https://wiki.arcengames.com/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Ovalcircle1&feedformat=atomArcen Wiki - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T07:12:01ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.34.2https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39834AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-08-07T20:38:19Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Bug Reports/Feedback */</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
= Feature List/Flavour =<br />
<br />
''Chris, this section is intended as fodder for you for marketing and other writeups. Feel free to change anything to your taste. Also check out the section at the bottom for some ideas and mechanics you might find useful''<br />
<br />
It was thought that the Zenith were long-dead. But they are far from gone; they have come back with a vengeance. A dreadful Zenith Onslaught. It started one day when a strange Zenith probe turned up on your sensors. After checking out a particularly mineral-rich planet, the probe was followed by a giant Zenith Miner who proceeded to devour the planet. And now it seems like everywhere you look there are new Zenith menaces come to make your life harder...<br />
<br />
The Zenith Onslaught is the second expansion for AI War 2. It's an expansion focused on making the galaxy feel rich and complex and changeable in new ways. It primarily provides Zenith-based factions that have their own agendas independent of humanity, unlike The Spire Rises, where all the factions cared about the player.<br />
<br />
=== New Factions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
=== New Map/Galaxy Types ===<br />
<br />
* Squares Map Type: Squares is like the Clusters type, but each cluster is aligned on a grid. There are lots of different tunables so you can get a big range of galaxies.<br />
<br />
* Compass Map Type: Compass starts with a Cluster at the center of the galaxy, then a series of planets in rings around the central cluster that can only be accessed via that central cluster. <br />
<br />
* Nomad Galaxy: All planets in the galaxy will move as if they are nomad planets. Leads to extremely chaotic and unique play.<br />
<br />
=== New AI Types ===<br />
<br />
* Geneticist AI Type: The AI gets Scourge units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Spire Hammer AI Type: The AI gets Spire units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Ragnarok AI Type: The AI gets Dark Alliance units in addition to its own unit types - do not use until chris does unit design<br />
<br />
* Gladiator AI Type: The AI gets Zenith Architrave units in addition to its own unit types - do not use until chris does unit design<br />
<br />
* Vengeful AI Type: Killing this AI's structures will provoke small exogalactic strikeforces against you<br />
<br />
* Praetor AI Type: This AI has an extra-strong praetorian guard which is allowed to roam further from its Homeworld.<br />
** Has 2 implementations, Medium (praetorian can strike 4 planets from homeworld, up from 3) and Hard (praetorian can strike 6 planets from the homeworld).<br />
<br />
=== New AI Abilities and Game Features ===<br />
<br />
* Random Factions : You can now request "Random Factions", and can choose its allegiance and impact.<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers : The AI now has the ability to create wormholes to allow its ships to bypass your defenses. They will spawn "Wormhole Borers", which will create a new wormhole. These are powerful structures, but you can destroy them to prevent the new wormhole from being created. Borers are gated behind an AIP threshold, and can be disabled in the game lobby as well.<br />
<br />
=== Some unique interactions with previous factions ===<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres can be set to spawn on a Nomad Planet if you have Nomad Planets enabled<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres can be killed by Zenith Miners<br />
<br />
=== Backported Features ===<br />
<br />
* The AI can send Exogalactic War Units against minor factions that get too powerful<br />
<br />
= TODOs and patch notes =<br />
<br />
* Nomads should have a "regular orbits" and "Crazy shit" mode, where they can start at unusual spots and change orbits and stuff.<br />
<br />
* Maybe another hack against the ZA ("Take an extra planet of Territory" perhaps? "Trigger an extra powerful Expansion mode (but you get some science)"? Perhaps a "ZA will give up this planet in its Territory, but will take several other planets")<br />
<br />
* ZA do not appear to be spawning their unique Golems (noted by Zeus)<br />
<br />
* Maybe a special interaction with the DZ? Players are not incentivized to interact with them currently. Players like incentives to include factions. Generally, the higher the risk, the higher the reward. Perhaps a unique Golem flagship with a complement of DZ units if players manage to kill a Jormangadur (noted by Zeus)<br />
<br />
Proposed DZ and ZA changes:<br />
<br />
* The DZ will generate one powerful structure that is hackable like an ARS, but for a large selection of DZ units. <br />
** This is intended to be really hard, optional, but giving players access to those units should be really fun<br />
<br />
*Each ZA portal will have a choice of 3 hacking options. <br />
** First is the Truce option, which works as it does now<br />
** Second is an ARS-style hack, where you get to steal a ship line from the ZA<br />
** Third is a forced-quiesce, where the ZA will be stuck not-in-war-mode for a while (15 minutes was suggested) so you can crush them easily. <br />
*** You only ever get to make one choice.<br />
*** If you pick item 2 or 3, the ZA will A. take a few more planets of Territory and B. dislike you permanently. Maybe they'll periodically send golems against you or something?<br />
<br />
* Note that once the minor-faction ARS code is in, it would be possible to use this for any other faction/units. Maybe a ship line of Scourge warriors..... <br />
<br />
== 2.116 ==<br />
<br />
* The ZA will now spawn Golems<br />
<br />
* The ZA is better at retreating its forces after a civil war and doing less damage<br />
<br />
== 2.115 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem with ZA pioneers<br />
** Thanks to oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* Chris fixed a problem where the DZ planets weren't spawning correctly<br />
** Thanks Chris! Reported by Oval<br />
<br />
== 2.114 ==<br />
<br />
* Both Praetor AI types have a 50% chance of generating a second dragon<br />
<br />
* The Praetor AI types now invest even more resources in their Praetorian Guards<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for the feedback<br />
<br />
* Spire Hammer Units have been made much tankier<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for the report<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to Random Factions; fix a bug where they could keep Allegiances between encounters. Improve the picking of minor faction teams<br />
<br />
* Add a message to the player when the ZA has resumed a truce with you. Untested<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with Vinco<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are now limited to one per galaxy<br />
** Mentioned by Starkelp<br />
<br />
* ZA has some minor buffs<br />
<br />
=== Geneticist Nerfs ===<br />
<br />
* The AI now gets more 'regular AI units' and fewer scourge units. Make the scourge units more expensive and nerf their damage<br />
* Many of the racial warriors are now zombifiable<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for the report, and further discussion with zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
== 2.113 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix some exceptions with the Zenith Miners<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Spire Hammer ai type was getting the wrong Spire Unit<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting? I think?<br />
<br />
* You can now have Random Factions<br />
<br />
== 2.112 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets now move faster <br />
<br />
== 2.111 ==<br />
<br />
* The compass map type defaults to using two rings<br />
** Thanks to Puppet Master for reporting<br />
<br />
* The ZA now says how many planets it needs to trigger a civil war in the threat menu tooltip. <br />
** Pupper Master requested<br />
<br />
* Turning on nomads with debug mode and nomad galaxy now causes all the planets to move quickly, allowing the gameplay slowdowns to be triggered very quickly<br />
<br />
* Once in a civil war, the ZAs will send their Pioneers home and allow them to despawn<br />
** This prevents the ZA's from expanding during a civil war. This is untested.<br />
** Thanks to Puppet Master for reporting<br />
*** The other choice is to allow ZAs to build only on neutral planets during a civil war? I'm open to this if people would prefer it.<br />
<br />
* Minor buffs to DZ invasion at higher difficulties<br />
<br />
== 2.110 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Compass map type<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Spire hybrids are now less common for the geneticist. Some nerfs to the Spire Hybrid weapons for the geneticist, and general range nerfs for the geneticist<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some additional checks to try to prevent the nomad galaxy from splitting<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where wormholes to destroyed planets would still exist after a Miner ate them<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* Some minor improvements to the ZM code and hovertext<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets can move a bit more quickly. Fewer nomads in a galaxy means they will move a bit faster (the logic here being "I'd like the Nomads to feel like they're doing something, and if you only have one nomad then it needs to move faster in the hopes it will be impactful)<br />
** Thanks to Puppet Master for a bug report<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with the way ZA allegiances were working in the civil war.<br />
<br />
* Minor improvements to the Notification hovertext for civil war and pioneers/expansion<br />
<br />
* After a civil war:<br />
** the ZA's units will all attrition very quickly for a while<br />
** The ZA will also stay peaceful to the AI for a while while the units retreat<br />
<br />
* Thanks to Puppet Master for some saves that brought all of these problems to my attention<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith now gets two wormholes into the galaxy instead of just one<br />
<br />
* The DZ is required to capture a few planets around their homeworlds before going on a domination spree. This will make it harder for counterattacks to reach their home planets and guarantee them at least some sort of defensive perimeter<br />
<br />
* DZ spawns some defensive structures when they warp in appear<br />
<br />
* The DZ now attack more quickly after spawning<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't get around to attacking for a few minutes after each time you loaded a save game<br />
<br />
* Add some variety to the DZ unit abilities and icons. These are still all slated to be replaced by Chris later, but I'd like testing to be a less frustrating experience<br />
<br />
* The DZ would sometimes leave units in 'non-attacker' mode and I don't know why, so the LRP thread will check for such units and make them attack.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where DZ fireteams would sometimes just sit there and never attack<br />
<br />
* The DZ now gets bonus strength for their initial invasion based on the AI difficulty. This should let the DZ adjust for very powerful AIs without being OP against lower difficulty AIs<br />
** Note: this is a major difficulty increase, since I'm not sure the DZ has been scary enough. If this is too much I now have more dials to tune the strength<br />
<br />
* Thanks to ArnaudB for some feedback that started me down this very helpful rabbit hole<br />
<br />
== 2.107 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miner === <br />
<br />
* Buff the Zenith Miner units; this is temporary since Chris will redo the units, but this should make them easier to test<br />
<br />
* Clarify that you can fight the Zenith Miners when they arrive in the Notification tooltip and the journal entry. <br />
* Make ZO specific hacks cheaper, by and large.<br />
<br />
* Killing a Zenith Miner now grants science and hacking points (seems only fitting given how big and powerful they are).<br />
** Plus since hacking the Probes will drain your resources, its only reasonable that the miners should refill your coffers<br />
*** Thanks to Puppet Master for the feedback<br />
<br />
* Add some journal entries for the Zenith Miners when they are attacking a Dyson Sphere<br />
<br />
* Additional tooltip tweaks for specific minor faction interactions<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The AI is not allowed to reconquer planets from the ZA during the civil war<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add text to the faction description for the ZA pointing out that it can make Data Centers or other critical targets harder to get to<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The ZA now defaults to 4 planet Territories<br />
** Thanks to Puppet Master for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Add some journal entries for when the Zenith Architraves break the truce, and add some text to the Notifications saying 'The ZA is violating the truce'<br />
** Thanks for Arnaud for reminding me that this mechanic can be confusing<br />
<br />
* The ZA is no longer allowed to be friendly to the player or the AI; it messes with some other mechanics.<br />
** Note that you can have a truce with the ZA anyway, so removing the "friendly to players" option isn't a big deal<br />
<br />
=== Nomad Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Incremental nerfs to the Nomad Planet hack; the Exostrikes are a bit smaller and a bit less frequent. How does it feel now?<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Clarify the "Crash Nomad Planet" hack description and text<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with DZ serialization. Note this probably breaks all saves with the DZ in it.<br />
<br />
=== Misc ===<br />
* Allow for Spire/Geneticist ship types to show up as unique Exogalactic Strikeforce leaders<br />
* Rejigger Spire Hammer units to stay low health but be much cheaper for the AI to buy<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* The Dyson Sphere now has a "seed me on a nomad if possible" setting<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting, most recently Puppet Master<br />
<br />
== 2.106 ==<br />
<br />
* When a Zenith Miner attacks a Dyson planet, instead of eating the planet it will kill the Dyson Sphere gate. <br />
** Zenith Miners really like eating dyson spheres; they have an increased chance for landing on dyson planets<br />
** Contains a Chris TODO for "Here's a spot in the Sim Stage3 code for when the dyson planet visuals should change"<br />
** Totally untested. <br />
<br />
* Slightly improve the hovertext for ZM notifications<br />
<br />
== 2.102 ==<br />
<br />
* The Dark Zenith now makes a good faith effort to spawn far from any ZA's territory<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Nerf the Geneticist's scourge subjugators; a bit less damage and tankiness, much less lifesteal<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug when serializing dark zenith data<br />
** thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith ships should no longer be counted as Threat. This only applies to new games; existing games will still have high threat numbers.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
== 2.099 ==<br />
<br />
* Change the way Nomad Planets spawn, to make sure they are more evenly distributed through the galaxy and move more cleanly. This in particular is an improvement for the Squares map type.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we weren't updating some Pathing data on the Planet objects when the DZ planets spawn<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Improve the ZA civil war notifier for clarity in terms of what's going on.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Miners were missing a tag<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
==== Journals ====<br />
<br />
* Add a Journal Entry for when the Dark Zenith spawn<br />
* Add two Journal Entries for the Zenith Miners<br />
** One for when the first Probe spawns, one for when the first Miner spawns.<br />
<br />
* Add Zenith Architrave journal entries<br />
** An entry for when we first find the ZA, explaining to be careful about attacking their territory<br />
** An entry for when we've explored all the ZA planets, explaining we might be able to make a truce with them by hacking their Portal.<br />
** An entry for when Pioneers spawn<br />
** An entry for the civil war<br />
** An entry for when a truce is declared (after hacking)<br />
*** If people could make sure these are all being displayed, and give feedback on the text (with a specific focus on mechanics that should be explained), that would be great.<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith Jormugandr ====<br />
<br />
* Add the DZ Jormugandr, to give them a cool new way of defending themselves against attack. The Jormugandr is the most powerful DZ unit, but it can only move fully into our galaxy when one of the initial DZ homeworlds (ie the new planets created when the DZ attack the galaxy) is attacked.<br />
** When there aren't any any attacks going on, the Jormugandr just wander around the homeworlds.<br />
** Once a homeworld is attacked, the Jormugandr are free to demolish any attackers and then start rampaging through the galaxy for a few minutes, then it must retreat to the DZ homeworlds again.<br />
** Each time the DZ homeworlds are attacked, the Jormugandr are unleashed for longer.<br />
** There is 1 Jormugandr spawned for difficulties 1-8, 2 on difficulty 9, 3 on difficulty 10.<br />
*** From a discussion with StarKelp and zeusalmighty.<br />
<br />
== 2.096 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Gladiator AI Type. This AI gets Zenith Architrave units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
* Add the Ragnarok AI Type. This AI gets Dark Alliance units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
<br />
* There are now 3 types of Nomad Nexus; the 'off' one, the 'can be crashed into ai homeworld' one, and the 'en route to ai homeworld one. The Off one is immune to damage. The 'Can be Crashed' on can be attacked by the player. The 'En Route' one can be attacked by anyone<br />
** This should allow players to safely hack the Disabled Nomad Nexus, but also allow minor factions to snipe a nomad nexus that's crashing.<br />
<br />
* Allow wormhole borers to bore from disabled nomads<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets now take between 5 and 13 minutes (give or take a bit) to crash into an AI homeworld, depending on the nomad's distance from the AI homeworld. When you hover over the Hack button, you will get a rough time estimate.<br />
** The first minute features weaker exos, so the player can use this hack to move an unwanted nomad out of the way and then disable it.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith (Nota Bene: This patch breaks all games with the DZ) ====<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wasn't correctly loading all its data. The new error checking will cause all previous DZ save games to break (technically, the DZ didn't really work at all after a reload anyway) <br />
** Noticed by zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.093 ==<br />
<br />
* Major nerfs to the Geneticist AI type; I've rebalanced all the scourge units that the AI owns<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.088 ==<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers can't interact with Nomad Planets (no point; the wormholes would just disappear)<br />
** Practically this means the nomad galaxy won't feature Borers<br />
** Thanks to zeus for spotting this interaction<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.087 ==<br />
<br />
* Make the ZA civil wars more endable by giving other ZA factions ways to send steadily increasing bonus strikes once the civil war goes on long enough<br />
<br />
* Geneticist Scourge generate Hostile To All zombies<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.085 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Praetor AI type, whose Praetorian Guard is extra strong and has extra range. Comes in "Medium" and "Strong" flavours<br />
** Thanks to ynof for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Add a new Map Type for the ZO, "Squares"<br />
** It is like clusters, but all the clusters are aligned on a grid.<br />
** There are lots of settings so you can get some extremely varied galaxies<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to the Spire Hammer AI Type<br />
<br />
* ZA strength drops off faster during civil war<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Rework how the DZ chooses where to spawn planets, to make them less likely to spawn in weird places<br />
<br />
* Add some new unit types to the DZ<br />
<br />
* Give the DZ some additional strength at the beginning of the game<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.082 ==<br />
<br />
* The ZA will never ally with the Dark Spire or Dark Zenith during a civil war<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* The ZA now has different income for its defensive structures, so it should be easier to whittle them down at all times<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix the Spire Hammer AI Type's description<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.077 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Spire Hammer AI type. It's targeted at the "Hard" difficulty level. I messed with the unit balance for the AI copies of the units, so let me know about the balance.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen code now tries to seed multiple copies of the same faction very far apart, with a 'retry with less strict requirements if it fails' mechanism.<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting that my previous mechanism still wasn't good enough<br />
<br />
* More nerfs to geneticist. Make scourge units a bit rarer in general, in particular Evuck Warriors<br />
** Thanks to zeus, demo and oval<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.075 ==<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to Geneticist<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the feedback<br />
<br />
* DZ can now upgrade itself to be able to build Terminii or Epistyles<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to the DZ permanent bonus income<br />
<br />
* Give some DZ and ZA structures enemy-attrition<br />
<br />
* The 'Vengeful' AI type now actually works<br />
** Every time you or a player-allied faction kill an AI structure that is A. a guardpost, B. Changes AIP, C. is a NormalPlanetNastyPick, or D. is a command station (its own category, so reconquest command stations will trigger it too), you will generate an Exo that's 1/3 of a wave (minimum exo size: 0.8 strength).<br />
** A fancier mechanism was suggested, but honestly I think this is fine. And it takes hours less of time to implement and test.<br />
<br />
* Add Wormhole Borers to the game.<br />
** With Wormhole Borers, I'm declaring myself feature complete. Other changes will be done in response to feedback, but this is all the big stuff I wanted to have done.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.074 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't spawn for a week.<br />
<br />
* Actually give the Dark Zenith a beacon<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Make the Geneticist AI much scarier. Please restart your games to get the new changes<br />
<br />
* Give the ZM some scarier Miners to spawn over time<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Completely rework the ZA income code to make them scale up more quickly during a war. This should let them expand more readily<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.065 ==<br />
<br />
* Add a few Achievements<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* The ZA will de-nomadify planets it captures if in the Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
* When seeding multiple ZAs, enforce some distance between each ZA faction; requested by a lot of people<br />
<br />
* The ZA can build tractors and gravity generators near wormholes to make attacking them harder.<br />
<br />
* Allow the player to hack the ZA home spawner for a truce.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.064 ==<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ====<br />
* Fix some DZ null references<br />
<br />
* Some decent improvements in DZ infrastructure logic. <br />
** They are now much more quick to expand to fill recently cleared enemy planets, which should give them a stronger economy<br />
** Improvements to "DZ bootstraps iteself" logic; the DZ will no longer try to build things it can't afford, and will be better at recovering if it takes a lot of damage. It should be able to recover as long as you leave it a single Metal Terminus. For eaxmple, it will no longer attempt to build anything it can't afford.<br />
<br />
* Allow Metal Harvesters to go to a different planet if all the metal terminii are killed<br />
<br />
==== AI Types ====<br />
<br />
* Add the Geneticist AI Type, which has access to both Scourge units and regular AI units<br />
** Its intended to be in the Hard or Brutal categories, and feedback is requested to make sure it feels that way<br />
<br />
* Add the Vengeful AI type; note this doesn't do anything yet.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
* Fix a nomad planet bug<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Lower the DZ's overall power level to prevent the AI from sending extragalactic war ships immediately<br />
** Thanks to Oval's feedback<br />
<br />
* Make the DZ a bit stronger at higher difficulties. Make them more likely to expand into new territory<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback ==<br />
<br />
Please put bug reports here!<br />
<br />
•Add a win condition involving Dark Zenith, so players could ally with the AI (or have allied + enemy AI) and still get a victory. (Win if you succesfully lock down the Dark Zenith planets with a hack for some time?) <=== Badger says "I do have thoughts along this lines, but not likely to DLC2. I think this expansion is already very large"<br />
<br />
**Perhaps an Exodian Blade retcon could be fitting here? (DLC 3) Introduce the Exodian Blade as the arch-enemy of the DZ that arrives to the player galaxy broken and scattered throughout the galaxy. Find the pieces and escort it to fight Jormangdur, etc. (noted by Zeus)<br />
<br />
•The Dark Zenith Ultimate Golem (Norse Dragon of Ragnarok starting with J thing) gets confused between staying in its cluster and rampaging after getting aggroed by an AI reconquest wave targeting the Dark Zenith planets. It loops back and forth between the wormholes of the AI planet and the connected DZ planet. - ArnaudB (https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/698572497171251200/737653691472937030)<br />
<br />
•Architrave portal is frustrating... Seeing health and shields, I expect to be able to attack it and destroy the faction. The fact that I cannot is unwelcome. I understand they can be hacked to enter a truce mode, but being able to actually eliminate them would be welcome.<br />
→Maybe you can destroy the portal, but it only stop them temporarily, and the portal come back 20min or 1h later. - ArnaudB (Zeus 2nded)<br />
<br />
* Make Zenith Miners and the Devourer Golem allied to each other. - Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
*Change the Compass defaults, as the minimum values give a fairly bad first impression. Perhaps 2/2/Medium?<br />
<br />
•Ragnarok AI-type critically bug when trying to create the hacking response. It'll throw errors which stall the hack and make it impossible to complete (you can only cancel it), the response units will never appear. This is specific to the AI type. cf save (Speed2)&screenshot on discord. - ArnaudB<br />
→Same thing with Gladiator.<br />
<br />
== Suggestions, ideas and mechanics for Chris ==<br />
<br />
<br />
• An UI rework might be needed to deal with the various notifications. It becomes really hard to keep track of what's going on with the growing number of factions. Maybe split the notifications threatening the players and those "informing" the player of events? (suggested by Arnaud, echoed by Puppet Master)<br />
** Badger think something like this might be necessary, given the sheer number of possible Notifications. Players keep requesting new Notifications (since that's how people keep track of things) and that number is getting ever-larger<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.<br />
<br />
* Suggestion: Give the player a mechanism to spawn wormholes like the Wormhole Borer. Maybe "you have a start structure and an end structure, and can activate them to make a wormhole between the planets"?<br />
<br />
* New Units<br />
** Frigate Class<br />
*** Zenith Aggregator<br />
**** Stores 50% of all damage taken as energy, and consumes this energy on death to deal damage in an area around itself.<br />
*** Zenith Compressor<br />
**** Long range, single target weapon that pulls enemies into itself, and high damage, short range, single target, Greater Metabolizing weapon.<br />
*** Zenith Needle<br />
**** Melee range, disables bubble shields on contact, converting them into personal shields.<br />
** Strikecraft Class<br />
*** Zenith Bracketeer<br />
**** All units that are on the same planet act as through they have shared Hull and Shield pools, which damage equally divided among them.<br />
** Mosquito (Exsanguinator)<br />
***Melee swarmer ship (for players/AI) that has "reverse" death grip-harmonic tractor beams. The idea is that it only can tractor super units but the super unit can move as normal, the mosquitoes are stuck to it. The mosquitos get the harmonic and death grip bonus so they do deal a lot more damage when they swarm the same unit.<br />
**Ninja (Melee Frigate)<br />
***Cloaked frigate with NO base weapons. However, launches special torpedos -- "corrosive shurikens" that deal high base damage to a single target (preferably guardian+) and minor AOE acid damage to nearby units. Shurikens are IMMUNE to gravity effects and are high speed.<br />
** Experimental 'Wing' Mechanic<br />
*** Carrier Frigates that fire off sub units like a Tesla Torpedo, which decay over time, that come with their own sub units.<br />
**** Zenith Forcefield Torpedo Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off slow moving Torpedoes that deploy up to 3 Degenerating Forcefield Generators, which lose 2% shield per second.<br />
**** Zenith Spiderweb Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off Minelayer Drones which have a weak melee carving weapon, and deploy Paralyzing Mines while enroute.<br />
<br />
* We could probably put the Zenith Mirror ability back in; probly something like "when we call TakeDamage, spawn a new shot going back to the old shot's target, but cap the mirrored shot's damage"<br />
<br />
<br />
* Vengeful Messages<br />
** My name is {AIName/Type}. You killed my {EntityThatDied}. Prepare to die.<br />
** GuardpostName will have it's revenge from beyond the grave.<br />
** GuardpostName says "Have a nice day! :D"<br />
** I am GuardpostName, son of GuardpostName. You killed my father!<br />
** You have lost reputation with GuardpostName.<br />
** GuardpostName will remember that.<br />
** GuardpostName thinks you are a stinky poo.<br />
** From hell's heart, GuardpostName stabs at you.<br />
** The ghost of GuardpostName is haunting you.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners need some fun mechanics; possibly including damage reduction for long range enemies? Maybe some powerful translocation?</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:Vengeance_of_the_Machine&diff=39808AI War:Vengeance of the Machine2020-08-07T00:05:09Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Other Miscellaneous Additions */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Category:AIWar]]<br />
[[Category:AIWarVotM]]<br />
[[File:AIWarVotM.jpg|center|Vengeance of the Machine]]<br/><br />
=What exactly is added in the Vengeance of the Machine expansion?=<br />
<br />
'''A:''' This expansion gives players some fun new toys but focuses on adding still more variety to your main opponent: the AI. There's already a ton of that variety, but our community is very excited about the new stuff VotM brings to the table, including "Dual-type" AIs, Dire Guardians, AI Planetary Subcommanders, and the "Hunter" and "Shark" AI plots. There are also new bonus ship types, AI types, map styles, core guard posts, guardians, core turret controllers, and more awesome music from Pablo Vega. The expansion also adds a new "Showdown" option that provides a brand-new way to win (or lose) in the form of an ultimate stalemate-breaker. This expansion is slated for official release in June 2013.<br />
<br />
== Dual-Type AIs ==<br />
<br />
Now you may optionally assign a secondary type to each of the two AI players so you can see what it's like to play against a Speed-Racer/Thief and a Spire-Hammer/Neinzul-Youngster (answer: the former is quite amusing in a morbid sort of way, and the latter is _rather_ challenging).<br />
<br />
You can also use it to "mix in" some of the new AI types like Chivalric and Bouncer to make the game perhaps a little easier in some ways, while still getting the distinctive features of the other types chosen.<br />
<br />
== AI Planetary Subcommanders ==<br />
<br />
Now some of each AI's planets (mainly picked from the MkIV and Core ones) will have a "subcommander" represented by one of 10 new special command stations (like "Gravitic", "Translocator" and "Lance"). Most subcommanders can also pick from some of the 11 new special guard posts (like "Plasma", "Implosion", and "Widow") and most also try to be extra clever in how they place their station and guard posts. <br />
<br />
The "Paranoid" subcommander, for example, will place its station as far away from all the wormholes as it can, and pick only Command-Station-Shield posts and place them as far away from the wormholes and each other as it can. <br />
<br />
The "Knife Fighter" subcommander, on the other hand, will pick from short-and-medium range combat-oriented stations and posts and try to place them so as to cover all its wormholes with overlapping fields of fire.<br />
<br />
And so on, with types like the long-range-favoring "Lobber", the tractor-and-gravity-loving "Obstructionist", and the ever-popular "Rude Gesture" (who is not at all happy about no longer being able to stack 13 counterattack posts on its planet, having to settle instead for 4).<br />
<br />
See [[AI War:Planetary_Subcommanders|Planetary Subcommanders]] for full list.<br />
<br />
== Dire Guardians ==<br />
<br />
Guardians in general are scarier than they once were, but we've also added much nastier versions called "Dire Guardians" as new "heavy-hitters" in the AI's toolbox, specifically:<br />
* Needler<br />
* Laser<br />
* MLRS<br />
* Implosion<br />
* Sniper<br />
* Spider<br />
* Tractor<br />
* Widow<br />
* Disassembler<br />
* Gravity<br />
* Munitions Boosting<br />
* Infiltration<br />
* Artillery<br />
* Raider<br />
* Shield<br />
<br />
Normally you'll only encounter these through a few "Dire Guardian Lairs" seeded in each map (unless you disable them in the lobby). Each lair is normally not a problem... until its planet goes on alert. Then it starts building a Dire Guardian inside. You're warned when these are building and you'll want to be ready to take it down (not easy, but doable with major fleet action) when it spawns. For some lairs you'll probably want to deal with them permanently at some point, and you can do so by destroying them. But destroying them releases a one-time spawn of _three_ Dire Guardians. Ouch.<br />
<br />
If you have any "Exogalactic Attack" sources on (Fallen Spire, Broken-Golems-Hard, etc) then Dire Guardians are also eligible to seed in those. They're only one step below Hunter/Killer units in cost so it's not really making exos any more dangerous overall in terms of raw strength, but it does add more variety and thus more potential for picking a "killer combo" that your defenses will be hard-pressed to withstand.<br />
<br />
== New AI Types ==<br />
<br />
*'''Easier'''<br />
** '''Chivalric'''<br />
*** This AI refrains from targeting irreplaceable structures (like Advanced Factories, Fabricators, etc) other than your Home Command Station, and instead gets a bonus to the size of its Cross Planet Attacks.<br />
*** When present in an AI with a secondary AI Type, this type's "do not target irreplaceable structures" characteristic is dominant despite being a disadvantage.<br />
** '''Bouncer'''<br />
*** This AI uses normal guard posts instead of wormhole guard posts next to each of its wormholes. The result is that you generally take more losses the first time you attack a planet but you have a much easier time keeping it from reinforcing much if you choose not to take it.<br />
<br />
*'''Moderate'''<br />
**'''Artillerist'''<br />
*** This AI is fascinated with bombardment and focuses on throwing lots of (preferably long-range) artillery units at you. Its defenses leave something to be desired, however.<br />
**'''Exotic'''<br />
*** This AI does not send normal waves, and instead sends small "exogalactic attacks" (similar to those provoked by the Fallen Spire, Broken Golems - Hard, Botnet Golem - Hard, or Spirecraft - Hard minor factions) with methods of composition and approach very different from normal waves.<br />
**'''Reservist'''<br />
***This AI gets a larger-than-usual strategic reserve and uses part of it to defend important planets that are normally not reinforced from the reserve.<br />
<br />
*'''Harder'''<br />
**'''Vorpal'''<br />
***This AI focuses on force-field-immune units and strong Cross Planet Attacks as a counter to fortified human positions.<br />
**'''Vengeful'''<br />
***This AI retaliates with (relatively) small exogalactic attacks every time you destroy one of its guard posts, warp gates, command stations, data centers... it's kind of attached to a lot of things, actually. Doesn't take criticism well.<br />
<br />
*'''"Red" Hard'''<br />
**'''Vicious Exotic'''<br />
***This AI does not send normal waves, and instead sends LARGE "exogalactic attacks" (similar to those provoked by the Fallen Spire, Broken Golems - Hard, Botnet Golem - Hard, or Spirecraft - Hard minor factions) with methods of composition and approach very different from normal waves.<br />
<br />
== New AI Plots ==<br />
<br />
* '''Hunter'''<br />
** If this is enabled, the AI gradually adds some extra-nasty units to its Special Forces. The SF fleet normally functions as a mobile defense fleet for the AI, but these extra units will make it far more... interesting.<br />
<br />
*'''Shark'''<br />
** If this is enabled (A and B can be enabled separately), the AI gains strength every time one of your command stations falls. Normally it's fairly minor when a human player loses a planet unless it was a critical defense point or had some important irreplaceable structure, but with the Shark plot once the AI smells blood in the water things could get out of hand in a hurry.<br />
** '''Shark-A''' gains AIP with each human command station death.<br />
** '''Shark-B''' gains no permanent bonuses with each human command station death, but does launch immediate follow-up ("go for the throat") attacks and contributes an extra chunk to the next Cross Planet Attack.<br />
<br />
== New AI Core Guard Posts ==<br />
<br />
Like all Core Guard Posts, these only appear on AI Homeworlds.<br />
<br />
* '''Core Implosion Drone Guard Post'''<br />
** This guard post is armed with several high-power implosion cannons that are extremely dangerous to large targets, but are thankfully relatively shorter-ranged than most implosion weapons. Unfortunately, this post also launches "Implosion Drones" which (while much shorter-ranged still, and the drone self-destructs when it fires) charge at enemy ships to fire several lower-power implosion rounds.<br />
<br />
* '''Core Arachnid Guard Post'''<br />
**This guard post is armed with massively powerful artillery cannon designed to cripple or destroy larger targets. It can't even shoot at smaller units.<br />
<br />
*'''Core Riot Control Guard Post'''<br />
**This guard post fires many shells that aren't massively powerful but do significant engine damage. Also, the post mounts many tractor beams which paralyze their victims.<br />
<br />
*'''Core Shredder Drone Guard Post'''<br />
**This guard post is armed with a powerful shotgun weapon, but its main danger lay in the fact that when damaged, it spawns "Shredder Drones" which then attack human units. If one of these shredders does enough damage it replicates itself. Further, after a shredder has existed for 30 seconds it will automatically scrap itself and restores a chunk of health to the Shredder Drone Guard Post (if the post is still alive).<br />
<br />
*'''Core Hunter/Killer Factory Guard Post'''<br />
**This guard post is armed with powerful Energy Wave cannons, but a far greater danger lies within: if an AI unit dies on its planet or any adjacent planet, or if any adjacent planet is not AI-held, this factory deploys the fearsome Hunter/Killer unit it has constructed. After deploying the H/K, the factory builds another in 30 minutes.<br />
<br />
== New AI Guardians ==<br />
<br />
Part of the base-game work during the post-6.0 development cycle made guardians a more variable part of the game by having each AI start with 3 guardian types "unlocked" and gradually unlocking more as AIP increases, rather than having all AIs have all guardian types all the time. In this expansion we're further increasing this new variety by adding the following guardian varieties:<br />
<br />
*'''Widow'''<br />
**A particularly uncomfortable variant of the Tractor Guardian which also paralyzes its victims.<br />
<br />
*'''Munitions Boosting'''<br />
**Dangerous in its own right, but the real problem is that this guardian boosts the attack power of nearby allied ships.<br />
<br />
*'''Needler'''<br />
**Bristles with banks of needlers. Best dealt with very carefully.<br />
<br />
*'''MLRS'''<br />
**Shoots rockets. LOTS of rockets.<br />
<br />
*'''Infiltration'''<br />
**Sneaky. Deadly.<br />
**Beware its immunity to your forcefields.<br />
<br />
*'''Shield'''<br />
**Not as individually dangerous as some other guardians, but its ability to protect nearby allies from incoming fire is actually often far more dangerous than additional firepower would be.<br />
<br />
*'''Plasma'''<br />
**So the AI took a gun. Then it put an engine on that gun. You are looking at that gun.<br />
**If something is unfortunate enough to be shot by that gun, it will take a lot of damage. Other things nearby will take some damage too. If it hits a forcefield, stuff under that forcefield also gets hurt.<br />
<br />
== New Map Styles ==<br />
<br />
* '''Wheel'''<br />
** Planets are arranged in a wheel-like shape with a number of spokes and a rim.<br />
<br />
* '''Honeycomb'''<br />
** Planets are arranged in a hexagonal pattern. Some map seeds leave just a few gaps in the pattern, others have many gaps creating a very different overall effect.<br />
<br />
== Core Turret Controllers ==<br />
<br />
These are capturables quite similar to Fabricators (which allow you to build a specific MkV ship type), but instead allow you to build a specific type of MkV turret. The other big twist is that these MkV turrets have PER-PLANET caps, instead of galaxy-wide caps. So if a Core Spider Turret Controller gives you a cap of 24 MkV spider turrets, then in theory you can build 24 MkV spider turrets on every planet you own (and all planets adjacent to those, as you also have supply there). In practice you generally won't be able to (or want to) spend _that_ much energy (or potentially metal or crystal) on turrets but either way this gives you much more flexibility for distributed defense.<br />
<br />
== New Bonus Ship Classes ==<br />
<br />
* '''Lightning Torpedo Frigate'''<br />
** Has modest firepower in its own right, but primarily attacks by launching miniaturized versions of the Lightning Warhead (that do not increase AIP when detonated, of course).<br />
<br />
*'''Zenith Devastator'''<br />
**A powerful starship designed by the Zenith during their ancient wars against the Spire (who heavily rely on shields). Its shots completely ignore forcefields (though the devastator itself does not ignore forcefields). Cannot target small ships.<br />
<br />
*'''Protector Starship'''<br />
**Small Starship-class modular vessel designed to defend other ships via passive and active defense systems.<br />
**Available modules:<br />
***'''Counter-Missile Module''': Shoots down a finite number of incoming enemy missiles per second.<br />
***'''Counter-Laser Module''': Shoots down a finite number of incoming enemy laser shots per second.<br />
***'''Counter-Shell Module''': Shoots down a finite number of incoming enemy shells per second.<br />
***'''Counter-Energy-Shot Module''': Shoots down a finite number of incoming enemy energy shots (which is a broad definition including negative energy, energy waves, implosion shots, impulse reactive shots, energy bombs, flame waves, etc) per second.<br />
***'''Protector Shield Module''': Provide protections to any allied ship within range. The generator itself is relatively weak and cannot hold up under intense fire, but does protect a much wider area than most mobile shield generators.<br />
<br />
*'''Neinzul Youngling Shrike'''<br />
** A fast-attacking cloaked raiding ship, with a youngling's very short lifespan.<br />
<br />
*'''Neinzul Railpod'''<br />
** Mature Neinzul organism without the time-limited lifespan of a Youngling. The railpod is basically an organic railcannon, with effectively infinte range. The downside is that firing the cannon does tremendous damage to the railpod itself, generally destroying itself after only two shots. Despite this limitation, railpods can contribute significantly to "burst" damage either defensively or offensively, and a group of space docks loop-building these with engineer support effectively becomes a large artillery battery.<br />
<br />
*'''Zenith Hydra'''<br />
** A potent short-range combatant that breathes (plasma) fire and can regenerate its own health over time.<br />
<br />
== "Showdown Devices" Minor Faction ==<br />
<br />
This is probably the biggest single feature of the expansion, and it provides another way to turn the normal "Guerrilla War" into a "Frontal War". Like Fallen Spire, to win by Showdown you'll need to withstand a truly tremendous AI attack. Unlike Fallen Spire, you can start the final confrontation simply by capturing four specific planets (the ones with the "[[AI War:Showdown Device|Showdown Devices]]"), and that confrontation only lasts about 30-40 minutes (less, if you're unsuccessful).<br />
<br />
We hope many of you enjoy devising new strategies to deal with the particular challenges of winning (or losing) via Showdown.<br />
<br />
== New Music Tracks ==<br />
<br />
A New Dawn.<br />
<br />
Ashes to Ashes.<br />
<br />
Before the Storm.<br />
<br />
Dust to Dust.<br />
<br />
Every Man for Himself.<br />
<br />
Falling Down.<br />
<br />
Return to Glory.<br />
<br />
Rising Up.<br />
<br />
Round and Round.<br />
<br />
The Hurricane.<br />
<br />
Title Theme (VotM version)<br />
<br />
Vengeance of the Machine.<br />
<br />
== Other Miscellaneous Additions ==<br />
<br />
* 28 New Achievements.<br />
* [[AI War:Showdown Devices Journal Entries|New Journal Entries for the Showdown Devices]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:Ancient_Shadows&diff=39807AI War:Ancient Shadows2020-08-07T00:04:33Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Other Miscellaneous Additions */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Category:AIWar]]<br />
[[Category:AIWarAS]]<br />
[[File:AIWarAS.jpg|center|Ancient Shadows]]<br/><br />
<br />
=What exactly is added in the Ancient Shadows expansion?=<br />
<br />
'''A:''' The main anchor feature is Champions, which is basically our take on the "hero unit" concept from other RTS games. Champions are the only units that can travel into the newly-added backwater nebulae that are inhabited not by the AI but by various Human, Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire splinter factions. There are also new bonus ship types, AI types, map styles, core guard posts, modular fortresses, a new minor faction, and a lot more music from Pablo Vega. This expansion is slated for official release on Friday, October 19th, 2012.<br />
<br />
== Champions and Nebulae ==<br />
<br />
A player slot can now be occupied by a "Champion" that controls a single modular super-starship. Champions can gain experience, and with experience can upgrade modules. More importantly, the champions have the unique ability to travel through "nebula" wormholes, and interact with the splinter factions of Humans, Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire that are found in those nebulae. Successfully helping a splinter faction can (among other rewards) unlock whole new lines of modules and even new and bigger hulls that your champion can switch to. For the lore-inclined among you, these "offroad" scenarios also reveal more of the backstory through journal entries, and you'll run into some old friends and foes.<br />
* Note: adding a champion to a singleplayer game is easy: just set your player role to "Normal+Champion" and you'll be given both the normal human home command station (and related units) and the champion unit.<br />
* Another note: Champions are effectively immortal. If they run out of health, they will immediately respawn at your Home Command Station, without any of the modules they had built at the time of the detonation.<br />
* Thanks to HitmanN for the champion-module art!<br />
<br />
== New Bonus Ship Classes ==<br />
<br />
* '''Tackle Drone Launcher'''<br />
** Has guns of its own but primarily attacks by launching small tractor-equipped drones. The drones fly in a straight line dragging any enemy they can tractor along with them and explode when they reach their maximum range or the edge of the gravity well, dealing damage to nearby targets. The drones are thus very effective at taking smaller craft out of a fight, but cannot damage tractor-immune ships in any way.<br />
<br />
* '''Saboteur'''<br />
** Fires hostile nanites at enemy ships. Unlike reclamation nanites, these focus on overloading the target's power systems with the goal of causing it to explode violently. This target does not go critical until its health is reduced to zero normally, but once that happens it will explode and damage nearby friendly (to the exploding ship) units. The damage done to each victim of the explosion is based on how much damage the exploding ship took from overload-nanites.<br />
<br />
* '''Zenith Medic Frigate'''<br />
** Moderately large frigate with capable weaponry, but the main point of a medic frigate is the multiplex repair beam emitter that allows it to heal nearby ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Zenith Siege Engine'''<br />
** Moderately large vessel built around an outsized plasma siege cannon. The ship does not have enough power to both move and keep the weapon online, so it must remain immobile for a full reload cycle before it can fire. When it fires, however, the enemy will feel it.<br />
<br />
* '''Zenith Reprocessor'''<br />
** A larger, specialized version of the Acid Sprayer, this ship's shots actually "metabolize" the enemy target. When the target dies, a portion of the target's metal+crystal construction cost will be granted to the player that did the most reprocessing damage to it.<br />
<br />
* '''Neinzul Scapegoat'''<br />
** Mature Neinzul organism without the short lifespan of a Youngling. Capable combatant in its own right, but also sacrifices itself to regenerate military fleet ships on the same planet when they take critical damage.<br />
<br />
* '''Youngling Firefly'''<br />
** Small, shortlived ship that builds up a charge as it successfully attacks other units. When it dies it explodes violently to damage nearby enemy units. The explosion damge done to each victim starts at one quarter the strength of the Firefly's normal shot, but increases with the charge the ship has accumulated.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Railcluster'''<br />
** Large Spire fleet ship mounting multiple short-range railcannons. Highly effective against very small ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Corvette'''<br />
** A starship-sized vessel developed by retrofitting the smallest Imperial Spire combat design with human technology. Has a moderately powerful photon lance, but can also mount a small number of modules.<br />
*** Built from the starship constructor, making this the first "Bonus Starship", a concept long requested by players.<br />
<br />
== New Minor Faction ==<br />
<br />
* '''Dark Spire'''<br />
** Several mysterious, ancient structures exist on AI planets throughout the galaxy. They cannot be harmed, and do not have any weapons, but they absorb energy when a ship dies on the same planet. What happens when they absorb too much?<br />
*** Hint: they spawn lots of angry ships that want to attack both the humans and the AI. And if a big enough cascade-effect gets going...<br />
<br />
== New Core AI Guard Posts ==<br />
<br />
* '''Wrath Lance'''<br />
** As long as it detects hostile military ships on the planet, fires several massive long-range continuous beam weapon cannons in different directions. Does not actually aim, but the beams move as the post rotates.<br />
<br />
* '''Teuthida'''<br />
** An AI/Neinzul hybrid experiment gone wrong. When hostiles are present, this post continuously generates nanoswarm-like drones. Instead of merely doing reclamation damage, however, the organisms released by these drones instantly transform the targets into "zombie" vessels.<br />
*** Ships immune to reclamation are spared this fate, but are not spared from the extremely powerful cluster of railcannons mounted on the post itself.<br />
<br />
* '''Grav Reactor'''<br />
** An enormously powerful reactor based on some kind of gravitational energy manipulation. Generates a strong gravity well that prevents most enemy ships from leaving the system, and greatly slows enemy ships that stray too near the reactor itself. Also builds gravity drones that rush hostile ships to slow them down and damage them upon detonation.<br />
*** The bright side is that the gravitational effect is too strong for this guard post to benefit from Core Shield Generator protection. So it may be taken out before the CSG network is down, if you dare.<br />
<br />
== New Player Units ==<br />
<br />
* '''Modular Fortresses'''<br />
** These are similar to the massive and expensive fortresses already available to players, but are modular.<br />
*** Can mount Needler, Laser, MLRS, Missile, Shield, and Heavy Beam modules.<br />
*** Further, the modules are not directly researched but become available through the corresponding turret/forcefield research.<br />
*** Variants based on Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire tech are also available as rewards from nebulae.<br />
<br />
== New AI Types ==<br />
<br />
* '''Fortress King'''<br />
** Has Modular Fortresses in place of most command stations. Expect grievous pain.<br />
<br />
* '''Heroic'''<br />
** Adds powerful Champion ships to each wave. Also periodically spawns a Champion ship on one of its own planets that joins the general AI forces threatening you. At higher tech levels it uses bigger Champion ships.<br />
<br />
== New Map Styles ==<br />
<br />
* '''Clusters'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a small number of clusters, each of which has only a few wormholes that lead to other clusters. Planets within a cluster each have a moderate number of connections to other planets within that cluster.<br />
*** One of the most requested map types... ever.<br />
<br />
* '''Microcosm Clusters'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a small number of clusters, each of which has only a few wormholes that lead to other clusters. Intra-cluster organization varies from cluster to cluster (including simple, concentric, crosshatch, and grid layouts).<br />
<br />
== New Music Tracks ==<br />
<br />
The expansion has 98 minutes and 5 seconds of music in all. Here's the full track list:<br />
<br />
Chapter I: The Human Awakening<br />
<br />
* 1. Arise Sleeping Warriors<br />
* 2. An Unfamiliar World<br />
* 3. A War Worth Fighting<br />
* 4. Ambitious Design<br />
* 5. AI Revolution<br />
* 6. Ancient Shadows<br />
<br />
Chapter II: The Zenith Revival<br />
<br />
* 7. Immortal<br />
* 8. Imminent Annihilation<br />
* 9. Inquisition Of The Stars<br />
* 10. Incarnate Race<br />
* 11. Imitated And Integrated<br />
* 12. Ironclad<br />
<br />
Chapter III: Revenge Of The Spire<br />
<br />
* 13. Waking To Darkness<br />
* 14. Worshipped Wasteland<br />
* 15. Watching The Night Sky<br />
* 16. Whispers Of Hope<br />
* 17. Wrath Of The Spire<br />
* 18. Welcome To The End<br />
<br />
Bonus Track: 19. Ancient Shadows - Title<br />
<br />
== Other Miscellaneous Additions ==<br />
<br />
* 32 New Achievements.<br />
* [[AI War:Ancient Shadows Journal Entries|New Journal Entries for the Champions and Nebulae]]<br />
[[AI War:AI War]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:Expansion_3_Light_of_the_Spire&diff=39806AI War:Expansion 3 Light of the Spire2020-08-07T00:03:35Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Other Miscellaneous Additions */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[category:AIWar]]<br />
[[category:AIWarLotS]]<br />
[[File:AIWarLotS.jpg|center|Light of the Spire]]<br/><br />
<br />
<b>The Spire are coming...</b><br />
<br />
Ravaged by their recent encounters with the same AIs that pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, the Spire are an alien race that have also been all but destroyed. However, while the AIs were successful in their surprise attack against the Spire, the Spire are far more powerful than even the AIs seem to have realized. The Zenith were broken-down and ancient when humanity encountered them, but the Spire were at the height of their deadly power until quite recently.<br />
<br />
Now the splintered remains of their race are regrouping, and entering the galaxy with a vengeance. Their attitude toward humanity, who after all spawned the AIs that harmed the Spire so, is unclear. Proceed with caution.<br />
<br />
=What exactly is added in the Light of the Spire expansion?=<br />
<br />
'''A:''' The short explanation is that the expansion is focused on adding more broad ways to play the game, such as the Fallen Spire story campaign and the Defender Mode campaign mode. Along with that, it adds a ton of more types of large ships, notably the spirecraft and the bonus ship types. In all, there are 180 new ships added in this expansion, making it our largest to date by a fair margin.<br />
<br />
== New Alien Race ==<br />
<br />
Ravaged by their recent encounters with the same AIs that pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, the Spire are an alien race that have also been all but destroyed. However, while the AIs were successful in their surprise attack against the Spire, the Spire are far more powerful than even the AIs seem to have realized. The Zenith were broken-down and ancient when humanity encountered them, but the Spire were at the height of their deadly power until quite recently.<br />
<br />
Now the splintered remains of their race are regrouping, and entering the galaxy with a vengeance. Their attitude toward humanity, who after all spawned the AIs that so harmed the Spire, is unclear. Proceed with caution.<br />
<br />
== New Bonus Ship Classes ==<br />
<br />
There are 9 new bonus ship classes added as part of this expansion, comprising 50 ships in all (45 for the bonus ship types themselves, then 5 additional for the spire blades that the spire blade generators create):<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Stealth Battleship''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Powerful battleship with onboard cloaking options as well as a portable radar dampener that makes enemy ships have to be in very close range to hit it at all (radar dampening does not affect the ability of enemy ships to hit other ships, just this one).<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Teleporting Leech''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large teleporting ship fires lightning shots. Reclaims enemy ships it kills (reclaimed ships have health = half damage inflicted by reclamator).<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Gravity Drain''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large, slow ship slows the movement of enemy ships near to it. Also has powerful short-range lasers.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Gravity Ripper''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large, high-health, slow ship temporarily halts the movement of enemy ships with every hit of its weak, short-range, rapid-fire energy bursts. Best used in combination with other ships to keep fast targets from escaping.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Mini Ram''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** This miniature battering ram specializes in high-health targets, crashing into them for high damage and destroying itself in the process. Unable to hit smaller ships.<br />
** Thanks to HitmanN and RCIX for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Tractor Platform''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large, slow alien vessel is bristling with small guns but most importantly many tractor beams. This has obvious defensive uses, but can also be used to hold enemy ships at bay while longer range allied ships take them out.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Maw''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Huge alien vessel that swallows transportable enemy ships and gradually attritions them. If the maw is destroyed, they are ejected with whatever health they have left. External guns also fire at targets at short range while it chews on the swallowed ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Blade Spawner''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large central ship has weak guns, but continously spawns smaller independent blades that crash into enemy ships.<br />
** This also adds mark I-V of Spire Blades.<br />
*** Extremely fast melee ship -- loses health over a 10-second period, then self-destructs. Created inside Spire Blade Spawners, these are uncontrollable but will viciously attack the enemy on the current planet. Players cannot give direct orders to the blades.<br />
** Thanks to soMe_RandoM for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Armor Rotter''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Shots do fairly little damage, but eat away at the armor of ships they hit with each shot. Ship armor gradually regenerates over time (it takes up to 10 minutes to fully regenerate, depending on how much armor the target has), but cannot be directly repaired. Thus the armor rotters can create a window of opportunity for other ships to strike high-armor ships.<br />
** Thanks to Salamander for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== New Minor Factions ==<br />
<br />
<br />
* '''Fallen Spire'''<br />
** "Minor" faction is something of a misnomer with this one. The fallen spire minor faction adds in a scripted "campaign" that players can opt to pursue or not in any game with the minor faction turned on. While the scripted progression is always the same, it interacts with the dynamic components of the game in such a way that that the experience should be satisfyingly different for many playthroughs.<br />
** It also has also enormous modular capital ships. Oh, and an optional alternate way to win the game. Thought you'd like to know that.<br />
** More details [[AI War:What_Is_The_Fallen_Spire_Minor_Faction|here]].<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Civilian Leaders'''<br />
** Up to 10 Spire Civilian Leader Outposts are scattered throughout the galaxy in the control of the AI. Against their will, every hour each outpost increases the AI Progress by 1. You have the choice of either destroying these outposts for colloduing with the AI, or freeing the outposts by capturing the planet from the AI. When freed, each of these outposts will gratefully decrease the AI Progress by one every hour.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft'''<br />
** There are three different variants of minor factions that allow players to use spirecraft ships.<br />
** In all of them, six different kinds of asteroids are seeded around the various planets of the galaxy, waiting for you to use your Spire Mining Ships (CONST tab) to build mining enclosures on them. From these mining enclosures, you can produce the rare and deadly Spirecraft ships, which cannot be procured any other way. These massive ships can be an enormous asset against the AI.<br />
** '''Spirecraft (1 - Easy)'''<br />
*** The EASY version of this minor faction simply gives you the spirecraft with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. Consequently, your adjusted score is also halved.<br />
** '''Spirecraft (2 - Moderate)'''<br />
*** The MODERATE version of this minor faction gives you the spirecraft with a vastly higher energy cost, and without the ability to repair them. Consequently, your adjusted score is also reduced by 1/3.<br />
**** This was the original design for the spirecraft in general, but players wanted more options. The best way to think of this version is as follows: the spirecraft are suitably awesome while they're alive, they don't stir up the AI, they don't cost knowledge, and they don't increase AI Progress. But they require the finite resource of asteroids, and quite a bit of metal/crystal, and when they're gone, they're gone. This makes the spirecraft, in essence, trump cards. Very interesting trump cards.<br />
** '''Spirecraft (3 - Hard)'''<br />
*** The HARD version of this minor faction gives you the spirecraft at their base energy requirements with no repair restrictions. However, whether or not you choose to capture any spirecraft, the AI will be launching periodic large waves with spirecraft (and other big nasty things) of their own -- so you're highly advised to get some spirecraft in order to survive.<br />
<br />
== New AI Plots ==<br />
<br />
* '''Beachheads'''<br />
** Each wave that the AI sends has a 10% chance of being half-size, but including a Beachhead structure that interferes with supply on the planet being attacked (thus knocking out everything from turrets to forcefields until the beachhead is destroyed), as well as preventing player ships from retreating. Counterattack waves, event waves, raid engine waves, and other specialized forms of waves won't ever include a beachhead.<br />
** Five marks of AI Beachhead have also been added:<br />
*** Tough, armored, immobile long-range AI ship that gets sent along with some waves. Interferes with supply on the planet being attacked (thus knocking out everything from turrets to forcefields until the beachhead is destroyed), as well as preventing its enemies' ships from retreating.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== Other New Ships Available For Direct Unlock By Players ==<br />
<br />
* There is a new Spire Mining Ship available on the CONST tab (knowledge free)<br />
** This ship allows the construction of mining enclosures on asteroids. Each tab in its build menu corresponds to a type of asteroid on which specific mining enclosures can be built.<br />
<br />
== New Capturables ==<br />
<br />
=== "Advanced Materials" ===<br />
<br />
Six different kinds of asteroids are now seeded throughout the galaxy in the following order of rarity (from least to most rare): Reptite, Pysite, Xampite, Ebonite, Adamantite, Titanite. Build a mining enclosure (via the Spire Mining Ship in your CONST tab) around this asteroid to consume it and use its advanced materials to create advanced Spirecraft ships not accessible any other way (see below).<br />
<br />
=== New Ship Class: Spirecraft ===<br />
<br />
This is another anchor feature of the expansion, available in one of three variants per campaign (see the minor factions list, above). Using the new asteroids that are scattered around the map when one of these minor factions is on, you'll construct mining enclosures that create one or more spirecraft ships per asteroid. There are mark I-V variants of each spirecraft, and rarer asteroid types give you access to both higher-mark and more-valuable-in-general spirecraft types. <br />
<br />
The spirecraft themselves have powerful and exciting abilities, putting most of them partway between a starship and a golem in terms of power, and some of them on par or above the strength of golems. Though there are always far more of these available to players than there are golems: there are dozens if not a hundred or more asteroids in big maps, and you don't have to capture planets in order to farm them -- so you can raid enemy territory to get these without even costing any AI Progress to take them!<br />
<br />
The different minor factions change up the way that the Spirecraft are balanced with your abilities versus those of the AI. In the easiest variant, you just get the spirecraft with no questions asked, but your score is halved since this is pretty unbalancing in your favor. The moderate and hard variants are both a lot more balanced and in some ways more interesting.<br />
<br />
Bear in mind these spirecraft don't cost you knowledge or remove your ability to use any of the other ships you already are used to using. They ''do'' cost quite a lot of metal/crystal, but the results are worth it even if not something you can continuously farm for the rest of the game.<br />
<br />
In all 50 different spirecraft are added as part of this expansion: 5 marks each for 10 different ship classes.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Shield Bearer''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Does relatively low damage, but has very high health and provides a sizable force field to protect allied ships. Its force field does not reduce the attack power of protected ships.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.<br />
** Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Ram''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** This massive battering ram specializes in high-health targets, crashing into them for extreme damage and destroying itself in the process. Unable to hit smaller ships.<br />
** These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Adamantite, Mark I-IV ships.<br />
** Thanks to HitmanN and RCIX for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Martyr''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** This massive ship has no guns, but is bristling with tractor beams. When it dies, it explodes for extreme damage to enemy ships within its tractor range.<br />
** These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Adamantite, Mark I-IV ships.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Attritioner''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** This massive ship has weak direct guns, but does high attrition damage to all enemy ships once per second (on the order of multiple fixed-position attrition emitters). Enemy ships on the current planet will notice that they are damaged by attrition and will turn aggressive, however, so be careful of stirring up enemy planets with the attritioners.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Scout''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** These scouts are all perma-cloaked, but move pretty slowly and rapidly lose health if they are on an enemy planet of a higher mark level than the scout itself. Most of these except for the Mark IV or V spirecraft scouts make for better long-term sentries (thus freeing up your normal scouts to do mobile scouting) rather than as literal scouts that explore.<br />
** These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Xampite to Titanite, Mark I-IV ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Ion Blaster''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Advanced weapon insta-kills most ships with a mark level equal to or lower than its mark value. Cannot fire upon ships immune to insta-kill. Unlike the fixed-position ion cannons, these ion ships are both mobile and much shorter-ranged, but they are still extremely deadly.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships. <br />
** Thanks to mr_lolz and love kawa for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Penetrator''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Perma-cloaked ship that cannot hit most smaller fleet ships and which must be manually targeted to fire. It does absolutely astronomical damage, and then is uncloaked and unable to fire for the next half hour. This ship is Blind, and thus requires the support of scouts or other similar ships to see its target, but otherwise it works best as a lone wolf sort of ship, delivering its payload and then returning to friendly space to rest and recuperate.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships. <br />
** Thanks to LintMan for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Implosion Artillery''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large, high-range, middling-health artillery weapon that does damage based on a percentage of the enemy ship's remaining health (not to be less than 1 damage). This is most effective when enemy ships have very high remaining health.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships. <br />
** Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Siege Tower''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Huge, slow, low-range, high-piercing, highly-armored, radar-dampened battlestation with multiple shots excellent for taking out large swathes of enemy ships while repelling a beating in return.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Jumpship''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Expensive, tiny-capacity transport with advanced teleportation and no self-attrition-per-wormhole. The advanced teleportation lets the jumpship pass through wormholes and across planets without the normal few-second delays that regular teleporting ships face. On planets with a higher mark than the jumpship, the jumpship expires in about twenty seconds, however.<br />
** These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Xampite to Titanite, Mark I-IV ships.<br />
** Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Other Capturables ===<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Archive'''<br />
** These powerful science vessels can be found nearby or on the AI homeworlds. Capturing them will provide +1/s knowledge income on the archive's planet for all human players while the archive lives, up to a cap that is 3x that of the normal per-planet cap. If the archive is destroyed, however, there is a hefty AI Progress cost.<br />
<br />
== Campaign Types ==<br />
<br />
In the past, the only way to play the game was in what we're now calling "Conquest" mode: in other words, you play until the AI kills your home command stations or you kill theirs. An anchor feature of this expansion is the addition of the new Defender campaign type that completely changes how that works.<br />
<br />
* '''Defender'''<br />
** An alternate ruleset for AI War, where your goal is to survive for a certain length of time instead of conquering the AIs. You can select as many starting homeworlds as you want, and then you must defend them from brutal AI aggression (the No Waves AI modifier won't help you here). It is HIGHLY recommended that you select multiple planets to start if you want any chance of survival (unlike in Conquest, this won't affect ship caps). As long as at least one of your homeworlds is standing when the timer runs out, you win! In trial mode, the max trial time is 1/3 of the time limit.<br />
** There are variants for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, 2 hours, and 4 hours. We don't allow more flexibility in the time limits because each one requires a specific balance to be playable.<br />
** There are a ''lot'' of changes that come into play with the game when you use this mode. Among them:<br />
*** Most of the good capturables are not seeded into the galaxy for players to capture. It's not expected that you'll be doing any capturing of AI planets.<br />
*** There are no AI homeworlds, and all of the AI planets are mark V brutes.<br />
*** Depending on combined the difficulty level you select for the two AIs, and what time limit variant you select, you'll have a lot of AI Progress right at the start of the game (in some cases 1000 or more), and the AI Progress automatically jumps upwards with every AI wave that is declared.<br />
*** AI Waves are ever-present: the instant as one arrives, the next is declared. Depending on the time-limit variant you choose, though, the waves are spaced further apart.<br />
*** Players start with 3x more resources, including knowledge, and Mark III Economic command stations on all their planets. However, colony ships, mercenary space docks, and missile silos are unavailable -- so when you lose a planet, you can't re-take it.<br />
*** There are 32 possible starting home planets that confer bonus ship types to players, rather than just 16 (assuming the map is large enough to contain them all). However, there is no other way for players to get more bonus ship types during the course of the game.<br />
*** All of the planets on the map can be chosen as starting home planets for players, whether or not they give a bonus ship type to them. Players can select literally every planet on the map if they like, or just one or two.<br />
*** Unlike in conquest mode, having multiple planets at the start does not affect player ship caps (though it does still affect the number of AI Waves at a time). It's expected that usually players would choose a couple of planets with bonus ship types, and then a number without, to have a chance of surviving. The lower-time variants are particularly brutal, as they're basically a cage match with a very angry AI.<br />
*** Most everything else from the Conquest campaign type is still in place, including multiplayer support, minor factions, AI plots (though not all would function, given that the Avenger would never have a chance to come out, for instance), AI types, map styles and planet counts, and so forth.<br />
<br />
== New AI Special Weapons ==<br />
<br />
This is another big focus for this expansion. Most the new ships in this category are guardians, those mobile AI ships that populate the various AI worlds. We saw that as the best way to make the biggest impact on the feeling of variety in the AI planets with this expansion. That said, we also added a number of new Core AI Guard Posts, to help with the variety of the endgame.<br />
<br />
=== Core AI Guard Posts ===<br />
<br />
4 core AI guard posts have been added as part of this expansion.<br />
<br />
* AI Core Raid Engine Guard Post<br />
** Launches brutal mark V waves against its own planet or any adjacent planets, if those planets are not controlled by AI players, or if the human players have a significant fleet there. If human players don't have warp sensors on these planets, the waves may well arrive unannounced. These waves arrive around every four minutes and contain a broad mix of AI ships.<br />
<br />
* AI Core Cross Planet Attack Guard Post<br />
** Launches brutal galaxy-wide cross planet attacks as soon as the human players bring military ships to this post's planet. These CPAs happen around every 13 minutes and are heavily influenced in their size by both the current AI Progress and the difficulty level of the AI controlling this post.<br />
<br />
* AI Core Heavy Beam Guard Post<br />
** A massive long-range beam cannon can vaporize very many smaller craft in one blast, or do extreme damage to a larger target.<br />
<br />
* AI Core Booster Guard Post<br />
** Middling weaponry, but significantly boosts both the munitions and the armor of all nearby AI ships.<br />
<br />
=== AI Guardians ===<br />
<br />
50 new AI guardians (5 marks each of 10 overall types) have been added as part of this expansion.<br />
<br />
* AI Carrier Guardian<br />
** Mid-power, very high-health guardian that starts out with no ships inside it. As AI ships are damaged on the planet the carrier is on, they get inside the carrier and are slowly healed. When the carrier has enough ships inside it, it makes a beeline for player homeworlds.<br />
<br />
* AI EMP Guardian<br />
** Quick mid-power guardian that lets off a planet-wide burst of EMP that only affects human ships -- stunning all of the non-EMP-immune human ships on the planet for a bit -- when it emerges from any wormhole.<br />
** Only appears on difficulty 7 and up.<br />
<br />
* AI Self-Destruction Guardian<br />
** Exceptionally fragile but also quite vicious, this guardian is dangerous in death: like a lightning warhead, it emits a burst of area damage when it goes down.<br />
** Only appears on difficulty 8 and up.<br />
<br />
* AI Special Forces Rally Guardian<br />
** Heavily armored, cloaked, fairly weak combatant acts as a mobile rally post for special forces AI ships. Unlike the special forces guard post, new AI ships won't spawn at this guardian, but they will rally to it as one of their patrol points -- this guardian thus does its best to get to the human homeworlds, thus attracting streams of other special forces ships when it can.<br />
<br />
* AI Vampire Guardian<br />
** Tough long-range combatant that heals itself as it damages enemy ships.<br />
<br />
* AI Warp Gate Guardian<br />
** High-health short-range combatant that also acts as a mobile warp gate. Careful of these, as when they are attacking into your territory they can provoke raids in unexpected places that were otherwise inaccessible to the AI via warp. Particularly hunts for the player homeworlds.<br />
** Only appears on difficulty 7 and up.<br />
<br />
* AI Zombie Guardian<br />
** Reclaims enemy ships it kills (reclaimed ships have health = full damage inflicted by reclamator). Reclaimed ships come back as Zombie Bots, which cannot be controlled but which will attack enemy ships mercilessly until they die. Zombie bots will travel to enemy planets if no enemies present. This guardian cannot attack ships that are immobile, have no attack, or are immune to reclamation.<br />
<br />
* AI Gravity Guardian<br />
** Enormous gravity distortion effect slows enemy ships over a wide area. Middling firepower specially geared towards starships and other large targets.<br />
** Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* AI Starship Disassembler Guardian<br />
** Huge alien guardian that swallows enemy starships and gradually attritions them. If the guardian is destroyed, they are ejected with whatever health they have left. External guns also fire at targets at short range while it chews on the swallowed ships.<br />
<br />
* AI Implosion Guardian<br />
** Mid-range, middling-health artillery weapon that does damage based on a percentage of the enemy ship's remaining health (not to be less than 1 damage). This is most effective when enemy ships have very high remaining health.<br />
** Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== New LotS AI Types ==<br />
The base game included 26 AI types, the Zenith Remnant added 14 more, and Children of Neinzul added an additional 6. Light of the Spire adds an additional 8, as the focus is primarily elsewhere with this expansion.<br />
<br />
=== Easier ===<br />
<br />
* '''Vanilla'''<br />
** Has absolutely no unusual powers. Just a plain old basic AI, with whatever unlocks happen to come with the map seed.<br />
<br />
=== Moderate ===<br />
<br />
* '''Spireling'''<br />
** Fairly aggressive AI that uses only Spire fleet ships.<br />
** Extra Ships: All Spire fleet ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Thief'''<br />
** Fairly aggressive AI that uses ships with tractor beams and leech capabilities. This can lead to a distinct disregard for player property rights.<br />
** Extra Ships: Etherjet tractors, Spire Tractor Platforms, Parasites<br />
** Thanks to Kemeno for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
=== Harder ===<br />
<br />
* '''Everything'''<br />
** Has absolutely every fleet ship and core ship type unlocked from the start.<br />
<br />
* '''Retaliatory'''<br />
** Starts with Counterattack Guard Posts on most planets, and can actually have more than one on a planet (if that planet would have gotten one normally). This can lead to devastating counter attacks particularly when taking a mkIV planet.<br />
** Thanks to zebramatt for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* '''Crafty Spire'''<br />
** Starts with various Spirecraft (which are generally bigger than starships and smaller than golems) on its planets.<br />
** Extra Ships: Spirecraft.<br />
<br />
* '''Extreme Raider'''<br />
** Very nasty AI that uses raid-oriented fleet ships and really likes sending Raid Starships along with normal waves.<br />
** Extra Ships: Raider, Spire Stealth Battleship, Cutlass, Vampire, Teleport Raider<br />
** Thanks to ShadowOTE for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Hammer'''<br />
** Generally solid AI that also adds a powerful Spire ship to each wave (in addition to the normal starship). At higher tech levels it will even send Capital-ship level vessels.<br />
** Extra Ships: Spire Frigates and Capital Ships.<br />
<br />
== New Map Styles ==<br />
<br />
Eight new map types in all are added as part of this expansion, based on three overall stylings.<br />
<br />
* '''Grid'''<br />
** Planets are organized into an orderly grid.<br />
* '''Crosshatch'''<br />
** Planets are organized into an orderly grid with the angles also filled in.<br />
* '''Maze A'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a grid to create the maze.<br />
* '''Maze A Easy'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a grid to create the maze, but with random extra links added in various spots.<br />
* '''Maze B'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze.<br />
* '''Maze B Easy'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze, but with random extra links added in various spots.<br />
* '''Maze C'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Prims algorithm on a grid to create the maze.<br />
* '''Maze D'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Prims algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze.<br />
<br />
== New Music Tracks ==<br />
In all, this expansion adds over 40 minutes of new in-game music, or about 46 minutes of music overall when the new Title Music and Chase tracks are included. Here's the list of tracks:<br />
<br />
* During-play tracks:<br />
** Darkness<br />
** Meteor Shower<br />
** Night Carousel<br />
** On The Move<br />
** The Blinding Star<br />
** The Light Within<br />
** The Night Light<br />
* Special Tracks<br />
** Light of the Spire Title Theme<br />
** The Chase (special event-specific music)<br />
<br />
== Other Miscellaneous Additions ==<br />
<br />
* Four new [[AI War:Cheats|cheats]] were added.<br />
* Twenty-three new achievements were added.<br />
* [[AI War:Fallen Spire Journal Entries|New Journal Entries for the Fallen Spire]]<br />
{{AIWarRefNav}}</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:Destroyer_of_Worlds&diff=39805AI War:Destroyer of Worlds2020-08-07T00:01:52Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Other Miscellaneous Additions */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Category:AIWar]]<br />
[[Category:AIWarDoW]]<br />
[[File:AIWarDoW.jpg|center|Destroyer of Worlds]]<br/><br />
=What exactly is added in the Destroyer of Worlds expansion?=<br />
<br />
'''A:''' This expansion focuses on two new optional features. "Nomad Planets" introduces dynamic topology to AI War for the first time, giving the player new challenges and opportunities beyond the previously-static wormhole network. One of the Nomads also holds a secret weapon of truly dire power (that gives the expansion its title, hint hint). The "Exodian Blade" is a powerful alternate way-to-win, but getting there is a multi-stage journey with a great deal of desperate fighting once things get going. Beyond those, this expansion also adds several new AI types, a new map type, new bonus ship types, a couple new AI guardian types, and the new "Preemptive" AI Plot. This expansion is slated for official release in August 2014.<br />
<br />
== Nomad Planets ==<br />
<br />
In the game lobby (under Minor Factions) you can choose to add 1 to 10 Nomad Planets to the game. These are basically normal AI planets but they will gradually "move" across the map during the game, and periodically "relink" their wormholes to the planets nearest to them at the time. Needless to say this can rather change the defensive game, and also provides new offensive opportunities.<br />
<br />
One of the Nomad planets will also seed with the golem-like "Nomad Beacon", which (if you can capture and repair it) can be used to influence the movements of the Nomads.<br />
<br />
== Exodian Blade ==<br />
<br />
Also enabled in the lobby under Minor Factions, this selects one planet on the map where you can find your potential ally. But you can't see which planet that is, and have to hack into AI command station telemetry archives to get more information on where to look. Once you've found it... well, discovery is part of the fun :) But a titanic death-or-glory battle is involved.<br />
<br />
We've had a lot of requests for more lore-laden journal entries like the Fallen Spire progression; there's also a good chunk of that here.<br />
<br />
== New AI Types ==<br />
<br />
*'''Easier'''<br />
** '''Cowardly'''<br />
*** Prefers engagements where it significantly outnumbers human forces, and is much quicker to retreat in other cases.<br />
<br />
*'''Moderate'''<br />
**'''Mime'''<br />
*** Normally when you lose units in AI territory the "salvage" is put towards a "reprisal" wave composed of normal AI units. The Mime will actually try to use the specific types of units you lost to create that salvage (even if that AI cannot normally put units of that type into a wave). If you use superweapons this can be... very painful.<br />
**'''Kite Flier'''<br />
*** All of its ships "auto kite", maneuvering to stay just barely in firing range of their target.<br />
<br />
*'''Harder'''<br />
**'''Overreactive'''<br />
*** Sends much larger Reprisal waves when it accumulates sufficient salvage from human ships dying on its planets.<br />
**'''Vanguard'''<br />
*** Uses Guardians instead of fleet ships or starships for most purposes (waves, reinforcements, etc). And Guardians are nasty.<br />
**'''Starship Fanatic'''<br />
*** Goes far beyond the Starfleet Commander, and instead of just getting more starships it uses them instead of fleet ships or guardians for most purposes (waves, reinforcements, etc).<br />
**'''Quadratic'''<br />
*** With every normal wave it sends, it doubles the minimum strength of wave that it is willing to send. This tends to lead to waves that take much longer to "charge" (before being announced), but eventually leads to VERY large waves.<br />
<br />
* '''"Red" Hard'''<br />
** '''Brutal'''<br />
*** Gets an extra "Brutal" core guard post on each homeworld, and gets another such post on each MkIV planet (that isn't too close to the human homeworlds). Those non-homeworld posts are not protected by the core shield network (if any) but do protect their local command station.<br />
<br />
== New AI Plot ==<br />
<br />
* '''Preemption'''<br />
** A portion of the AI's defensive reinforcements (higher intensity means a higher portion) are released as threat instead (and can thus go attack you immediately).<br />
<br />
== New AI Guardians ==<br />
<br />
* '''Combat Carrier'''<br />
** Adapted from Neinzul technology, when threatened this unit deploys Beam, Rail, Spider, and Grav drones.<br />
<br />
* '''Translocator'''<br />
** Equipped with multiple medium-ranged railguns that displace targets further away.<br />
<br />
* '''Devastator'''<br />
** Based on Zenith technology used for fighting shield-heavy Spire units, this guardian's cannon completely ignores forcefields. However, it cannot target small units.<br />
<br />
== New Map Style ==<br />
<br />
* '''Encapsulated'''<br />
** Planets are arranged in small and large clusters inside an outer rim. Sometimes the clusters all connect to each other, other times you have to traverse the rim to get to the other clusters.<br />
<br />
== New Bonus Ship Classes ==<br />
<br />
* '''Neinzul Combat Carrier'''<br />
** Periodically while enemies are present, this ship produces a group of special short-lived "drone" attack ships. Rather than the Enclave Starship's Needler, Laser, MLRS, and Missle drones, the Combat Carrier produces Beam, Rail, Spider, and Grav drones.<br />
** '''Beam Drone'''<br />
*** A small, shortlived drone. Basically just an engine slapped on to a reactor and the main emitter array from a Heavy Beam Cannon. There wasn't room for any of that unimportant stuff like safety equipment, heatsinks, etc. So it generally only gets one or two shots before ceasing to be.<br />
** '''Rail Drone'''<br />
*** A small, shortlived drone equipped with a medium-range railgun.<br />
** '''Spider Drone'''<br />
*** A small, shortlived drone equipped with a medium-range railgun. The shells are weaker than those fired by the Rail Drone, but also cause engine damage.<br />
** '''Grav Drone'''<br />
*** A small, shortlived drone with weak weaponry but also a gravity generator for slowing down enemy ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Lightning Starship'''<br />
** A starship-class unit built around an enormous generator that fires electric bolts into up to 200 nearby enemy ships. Can concentrate full power against any group (of eligible targets) larger than 40. Against groups smaller than 40 some of the power is wasted.<br />
<br />
* '''Powerslaver'''<br />
** Is initially fairly weak, but can swallow enemy ships whole and uses those to power up its own guns.<br />
<br />
* '''Translocator Starship'''<br />
** A starship-class unit equipped with multiple medium-ranged railguns that displace targets further away.<br />
<br />
== New Music Tracks ==<br />
<br />
28 minutes, 50 seconds of new music by Pablo Vega in all!<br />
<br />
* Devastator<br />
* Kite Flier<br />
* Neinzul Reborn<br />
* Nomad Beacon<br />
* Nomad Sunrise<br />
* The Exodian Blade<br />
* The Worm Hole<br />
* Translocator<br />
<br />
== Other Miscellaneous Additions ==<br />
<br />
*28 New Achievements<br />
* [[AI War:Nomad Planets Journal Entries|New Journal Entries for Nomad Planets ]]<br />
* [[AI War:Exodian Blade Journal Entries|New Journal Entries for the Exodian Blade]]<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:AI War]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:Vengeance_of_the_Machine&diff=39804AI War:Vengeance of the Machine2020-08-07T00:00:09Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Other Miscellaneous Additions */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Category:AIWar]]<br />
[[Category:AIWarVotM]]<br />
[[File:AIWarVotM.jpg|center|Vengeance of the Machine]]<br/><br />
=What exactly is added in the Vengeance of the Machine expansion?=<br />
<br />
'''A:''' This expansion gives players some fun new toys but focuses on adding still more variety to your main opponent: the AI. There's already a ton of that variety, but our community is very excited about the new stuff VotM brings to the table, including "Dual-type" AIs, Dire Guardians, AI Planetary Subcommanders, and the "Hunter" and "Shark" AI plots. There are also new bonus ship types, AI types, map styles, core guard posts, guardians, core turret controllers, and more awesome music from Pablo Vega. The expansion also adds a new "Showdown" option that provides a brand-new way to win (or lose) in the form of an ultimate stalemate-breaker. This expansion is slated for official release in June 2013.<br />
<br />
== Dual-Type AIs ==<br />
<br />
Now you may optionally assign a secondary type to each of the two AI players so you can see what it's like to play against a Speed-Racer/Thief and a Spire-Hammer/Neinzul-Youngster (answer: the former is quite amusing in a morbid sort of way, and the latter is _rather_ challenging).<br />
<br />
You can also use it to "mix in" some of the new AI types like Chivalric and Bouncer to make the game perhaps a little easier in some ways, while still getting the distinctive features of the other types chosen.<br />
<br />
== AI Planetary Subcommanders ==<br />
<br />
Now some of each AI's planets (mainly picked from the MkIV and Core ones) will have a "subcommander" represented by one of 10 new special command stations (like "Gravitic", "Translocator" and "Lance"). Most subcommanders can also pick from some of the 11 new special guard posts (like "Plasma", "Implosion", and "Widow") and most also try to be extra clever in how they place their station and guard posts. <br />
<br />
The "Paranoid" subcommander, for example, will place its station as far away from all the wormholes as it can, and pick only Command-Station-Shield posts and place them as far away from the wormholes and each other as it can. <br />
<br />
The "Knife Fighter" subcommander, on the other hand, will pick from short-and-medium range combat-oriented stations and posts and try to place them so as to cover all its wormholes with overlapping fields of fire.<br />
<br />
And so on, with types like the long-range-favoring "Lobber", the tractor-and-gravity-loving "Obstructionist", and the ever-popular "Rude Gesture" (who is not at all happy about no longer being able to stack 13 counterattack posts on its planet, having to settle instead for 4).<br />
<br />
See [[AI War:Planetary_Subcommanders|Planetary Subcommanders]] for full list.<br />
<br />
== Dire Guardians ==<br />
<br />
Guardians in general are scarier than they once were, but we've also added much nastier versions called "Dire Guardians" as new "heavy-hitters" in the AI's toolbox, specifically:<br />
* Needler<br />
* Laser<br />
* MLRS<br />
* Implosion<br />
* Sniper<br />
* Spider<br />
* Tractor<br />
* Widow<br />
* Disassembler<br />
* Gravity<br />
* Munitions Boosting<br />
* Infiltration<br />
* Artillery<br />
* Raider<br />
* Shield<br />
<br />
Normally you'll only encounter these through a few "Dire Guardian Lairs" seeded in each map (unless you disable them in the lobby). Each lair is normally not a problem... until its planet goes on alert. Then it starts building a Dire Guardian inside. You're warned when these are building and you'll want to be ready to take it down (not easy, but doable with major fleet action) when it spawns. For some lairs you'll probably want to deal with them permanently at some point, and you can do so by destroying them. But destroying them releases a one-time spawn of _three_ Dire Guardians. Ouch.<br />
<br />
If you have any "Exogalactic Attack" sources on (Fallen Spire, Broken-Golems-Hard, etc) then Dire Guardians are also eligible to seed in those. They're only one step below Hunter/Killer units in cost so it's not really making exos any more dangerous overall in terms of raw strength, but it does add more variety and thus more potential for picking a "killer combo" that your defenses will be hard-pressed to withstand.<br />
<br />
== New AI Types ==<br />
<br />
*'''Easier'''<br />
** '''Chivalric'''<br />
*** This AI refrains from targeting irreplaceable structures (like Advanced Factories, Fabricators, etc) other than your Home Command Station, and instead gets a bonus to the size of its Cross Planet Attacks.<br />
*** When present in an AI with a secondary AI Type, this type's "do not target irreplaceable structures" characteristic is dominant despite being a disadvantage.<br />
** '''Bouncer'''<br />
*** This AI uses normal guard posts instead of wormhole guard posts next to each of its wormholes. The result is that you generally take more losses the first time you attack a planet but you have a much easier time keeping it from reinforcing much if you choose not to take it.<br />
<br />
*'''Moderate'''<br />
**'''Artillerist'''<br />
*** This AI is fascinated with bombardment and focuses on throwing lots of (preferably long-range) artillery units at you. Its defenses leave something to be desired, however.<br />
**'''Exotic'''<br />
*** This AI does not send normal waves, and instead sends small "exogalactic attacks" (similar to those provoked by the Fallen Spire, Broken Golems - Hard, Botnet Golem - Hard, or Spirecraft - Hard minor factions) with methods of composition and approach very different from normal waves.<br />
**'''Reservist'''<br />
***This AI gets a larger-than-usual strategic reserve and uses part of it to defend important planets that are normally not reinforced from the reserve.<br />
<br />
*'''Harder'''<br />
**'''Vorpal'''<br />
***This AI focuses on force-field-immune units and strong Cross Planet Attacks as a counter to fortified human positions.<br />
**'''Vengeful'''<br />
***This AI retaliates with (relatively) small exogalactic attacks every time you destroy one of its guard posts, warp gates, command stations, data centers... it's kind of attached to a lot of things, actually. Doesn't take criticism well.<br />
<br />
*'''"Red" Hard'''<br />
**'''Vicious Exotic'''<br />
***This AI does not send normal waves, and instead sends LARGE "exogalactic attacks" (similar to those provoked by the Fallen Spire, Broken Golems - Hard, Botnet Golem - Hard, or Spirecraft - Hard minor factions) with methods of composition and approach very different from normal waves.<br />
<br />
== New AI Plots ==<br />
<br />
* '''Hunter'''<br />
** If this is enabled, the AI gradually adds some extra-nasty units to its Special Forces. The SF fleet normally functions as a mobile defense fleet for the AI, but these extra units will make it far more... interesting.<br />
<br />
*'''Shark'''<br />
** If this is enabled (A and B can be enabled separately), the AI gains strength every time one of your command stations falls. Normally it's fairly minor when a human player loses a planet unless it was a critical defense point or had some important irreplaceable structure, but with the Shark plot once the AI smells blood in the water things could get out of hand in a hurry.<br />
** '''Shark-A''' gains AIP with each human command station death.<br />
** '''Shark-B''' gains no permanent bonuses with each human command station death, but does launch immediate follow-up ("go for the throat") attacks and contributes an extra chunk to the next Cross Planet Attack.<br />
<br />
== New AI Core Guard Posts ==<br />
<br />
Like all Core Guard Posts, these only appear on AI Homeworlds.<br />
<br />
* '''Core Implosion Drone Guard Post'''<br />
** This guard post is armed with several high-power implosion cannons that are extremely dangerous to large targets, but are thankfully relatively shorter-ranged than most implosion weapons. Unfortunately, this post also launches "Implosion Drones" which (while much shorter-ranged still, and the drone self-destructs when it fires) charge at enemy ships to fire several lower-power implosion rounds.<br />
<br />
* '''Core Arachnid Guard Post'''<br />
**This guard post is armed with massively powerful artillery cannon designed to cripple or destroy larger targets. It can't even shoot at smaller units.<br />
<br />
*'''Core Riot Control Guard Post'''<br />
**This guard post fires many shells that aren't massively powerful but do significant engine damage. Also, the post mounts many tractor beams which paralyze their victims.<br />
<br />
*'''Core Shredder Drone Guard Post'''<br />
**This guard post is armed with a powerful shotgun weapon, but its main danger lay in the fact that when damaged, it spawns "Shredder Drones" which then attack human units. If one of these shredders does enough damage it replicates itself. Further, after a shredder has existed for 30 seconds it will automatically scrap itself and restores a chunk of health to the Shredder Drone Guard Post (if the post is still alive).<br />
<br />
*'''Core Hunter/Killer Factory Guard Post'''<br />
**This guard post is armed with powerful Energy Wave cannons, but a far greater danger lies within: if an AI unit dies on its planet or any adjacent planet, or if any adjacent planet is not AI-held, this factory deploys the fearsome Hunter/Killer unit it has constructed. After deploying the H/K, the factory builds another in 30 minutes.<br />
<br />
== New AI Guardians ==<br />
<br />
Part of the base-game work during the post-6.0 development cycle made guardians a more variable part of the game by having each AI start with 3 guardian types "unlocked" and gradually unlocking more as AIP increases, rather than having all AIs have all guardian types all the time. In this expansion we're further increasing this new variety by adding the following guardian varieties:<br />
<br />
*'''Widow'''<br />
**A particularly uncomfortable variant of the Tractor Guardian which also paralyzes its victims.<br />
<br />
*'''Munitions Boosting'''<br />
**Dangerous in its own right, but the real problem is that this guardian boosts the attack power of nearby allied ships.<br />
<br />
*'''Needler'''<br />
**Bristles with banks of needlers. Best dealt with very carefully.<br />
<br />
*'''MLRS'''<br />
**Shoots rockets. LOTS of rockets.<br />
<br />
*'''Infiltration'''<br />
**Sneaky. Deadly.<br />
**Beware its immunity to your forcefields.<br />
<br />
*'''Shield'''<br />
**Not as individually dangerous as some other guardians, but its ability to protect nearby allies from incoming fire is actually often far more dangerous than additional firepower would be.<br />
<br />
*'''Plasma'''<br />
**So the AI took a gun. Then it put an engine on that gun. You are looking at that gun.<br />
**If something is unfortunate enough to be shot by that gun, it will take a lot of damage. Other things nearby will take some damage too. If it hits a forcefield, stuff under that forcefield also gets hurt.<br />
<br />
== New Map Styles ==<br />
<br />
* '''Wheel'''<br />
** Planets are arranged in a wheel-like shape with a number of spokes and a rim.<br />
<br />
* '''Honeycomb'''<br />
** Planets are arranged in a hexagonal pattern. Some map seeds leave just a few gaps in the pattern, others have many gaps creating a very different overall effect.<br />
<br />
== Core Turret Controllers ==<br />
<br />
These are capturables quite similar to Fabricators (which allow you to build a specific MkV ship type), but instead allow you to build a specific type of MkV turret. The other big twist is that these MkV turrets have PER-PLANET caps, instead of galaxy-wide caps. So if a Core Spider Turret Controller gives you a cap of 24 MkV spider turrets, then in theory you can build 24 MkV spider turrets on every planet you own (and all planets adjacent to those, as you also have supply there). In practice you generally won't be able to (or want to) spend _that_ much energy (or potentially metal or crystal) on turrets but either way this gives you much more flexibility for distributed defense.<br />
<br />
== New Bonus Ship Classes ==<br />
<br />
* '''Lightning Torpedo Frigate'''<br />
** Has modest firepower in its own right, but primarily attacks by launching miniaturized versions of the Lightning Warhead (that do not increase AIP when detonated, of course).<br />
<br />
*'''Zenith Devastator'''<br />
**A powerful starship designed by the Zenith during their ancient wars against the Spire (who heavily rely on shields). Its shots completely ignore forcefields (though the devastator itself does not ignore forcefields). Cannot target small ships.<br />
<br />
*'''Protector Starship'''<br />
**Small Starship-class modular vessel designed to defend other ships via passive and active defense systems.<br />
**Available modules:<br />
***'''Counter-Missile Module''': Shoots down a finite number of incoming enemy missiles per second.<br />
***'''Counter-Laser Module''': Shoots down a finite number of incoming enemy laser shots per second.<br />
***'''Counter-Shell Module''': Shoots down a finite number of incoming enemy shells per second.<br />
***'''Counter-Energy-Shot Module''': Shoots down a finite number of incoming enemy energy shots (which is a broad definition including negative energy, energy waves, implosion shots, impulse reactive shots, energy bombs, flame waves, etc) per second.<br />
***'''Protector Shield Module''': Provide protections to any allied ship within range. The generator itself is relatively weak and cannot hold up under intense fire, but does protect a much wider area than most mobile shield generators.<br />
<br />
*'''Neinzul Youngling Shrike'''<br />
** A fast-attacking cloaked raiding ship, with a youngling's very short lifespan.<br />
<br />
*'''Neinzul Railpod'''<br />
** Mature Neinzul organism without the time-limited lifespan of a Youngling. The railpod is basically an organic railcannon, with effectively infinte range. The downside is that firing the cannon does tremendous damage to the railpod itself, generally destroying itself after only two shots. Despite this limitation, railpods can contribute significantly to "burst" damage either defensively or offensively, and a group of space docks loop-building these with engineer support effectively becomes a large artillery battery.<br />
<br />
*'''Zenith Hydra'''<br />
** A potent short-range combatant that breathes (plasma) fire and can regenerate its own health over time.<br />
<br />
== "Showdown Devices" Minor Faction ==<br />
<br />
This is probably the biggest single feature of the expansion, and it provides another way to turn the normal "Guerrilla War" into a "Frontal War". Like Fallen Spire, to win by Showdown you'll need to withstand a truly tremendous AI attack. Unlike Fallen Spire, you can start the final confrontation simply by capturing four specific planets (the ones with the "[[AI War:Showdown Device|Showdown Devices]]"), and that confrontation only lasts about 30-40 minutes (less, if you're unsuccessful).<br />
<br />
We hope many of you enjoy devising new strategies to deal with the particular challenges of winning (or losing) via Showdown.<br />
<br />
== New Music Tracks ==<br />
<br />
A New Dawn.<br />
<br />
Ashes to Ashes.<br />
<br />
Before the Storm.<br />
<br />
Dust to Dust.<br />
<br />
Every Man for Himself.<br />
<br />
Falling Down.<br />
<br />
Return to Glory.<br />
<br />
Rising Up.<br />
<br />
Round and Round.<br />
<br />
The Hurricane.<br />
<br />
Title Theme (VotM version)<br />
<br />
Vengeance of the Machine.<br />
<br />
== Other Miscellaneous Additions ==<br />
<br />
* 28 New Achievements.<br />
* [[AI War:Showdown Devices Journal Entries|New Journal Entries]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:Ancient_Shadows&diff=39803AI War:Ancient Shadows2020-08-06T23:46:32Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Other Miscellaneous Additions */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Category:AIWar]]<br />
[[Category:AIWarAS]]<br />
[[File:AIWarAS.jpg|center|Ancient Shadows]]<br/><br />
<br />
=What exactly is added in the Ancient Shadows expansion?=<br />
<br />
'''A:''' The main anchor feature is Champions, which is basically our take on the "hero unit" concept from other RTS games. Champions are the only units that can travel into the newly-added backwater nebulae that are inhabited not by the AI but by various Human, Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire splinter factions. There are also new bonus ship types, AI types, map styles, core guard posts, modular fortresses, a new minor faction, and a lot more music from Pablo Vega. This expansion is slated for official release on Friday, October 19th, 2012.<br />
<br />
== Champions and Nebulae ==<br />
<br />
A player slot can now be occupied by a "Champion" that controls a single modular super-starship. Champions can gain experience, and with experience can upgrade modules. More importantly, the champions have the unique ability to travel through "nebula" wormholes, and interact with the splinter factions of Humans, Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire that are found in those nebulae. Successfully helping a splinter faction can (among other rewards) unlock whole new lines of modules and even new and bigger hulls that your champion can switch to. For the lore-inclined among you, these "offroad" scenarios also reveal more of the backstory through journal entries, and you'll run into some old friends and foes.<br />
* Note: adding a champion to a singleplayer game is easy: just set your player role to "Normal+Champion" and you'll be given both the normal human home command station (and related units) and the champion unit.<br />
* Another note: Champions are effectively immortal. If they run out of health, they will immediately respawn at your Home Command Station, without any of the modules they had built at the time of the detonation.<br />
* Thanks to HitmanN for the champion-module art!<br />
<br />
== New Bonus Ship Classes ==<br />
<br />
* '''Tackle Drone Launcher'''<br />
** Has guns of its own but primarily attacks by launching small tractor-equipped drones. The drones fly in a straight line dragging any enemy they can tractor along with them and explode when they reach their maximum range or the edge of the gravity well, dealing damage to nearby targets. The drones are thus very effective at taking smaller craft out of a fight, but cannot damage tractor-immune ships in any way.<br />
<br />
* '''Saboteur'''<br />
** Fires hostile nanites at enemy ships. Unlike reclamation nanites, these focus on overloading the target's power systems with the goal of causing it to explode violently. This target does not go critical until its health is reduced to zero normally, but once that happens it will explode and damage nearby friendly (to the exploding ship) units. The damage done to each victim of the explosion is based on how much damage the exploding ship took from overload-nanites.<br />
<br />
* '''Zenith Medic Frigate'''<br />
** Moderately large frigate with capable weaponry, but the main point of a medic frigate is the multiplex repair beam emitter that allows it to heal nearby ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Zenith Siege Engine'''<br />
** Moderately large vessel built around an outsized plasma siege cannon. The ship does not have enough power to both move and keep the weapon online, so it must remain immobile for a full reload cycle before it can fire. When it fires, however, the enemy will feel it.<br />
<br />
* '''Zenith Reprocessor'''<br />
** A larger, specialized version of the Acid Sprayer, this ship's shots actually "metabolize" the enemy target. When the target dies, a portion of the target's metal+crystal construction cost will be granted to the player that did the most reprocessing damage to it.<br />
<br />
* '''Neinzul Scapegoat'''<br />
** Mature Neinzul organism without the short lifespan of a Youngling. Capable combatant in its own right, but also sacrifices itself to regenerate military fleet ships on the same planet when they take critical damage.<br />
<br />
* '''Youngling Firefly'''<br />
** Small, shortlived ship that builds up a charge as it successfully attacks other units. When it dies it explodes violently to damage nearby enemy units. The explosion damge done to each victim starts at one quarter the strength of the Firefly's normal shot, but increases with the charge the ship has accumulated.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Railcluster'''<br />
** Large Spire fleet ship mounting multiple short-range railcannons. Highly effective against very small ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Corvette'''<br />
** A starship-sized vessel developed by retrofitting the smallest Imperial Spire combat design with human technology. Has a moderately powerful photon lance, but can also mount a small number of modules.<br />
*** Built from the starship constructor, making this the first "Bonus Starship", a concept long requested by players.<br />
<br />
== New Minor Faction ==<br />
<br />
* '''Dark Spire'''<br />
** Several mysterious, ancient structures exist on AI planets throughout the galaxy. They cannot be harmed, and do not have any weapons, but they absorb energy when a ship dies on the same planet. What happens when they absorb too much?<br />
*** Hint: they spawn lots of angry ships that want to attack both the humans and the AI. And if a big enough cascade-effect gets going...<br />
<br />
== New Core AI Guard Posts ==<br />
<br />
* '''Wrath Lance'''<br />
** As long as it detects hostile military ships on the planet, fires several massive long-range continuous beam weapon cannons in different directions. Does not actually aim, but the beams move as the post rotates.<br />
<br />
* '''Teuthida'''<br />
** An AI/Neinzul hybrid experiment gone wrong. When hostiles are present, this post continuously generates nanoswarm-like drones. Instead of merely doing reclamation damage, however, the organisms released by these drones instantly transform the targets into "zombie" vessels.<br />
*** Ships immune to reclamation are spared this fate, but are not spared from the extremely powerful cluster of railcannons mounted on the post itself.<br />
<br />
* '''Grav Reactor'''<br />
** An enormously powerful reactor based on some kind of gravitational energy manipulation. Generates a strong gravity well that prevents most enemy ships from leaving the system, and greatly slows enemy ships that stray too near the reactor itself. Also builds gravity drones that rush hostile ships to slow them down and damage them upon detonation.<br />
*** The bright side is that the gravitational effect is too strong for this guard post to benefit from Core Shield Generator protection. So it may be taken out before the CSG network is down, if you dare.<br />
<br />
== New Player Units ==<br />
<br />
* '''Modular Fortresses'''<br />
** These are similar to the massive and expensive fortresses already available to players, but are modular.<br />
*** Can mount Needler, Laser, MLRS, Missile, Shield, and Heavy Beam modules.<br />
*** Further, the modules are not directly researched but become available through the corresponding turret/forcefield research.<br />
*** Variants based on Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire tech are also available as rewards from nebulae.<br />
<br />
== New AI Types ==<br />
<br />
* '''Fortress King'''<br />
** Has Modular Fortresses in place of most command stations. Expect grievous pain.<br />
<br />
* '''Heroic'''<br />
** Adds powerful Champion ships to each wave. Also periodically spawns a Champion ship on one of its own planets that joins the general AI forces threatening you. At higher tech levels it uses bigger Champion ships.<br />
<br />
== New Map Styles ==<br />
<br />
* '''Clusters'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a small number of clusters, each of which has only a few wormholes that lead to other clusters. Planets within a cluster each have a moderate number of connections to other planets within that cluster.<br />
*** One of the most requested map types... ever.<br />
<br />
* '''Microcosm Clusters'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a small number of clusters, each of which has only a few wormholes that lead to other clusters. Intra-cluster organization varies from cluster to cluster (including simple, concentric, crosshatch, and grid layouts).<br />
<br />
== New Music Tracks ==<br />
<br />
The expansion has 98 minutes and 5 seconds of music in all. Here's the full track list:<br />
<br />
Chapter I: The Human Awakening<br />
<br />
* 1. Arise Sleeping Warriors<br />
* 2. An Unfamiliar World<br />
* 3. A War Worth Fighting<br />
* 4. Ambitious Design<br />
* 5. AI Revolution<br />
* 6. Ancient Shadows<br />
<br />
Chapter II: The Zenith Revival<br />
<br />
* 7. Immortal<br />
* 8. Imminent Annihilation<br />
* 9. Inquisition Of The Stars<br />
* 10. Incarnate Race<br />
* 11. Imitated And Integrated<br />
* 12. Ironclad<br />
<br />
Chapter III: Revenge Of The Spire<br />
<br />
* 13. Waking To Darkness<br />
* 14. Worshipped Wasteland<br />
* 15. Watching The Night Sky<br />
* 16. Whispers Of Hope<br />
* 17. Wrath Of The Spire<br />
* 18. Welcome To The End<br />
<br />
Bonus Track: 19. Ancient Shadows - Title<br />
<br />
== Other Miscellaneous Additions ==<br />
<br />
* 32 New Achievements.<br />
* [[AI War:Ancient Shadows Journal Entries|New Journal Entries]]<br />
[[AI War:AI War]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:Expansion_3_Light_of_the_Spire&diff=39802AI War:Expansion 3 Light of the Spire2020-08-06T23:43:36Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Other Miscellaneous Additions */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[category:AIWar]]<br />
[[category:AIWarLotS]]<br />
[[File:AIWarLotS.jpg|center|Light of the Spire]]<br/><br />
<br />
<b>The Spire are coming...</b><br />
<br />
Ravaged by their recent encounters with the same AIs that pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, the Spire are an alien race that have also been all but destroyed. However, while the AIs were successful in their surprise attack against the Spire, the Spire are far more powerful than even the AIs seem to have realized. The Zenith were broken-down and ancient when humanity encountered them, but the Spire were at the height of their deadly power until quite recently.<br />
<br />
Now the splintered remains of their race are regrouping, and entering the galaxy with a vengeance. Their attitude toward humanity, who after all spawned the AIs that harmed the Spire so, is unclear. Proceed with caution.<br />
<br />
=What exactly is added in the Light of the Spire expansion?=<br />
<br />
'''A:''' The short explanation is that the expansion is focused on adding more broad ways to play the game, such as the Fallen Spire story campaign and the Defender Mode campaign mode. Along with that, it adds a ton of more types of large ships, notably the spirecraft and the bonus ship types. In all, there are 180 new ships added in this expansion, making it our largest to date by a fair margin.<br />
<br />
== New Alien Race ==<br />
<br />
Ravaged by their recent encounters with the same AIs that pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, the Spire are an alien race that have also been all but destroyed. However, while the AIs were successful in their surprise attack against the Spire, the Spire are far more powerful than even the AIs seem to have realized. The Zenith were broken-down and ancient when humanity encountered them, but the Spire were at the height of their deadly power until quite recently.<br />
<br />
Now the splintered remains of their race are regrouping, and entering the galaxy with a vengeance. Their attitude toward humanity, who after all spawned the AIs that so harmed the Spire, is unclear. Proceed with caution.<br />
<br />
== New Bonus Ship Classes ==<br />
<br />
There are 9 new bonus ship classes added as part of this expansion, comprising 50 ships in all (45 for the bonus ship types themselves, then 5 additional for the spire blades that the spire blade generators create):<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Stealth Battleship''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Powerful battleship with onboard cloaking options as well as a portable radar dampener that makes enemy ships have to be in very close range to hit it at all (radar dampening does not affect the ability of enemy ships to hit other ships, just this one).<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Teleporting Leech''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large teleporting ship fires lightning shots. Reclaims enemy ships it kills (reclaimed ships have health = half damage inflicted by reclamator).<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Gravity Drain''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large, slow ship slows the movement of enemy ships near to it. Also has powerful short-range lasers.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Gravity Ripper''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large, high-health, slow ship temporarily halts the movement of enemy ships with every hit of its weak, short-range, rapid-fire energy bursts. Best used in combination with other ships to keep fast targets from escaping.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Mini Ram''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** This miniature battering ram specializes in high-health targets, crashing into them for high damage and destroying itself in the process. Unable to hit smaller ships.<br />
** Thanks to HitmanN and RCIX for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Tractor Platform''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large, slow alien vessel is bristling with small guns but most importantly many tractor beams. This has obvious defensive uses, but can also be used to hold enemy ships at bay while longer range allied ships take them out.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Maw''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Huge alien vessel that swallows transportable enemy ships and gradually attritions them. If the maw is destroyed, they are ejected with whatever health they have left. External guns also fire at targets at short range while it chews on the swallowed ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Blade Spawner''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large central ship has weak guns, but continously spawns smaller independent blades that crash into enemy ships.<br />
** This also adds mark I-V of Spire Blades.<br />
*** Extremely fast melee ship -- loses health over a 10-second period, then self-destructs. Created inside Spire Blade Spawners, these are uncontrollable but will viciously attack the enemy on the current planet. Players cannot give direct orders to the blades.<br />
** Thanks to soMe_RandoM for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Armor Rotter''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Shots do fairly little damage, but eat away at the armor of ships they hit with each shot. Ship armor gradually regenerates over time (it takes up to 10 minutes to fully regenerate, depending on how much armor the target has), but cannot be directly repaired. Thus the armor rotters can create a window of opportunity for other ships to strike high-armor ships.<br />
** Thanks to Salamander for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== New Minor Factions ==<br />
<br />
<br />
* '''Fallen Spire'''<br />
** "Minor" faction is something of a misnomer with this one. The fallen spire minor faction adds in a scripted "campaign" that players can opt to pursue or not in any game with the minor faction turned on. While the scripted progression is always the same, it interacts with the dynamic components of the game in such a way that that the experience should be satisfyingly different for many playthroughs.<br />
** It also has also enormous modular capital ships. Oh, and an optional alternate way to win the game. Thought you'd like to know that.<br />
** More details [[AI War:What_Is_The_Fallen_Spire_Minor_Faction|here]].<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Civilian Leaders'''<br />
** Up to 10 Spire Civilian Leader Outposts are scattered throughout the galaxy in the control of the AI. Against their will, every hour each outpost increases the AI Progress by 1. You have the choice of either destroying these outposts for colloduing with the AI, or freeing the outposts by capturing the planet from the AI. When freed, each of these outposts will gratefully decrease the AI Progress by one every hour.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft'''<br />
** There are three different variants of minor factions that allow players to use spirecraft ships.<br />
** In all of them, six different kinds of asteroids are seeded around the various planets of the galaxy, waiting for you to use your Spire Mining Ships (CONST tab) to build mining enclosures on them. From these mining enclosures, you can produce the rare and deadly Spirecraft ships, which cannot be procured any other way. These massive ships can be an enormous asset against the AI.<br />
** '''Spirecraft (1 - Easy)'''<br />
*** The EASY version of this minor faction simply gives you the spirecraft with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. Consequently, your adjusted score is also halved.<br />
** '''Spirecraft (2 - Moderate)'''<br />
*** The MODERATE version of this minor faction gives you the spirecraft with a vastly higher energy cost, and without the ability to repair them. Consequently, your adjusted score is also reduced by 1/3.<br />
**** This was the original design for the spirecraft in general, but players wanted more options. The best way to think of this version is as follows: the spirecraft are suitably awesome while they're alive, they don't stir up the AI, they don't cost knowledge, and they don't increase AI Progress. But they require the finite resource of asteroids, and quite a bit of metal/crystal, and when they're gone, they're gone. This makes the spirecraft, in essence, trump cards. Very interesting trump cards.<br />
** '''Spirecraft (3 - Hard)'''<br />
*** The HARD version of this minor faction gives you the spirecraft at their base energy requirements with no repair restrictions. However, whether or not you choose to capture any spirecraft, the AI will be launching periodic large waves with spirecraft (and other big nasty things) of their own -- so you're highly advised to get some spirecraft in order to survive.<br />
<br />
== New AI Plots ==<br />
<br />
* '''Beachheads'''<br />
** Each wave that the AI sends has a 10% chance of being half-size, but including a Beachhead structure that interferes with supply on the planet being attacked (thus knocking out everything from turrets to forcefields until the beachhead is destroyed), as well as preventing player ships from retreating. Counterattack waves, event waves, raid engine waves, and other specialized forms of waves won't ever include a beachhead.<br />
** Five marks of AI Beachhead have also been added:<br />
*** Tough, armored, immobile long-range AI ship that gets sent along with some waves. Interferes with supply on the planet being attacked (thus knocking out everything from turrets to forcefields until the beachhead is destroyed), as well as preventing its enemies' ships from retreating.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== Other New Ships Available For Direct Unlock By Players ==<br />
<br />
* There is a new Spire Mining Ship available on the CONST tab (knowledge free)<br />
** This ship allows the construction of mining enclosures on asteroids. Each tab in its build menu corresponds to a type of asteroid on which specific mining enclosures can be built.<br />
<br />
== New Capturables ==<br />
<br />
=== "Advanced Materials" ===<br />
<br />
Six different kinds of asteroids are now seeded throughout the galaxy in the following order of rarity (from least to most rare): Reptite, Pysite, Xampite, Ebonite, Adamantite, Titanite. Build a mining enclosure (via the Spire Mining Ship in your CONST tab) around this asteroid to consume it and use its advanced materials to create advanced Spirecraft ships not accessible any other way (see below).<br />
<br />
=== New Ship Class: Spirecraft ===<br />
<br />
This is another anchor feature of the expansion, available in one of three variants per campaign (see the minor factions list, above). Using the new asteroids that are scattered around the map when one of these minor factions is on, you'll construct mining enclosures that create one or more spirecraft ships per asteroid. There are mark I-V variants of each spirecraft, and rarer asteroid types give you access to both higher-mark and more-valuable-in-general spirecraft types. <br />
<br />
The spirecraft themselves have powerful and exciting abilities, putting most of them partway between a starship and a golem in terms of power, and some of them on par or above the strength of golems. Though there are always far more of these available to players than there are golems: there are dozens if not a hundred or more asteroids in big maps, and you don't have to capture planets in order to farm them -- so you can raid enemy territory to get these without even costing any AI Progress to take them!<br />
<br />
The different minor factions change up the way that the Spirecraft are balanced with your abilities versus those of the AI. In the easiest variant, you just get the spirecraft with no questions asked, but your score is halved since this is pretty unbalancing in your favor. The moderate and hard variants are both a lot more balanced and in some ways more interesting.<br />
<br />
Bear in mind these spirecraft don't cost you knowledge or remove your ability to use any of the other ships you already are used to using. They ''do'' cost quite a lot of metal/crystal, but the results are worth it even if not something you can continuously farm for the rest of the game.<br />
<br />
In all 50 different spirecraft are added as part of this expansion: 5 marks each for 10 different ship classes.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Shield Bearer''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Does relatively low damage, but has very high health and provides a sizable force field to protect allied ships. Its force field does not reduce the attack power of protected ships.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.<br />
** Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Ram''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** This massive battering ram specializes in high-health targets, crashing into them for extreme damage and destroying itself in the process. Unable to hit smaller ships.<br />
** These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Adamantite, Mark I-IV ships.<br />
** Thanks to HitmanN and RCIX for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Martyr''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** This massive ship has no guns, but is bristling with tractor beams. When it dies, it explodes for extreme damage to enemy ships within its tractor range.<br />
** These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Adamantite, Mark I-IV ships.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Attritioner''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** This massive ship has weak direct guns, but does high attrition damage to all enemy ships once per second (on the order of multiple fixed-position attrition emitters). Enemy ships on the current planet will notice that they are damaged by attrition and will turn aggressive, however, so be careful of stirring up enemy planets with the attritioners.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Scout''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** These scouts are all perma-cloaked, but move pretty slowly and rapidly lose health if they are on an enemy planet of a higher mark level than the scout itself. Most of these except for the Mark IV or V spirecraft scouts make for better long-term sentries (thus freeing up your normal scouts to do mobile scouting) rather than as literal scouts that explore.<br />
** These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Xampite to Titanite, Mark I-IV ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Ion Blaster''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Advanced weapon insta-kills most ships with a mark level equal to or lower than its mark value. Cannot fire upon ships immune to insta-kill. Unlike the fixed-position ion cannons, these ion ships are both mobile and much shorter-ranged, but they are still extremely deadly.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships. <br />
** Thanks to mr_lolz and love kawa for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Penetrator''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Perma-cloaked ship that cannot hit most smaller fleet ships and which must be manually targeted to fire. It does absolutely astronomical damage, and then is uncloaked and unable to fire for the next half hour. This ship is Blind, and thus requires the support of scouts or other similar ships to see its target, but otherwise it works best as a lone wolf sort of ship, delivering its payload and then returning to friendly space to rest and recuperate.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships. <br />
** Thanks to LintMan for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Implosion Artillery''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Large, high-range, middling-health artillery weapon that does damage based on a percentage of the enemy ship's remaining health (not to be less than 1 damage). This is most effective when enemy ships have very high remaining health.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships. <br />
** Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Siege Tower''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Huge, slow, low-range, high-piercing, highly-armored, radar-dampened battlestation with multiple shots excellent for taking out large swathes of enemy ships while repelling a beating in return.<br />
** These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Spirecraft Jumpship''' (Mark I-V)<br />
** Expensive, tiny-capacity transport with advanced teleportation and no self-attrition-per-wormhole. The advanced teleportation lets the jumpship pass through wormholes and across planets without the normal few-second delays that regular teleporting ships face. On planets with a higher mark than the jumpship, the jumpship expires in about twenty seconds, however.<br />
** These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Xampite to Titanite, Mark I-IV ships.<br />
** Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Other Capturables ===<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Archive'''<br />
** These powerful science vessels can be found nearby or on the AI homeworlds. Capturing them will provide +1/s knowledge income on the archive's planet for all human players while the archive lives, up to a cap that is 3x that of the normal per-planet cap. If the archive is destroyed, however, there is a hefty AI Progress cost.<br />
<br />
== Campaign Types ==<br />
<br />
In the past, the only way to play the game was in what we're now calling "Conquest" mode: in other words, you play until the AI kills your home command stations or you kill theirs. An anchor feature of this expansion is the addition of the new Defender campaign type that completely changes how that works.<br />
<br />
* '''Defender'''<br />
** An alternate ruleset for AI War, where your goal is to survive for a certain length of time instead of conquering the AIs. You can select as many starting homeworlds as you want, and then you must defend them from brutal AI aggression (the No Waves AI modifier won't help you here). It is HIGHLY recommended that you select multiple planets to start if you want any chance of survival (unlike in Conquest, this won't affect ship caps). As long as at least one of your homeworlds is standing when the timer runs out, you win! In trial mode, the max trial time is 1/3 of the time limit.<br />
** There are variants for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, 2 hours, and 4 hours. We don't allow more flexibility in the time limits because each one requires a specific balance to be playable.<br />
** There are a ''lot'' of changes that come into play with the game when you use this mode. Among them:<br />
*** Most of the good capturables are not seeded into the galaxy for players to capture. It's not expected that you'll be doing any capturing of AI planets.<br />
*** There are no AI homeworlds, and all of the AI planets are mark V brutes.<br />
*** Depending on combined the difficulty level you select for the two AIs, and what time limit variant you select, you'll have a lot of AI Progress right at the start of the game (in some cases 1000 or more), and the AI Progress automatically jumps upwards with every AI wave that is declared.<br />
*** AI Waves are ever-present: the instant as one arrives, the next is declared. Depending on the time-limit variant you choose, though, the waves are spaced further apart.<br />
*** Players start with 3x more resources, including knowledge, and Mark III Economic command stations on all their planets. However, colony ships, mercenary space docks, and missile silos are unavailable -- so when you lose a planet, you can't re-take it.<br />
*** There are 32 possible starting home planets that confer bonus ship types to players, rather than just 16 (assuming the map is large enough to contain them all). However, there is no other way for players to get more bonus ship types during the course of the game.<br />
*** All of the planets on the map can be chosen as starting home planets for players, whether or not they give a bonus ship type to them. Players can select literally every planet on the map if they like, or just one or two.<br />
*** Unlike in conquest mode, having multiple planets at the start does not affect player ship caps (though it does still affect the number of AI Waves at a time). It's expected that usually players would choose a couple of planets with bonus ship types, and then a number without, to have a chance of surviving. The lower-time variants are particularly brutal, as they're basically a cage match with a very angry AI.<br />
*** Most everything else from the Conquest campaign type is still in place, including multiplayer support, minor factions, AI plots (though not all would function, given that the Avenger would never have a chance to come out, for instance), AI types, map styles and planet counts, and so forth.<br />
<br />
== New AI Special Weapons ==<br />
<br />
This is another big focus for this expansion. Most the new ships in this category are guardians, those mobile AI ships that populate the various AI worlds. We saw that as the best way to make the biggest impact on the feeling of variety in the AI planets with this expansion. That said, we also added a number of new Core AI Guard Posts, to help with the variety of the endgame.<br />
<br />
=== Core AI Guard Posts ===<br />
<br />
4 core AI guard posts have been added as part of this expansion.<br />
<br />
* AI Core Raid Engine Guard Post<br />
** Launches brutal mark V waves against its own planet or any adjacent planets, if those planets are not controlled by AI players, or if the human players have a significant fleet there. If human players don't have warp sensors on these planets, the waves may well arrive unannounced. These waves arrive around every four minutes and contain a broad mix of AI ships.<br />
<br />
* AI Core Cross Planet Attack Guard Post<br />
** Launches brutal galaxy-wide cross planet attacks as soon as the human players bring military ships to this post's planet. These CPAs happen around every 13 minutes and are heavily influenced in their size by both the current AI Progress and the difficulty level of the AI controlling this post.<br />
<br />
* AI Core Heavy Beam Guard Post<br />
** A massive long-range beam cannon can vaporize very many smaller craft in one blast, or do extreme damage to a larger target.<br />
<br />
* AI Core Booster Guard Post<br />
** Middling weaponry, but significantly boosts both the munitions and the armor of all nearby AI ships.<br />
<br />
=== AI Guardians ===<br />
<br />
50 new AI guardians (5 marks each of 10 overall types) have been added as part of this expansion.<br />
<br />
* AI Carrier Guardian<br />
** Mid-power, very high-health guardian that starts out with no ships inside it. As AI ships are damaged on the planet the carrier is on, they get inside the carrier and are slowly healed. When the carrier has enough ships inside it, it makes a beeline for player homeworlds.<br />
<br />
* AI EMP Guardian<br />
** Quick mid-power guardian that lets off a planet-wide burst of EMP that only affects human ships -- stunning all of the non-EMP-immune human ships on the planet for a bit -- when it emerges from any wormhole.<br />
** Only appears on difficulty 7 and up.<br />
<br />
* AI Self-Destruction Guardian<br />
** Exceptionally fragile but also quite vicious, this guardian is dangerous in death: like a lightning warhead, it emits a burst of area damage when it goes down.<br />
** Only appears on difficulty 8 and up.<br />
<br />
* AI Special Forces Rally Guardian<br />
** Heavily armored, cloaked, fairly weak combatant acts as a mobile rally post for special forces AI ships. Unlike the special forces guard post, new AI ships won't spawn at this guardian, but they will rally to it as one of their patrol points -- this guardian thus does its best to get to the human homeworlds, thus attracting streams of other special forces ships when it can.<br />
<br />
* AI Vampire Guardian<br />
** Tough long-range combatant that heals itself as it damages enemy ships.<br />
<br />
* AI Warp Gate Guardian<br />
** High-health short-range combatant that also acts as a mobile warp gate. Careful of these, as when they are attacking into your territory they can provoke raids in unexpected places that were otherwise inaccessible to the AI via warp. Particularly hunts for the player homeworlds.<br />
** Only appears on difficulty 7 and up.<br />
<br />
* AI Zombie Guardian<br />
** Reclaims enemy ships it kills (reclaimed ships have health = full damage inflicted by reclamator). Reclaimed ships come back as Zombie Bots, which cannot be controlled but which will attack enemy ships mercilessly until they die. Zombie bots will travel to enemy planets if no enemies present. This guardian cannot attack ships that are immobile, have no attack, or are immune to reclamation.<br />
<br />
* AI Gravity Guardian<br />
** Enormous gravity distortion effect slows enemy ships over a wide area. Middling firepower specially geared towards starships and other large targets.<br />
** Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* AI Starship Disassembler Guardian<br />
** Huge alien guardian that swallows enemy starships and gradually attritions them. If the guardian is destroyed, they are ejected with whatever health they have left. External guns also fire at targets at short range while it chews on the swallowed ships.<br />
<br />
* AI Implosion Guardian<br />
** Mid-range, middling-health artillery weapon that does damage based on a percentage of the enemy ship's remaining health (not to be less than 1 damage). This is most effective when enemy ships have very high remaining health.<br />
** Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== New LotS AI Types ==<br />
The base game included 26 AI types, the Zenith Remnant added 14 more, and Children of Neinzul added an additional 6. Light of the Spire adds an additional 8, as the focus is primarily elsewhere with this expansion.<br />
<br />
=== Easier ===<br />
<br />
* '''Vanilla'''<br />
** Has absolutely no unusual powers. Just a plain old basic AI, with whatever unlocks happen to come with the map seed.<br />
<br />
=== Moderate ===<br />
<br />
* '''Spireling'''<br />
** Fairly aggressive AI that uses only Spire fleet ships.<br />
** Extra Ships: All Spire fleet ships.<br />
<br />
* '''Thief'''<br />
** Fairly aggressive AI that uses ships with tractor beams and leech capabilities. This can lead to a distinct disregard for player property rights.<br />
** Extra Ships: Etherjet tractors, Spire Tractor Platforms, Parasites<br />
** Thanks to Kemeno for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
=== Harder ===<br />
<br />
* '''Everything'''<br />
** Has absolutely every fleet ship and core ship type unlocked from the start.<br />
<br />
* '''Retaliatory'''<br />
** Starts with Counterattack Guard Posts on most planets, and can actually have more than one on a planet (if that planet would have gotten one normally). This can lead to devastating counter attacks particularly when taking a mkIV planet.<br />
** Thanks to zebramatt for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* '''Crafty Spire'''<br />
** Starts with various Spirecraft (which are generally bigger than starships and smaller than golems) on its planets.<br />
** Extra Ships: Spirecraft.<br />
<br />
* '''Extreme Raider'''<br />
** Very nasty AI that uses raid-oriented fleet ships and really likes sending Raid Starships along with normal waves.<br />
** Extra Ships: Raider, Spire Stealth Battleship, Cutlass, Vampire, Teleport Raider<br />
** Thanks to ShadowOTE for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* '''Spire Hammer'''<br />
** Generally solid AI that also adds a powerful Spire ship to each wave (in addition to the normal starship). At higher tech levels it will even send Capital-ship level vessels.<br />
** Extra Ships: Spire Frigates and Capital Ships.<br />
<br />
== New Map Styles ==<br />
<br />
Eight new map types in all are added as part of this expansion, based on three overall stylings.<br />
<br />
* '''Grid'''<br />
** Planets are organized into an orderly grid.<br />
* '''Crosshatch'''<br />
** Planets are organized into an orderly grid with the angles also filled in.<br />
* '''Maze A'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a grid to create the maze.<br />
* '''Maze A Easy'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a grid to create the maze, but with random extra links added in various spots.<br />
* '''Maze B'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze.<br />
* '''Maze B Easy'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze, but with random extra links added in various spots.<br />
* '''Maze C'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Prims algorithm on a grid to create the maze.<br />
* '''Maze D'''<br />
** Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Prims algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze.<br />
<br />
== New Music Tracks ==<br />
In all, this expansion adds over 40 minutes of new in-game music, or about 46 minutes of music overall when the new Title Music and Chase tracks are included. Here's the list of tracks:<br />
<br />
* During-play tracks:<br />
** Darkness<br />
** Meteor Shower<br />
** Night Carousel<br />
** On The Move<br />
** The Blinding Star<br />
** The Light Within<br />
** The Night Light<br />
* Special Tracks<br />
** Light of the Spire Title Theme<br />
** The Chase (special event-specific music)<br />
<br />
== Other Miscellaneous Additions ==<br />
<br />
* Four new [[AI War:Cheats|cheats]] were added.<br />
* Twenty-three new achievements were added.<br />
* [[AI War:Fallen Spire Journal Entries|New Journal Entries]]<br />
{{AIWarRefNav}}</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:AI_War&diff=39801AI War:AI War2020-08-06T23:32:33Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Expansions */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Category:AIWar]]<br />
[[File:AIWar.jpg|center|AI War:Fleet Command]]<br/><br />
'''AI War: Fleet Command''' is the flagship video game of Arcen Games, first released in 2009. Up to eight players battle a pair of rampant artificial intelligences once used by warring human superpowers, in the aftermath of the AI's near complete victory over humanity. Human players must avoid the notice of AI powers while preparing for an attack against the AI homeworlds. The game takes place on a procedurally generated galaxy map with between 10 and 120 planets in a genre splicing mix of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_strategy Real-Time Strategy], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X 4X], and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_defense Tower Defense].<br />
<br />
AI War is known for its gameplay depth, [http://arcengames.com/designing-emergent-ai-part-1-an-introduction/ the behavior of its AI opponents], and strong ties between fans and creators.<br />
: [[AI War:Current Post-8.000 Beta|Upcoming and latest patch-notes]].<br />
<br />
== More About ==<br />
AI War: Fleet Command is a space-based RTS with incredible AI and the largest number of units (30,000+ in most games) of any game we know of. Up to eight players team up against two [http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2009/06/designing-emergent-ai-part-1.html deadly AI civilizations] in lengthy, multi-session campaigns spanning a 10-120 planet galaxy map. Over 120 hours of content means there is always something new to discover. Whether you're a newbie or a genre veteran when it comes to RTS, you'll discover something startlingly new and fun when you and your friends start executing coordinated attacks with thousands of ships! <br />
<br />
* Cooperative RTS game (1-8 players) with numerous unique ship types.<br />
* Challenging AI in 26 styles, 20 additional with the first two expansions; many with unique superweapons.<br />
* Insanely high unit counts: 30,000+ ships in most games.<br />
* Lengthy campaigns featuring up to 120 simultaneous planetary battlefields.<br />
* Different Every Time: 16 billion procedural maps, each with specific units.<br />
* A focus on deep strategy that you don't get in most RTS games.<br />
<br />
== Game Setup ==<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Minor Factions|Minor Factions ]]<br />
* Player [[AI War:Role|Role]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Plot|AI Plots]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Types|AI Types]]<br />
* [[AI War:Difficulty|Difficulty]]<br />
* Auto [[AI War:AI Progress|AI Progress]]<br />
* [[AI War:Map Style|Map Style]]<br />
* [[AI War:Map Size|Map Size]]<br />
<br />
== Objectives ==<br />
<br />
* Explore and gather [[AI War:Intel|Intel]] with [[AI War:Scout Drone|Scouts]]<br />
* Capture some territory for [[AI War:Metal|Metal]], [[AI War:Energy|Energy]] and [[AI War:Knowledge|Knowledge]]<br />
* Gain more power by capturing [[AI War:Advanced Research Station|ARS]] and [[AI War:Core Fabricator|Core Fabricators]] and by [[AI War:Hacking|Hacking]]<br />
* Reduce [[AI War:AI Progress|AIP]] by destroying [[AI War:Data Center|Data Centers]] and [[AI War:Co-Processor|Co-Processors]]<br />
* Destroy the [[AI War:Core Shield Generator|CSG]] networks<br />
* Invade and destroy the two [[AI War:AI Homeworld|AI Homeworlds]]<br />
<br />
''Players can refer to in-game objective list (accessed through "Message Log") which is dynamically updated during play.''<br />
<br />
== Economy ==<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Metal|Metal]]<br />
* [[AI War:Energy|Energy]]<br />
* [[AI War:Knowledge|Knowledge]]<br />
* [[AI War:Hacking|Hacking]]<br />
* [[AI War:Supply|Supply]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Progress|AI Progress]]<br />
<br />
== Ship mechanisms ==<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Mark|Mark]] Level<br />
* Ship [[AI War:Cap|Cap]]<br />
* [[AI War:Attack|Attack]]<br />
* [[AI War:Health|Health]]<br />
* [[AI War:Hull Types|Hull Types]]<br />
* [[AI War:Speed|Speed]]<br />
* [[AI War:Range|Range]]<br />
* [[AI War:Cloaking|Cloaking]] (and Tachyon)<br />
* [[AI War:Intel|Intel]] (Scout and Blind)<br />
* [[AI War:Immunities|Immunities]]<br />
<br />
== AI Mechanisms ==<br />
<br />
=== General ===<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:AI Progress|AI Progress]]<br />
* [[AI War:Alert|Alert]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Tech|AI Tech]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Unlock|AI Unlock]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Plot|AI Plots]]<br />
<br />
=== Offense ===<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Wave|Wave]]<br />
* [[AI War:Cross Planet Attacks|Cross Planet Attack]]<br />
* [[AI War:Exogalactic Strikeforce|Exogalactic Strikeforce]]<br />
* [[AI War:Threat|Threat]]<br />
* [[AI War:Reprisal|Reprisal]]<br />
<br />
=== Defense ===<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Reinforcement|Reinforcement]]<br />
* [[AI War:Special Forces|Special Forces]]<br />
* [[AI War:Strategic Reserve|Strategic Reserve]]<br />
* [[AI War:Planet Mark|Planet Mark]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Homeworld|AI Homeworld]] and [[AI War:AI Core World|AI Core World]]<br />
* [[AI War:Planetary Subcommander|Planetary Subcommander]]<br />
* [[AI War:Deepstrike Threatening|Deepstrike Threatening]]<br />
<br />
== Units ==<br />
<br />
=== Shared Units ===<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Fleet Ships|Fleet Ships]]<br />
* [[AI War:Starships|Starships]]<br />
* [[AI War:Golems|Golems]]<br />
* [[AI War:Spirecraft|Spirecraft]]<br />
* [[AI War:Fortresses|Fortresses]]<br />
* [[AI War:Mines|Mines]]<br />
* [[AI War:Force Field|Force Fields]]<br />
<br />
=== Human Units ===<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Turrets|Turrets]]<br />
* [[AI War:Warheads|Warheads]]<br />
* [[AI War:Mercenaries|Mercenaries]]<br />
* [[AI War:Human Economical Units|Economical Units]]<br />
* [[AI War:Human Logistical Units|Logistical Units]]<br />
<br />
=== AI Units ===<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Guard Posts|Guard Posts]]<br />
* [[AI War:Guardians|Guardians]]<br />
* [[AI War:Dire Guardians|Dire Guardians]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Economical Units|Economical Units]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Devices|Devices]]<br />
<br />
== Races ==<br />
<br />
* [[Lore:Humanity|Humanity]]: only playable race in AI War, mankind was nearly exterminated by the AI and is now seeking an opportunity to land a deadly strike at its opponent.<br />
* [[Lore:The AI|The AI]]: seemingly created by Humans during their civil war, the AI now seems preoccupied in another galaxy with grander design than Human's remains extermination.<br />
* [[Lore:Zenith|Zenith]]: eons old alien race only represented by its technological remains and scattered beings.<br />
* [[Lore:Neinzul|Neinzul]]: insectoid aliens of eternal children with extremely short life span.<br />
* [[Lore:Spire|Spire]]: mineral alien specie whose empire sprawl many distant galaxies.<br />
<br />
== Expansions ==<br />
<br />
''AI War has six expansions which variously include additional units, critical paths, AI types, lore, and music. The game is in ongoing development and receives regular bug fixes and balance adjustments based on community feedback. Major version updates typically coincide with new expansions and sometimes fold improvements from expansion development into the base game.''<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Zenith Remnant|The Zenith Remnant ]]<br />
* [[AI War:Expansion 2 Children of Neinzul|Children of the Neinzul ]]<br />
* [[AI War:Expansion 3 Light of the Spire|Light of the Spire ]]<br />
* [[AI War:Ancient Shadows|Ancient Shadows ]]<br />
* [[AI War:Vengeance of the Machine|Vengeance of the Machine ]]<br />
* [[AI War:Destroyer of Worlds|Destroyer of Worlds ]]<br />
<br />
== Strategy ==<br />
<br />
''The links below were part of the old version of this central page. They are very useful and interesting but may be outdated.''<br />
<br />
=== Introduction ===<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Fast Facts|Fast Facts: A Crash Course On AI War]]<br />
* [[AI War:Starting Out|I'm Just Starting Out -- What Should I Do?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Choosing A Difficulty Level|How Do I Know What Difficulty Level To Play On?]]<br />
** [[AI War:Choosing A Difficulty Level#Is The Difficulty Really Constant Throughout A Game Of AI War? |Is The Difficulty Really Constant Throughout A Game Of AI War? ]]<br />
* [[AI War:Choosing A Map Size|What Difference Does The Map Size Make? (Hint: Tiny Maps Are Harder)]]<br />
* [[AI War:Choosing An AI Opponent|What are suggestions for a good first AI opponent?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Prerequisites to Winning|Steps Required To Win]]<br />
* [http://www.arcengames.com/aiwar_videos.php Video Tutorials (See An Expert Play)]<br />
<br />
=== General Gameplay ===<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Getting More Ships|How Do I Get More Ships?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Using Older Ships|What Do I Do With My Older Ships?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Technologies|What Technologies Should I Unlock If I'm New?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Galaxy Map Priority Buttons|How Do I Use The Priority Buttons In The Galaxy Map?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Do Shots Miss|Do Shots Miss Sometimes?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Microing|Should I Micromanage Ships In Battle?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Ships Slowing Down|Some Of My Ships Are Extra Slow, Or Won't Move At All. Why?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Cheats|Are There Cheats In The Game?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Cheats#Maintenance Commands|What Maintenance Commands Available To Alter Existing Savegames?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Why Do Enemy Waves Get So Large%3F#How_Wave_Sizes_Are_Calculated|AI Wave Size Calculation]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Progress#When To Worry|When Should I Be Worried About The AI Progress Getting Too High?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Minimizing Micromanagement|How Do I Minimize Micromanagement?]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Progress#AI Only|Does The AI Progress Go Up When I Lose A Command Station?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Choosing A Difficulty Level#Like Chess, A Game Of AI War Has Three Abstract "Phases" |Like Chess, A Game Of AI War Has Three Abstract "Phases" ]]<br />
* [[AI War:Hacking|What is Hacking?]]<br />
<br />
=== Multiplayer Co-Op ===<br />
* [[AI War:Multiplayer|What are the differences between solo and multiplayer?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Multiplayer#How To Manage Player Drop-In and Drop-Out In Co-Op?|How To Manage Player Drop-In and Drop-Out In Co-Op?]]<br />
<br />
=== Expansions ===<br />
* [[AI War:Expansions Vs Free DLC|Expansions Vs Free DLC -- What's The Difference?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Base "Fleet Command" Game Features|What exactly are the features in the base game of AI War?]]<br />
* [[AI War:The Zenith Remnant|What exactly is added via The Zenith Remnant expansion?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Children of Neinzul|What exactly is added via the Children of Neinzul micro expansion?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Light of the Spire|What exactly is added via the Light of the Spire expansion?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Ancient Shadows|What exactly is added via the Ancient Shadows expansion?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Vengeance of the Machine|What exactly is added via the Vengeance of the Machine expansion?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Destroyer of Worlds|What exactly is added via the Destroyer of Worlds expansion?]]<br />
<br />
=== Game Setup ===<br />
* [[AI War:Minor Factions|Minor Factions]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Plots|AI Plots]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Opponent Types|AI Type]]<br />
* [[AI War:Map Style|Map Style]]<br />
<br />
=== Interface ===<br />
* Keyboard: [[AI War:Keyboard Controls|Where Are The Keyboard Controls For The Game Documented?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Flashing In Galaxy Map|What Does Flashing On The Galaxy Map Indicate?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Quick Buttons|How Do the Quick Buttons At The Bottom Of The Screen Work?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Planetary Summary|About The Planetary Summary]]<br />
* [[AI War:Zoom|Is It Possible To Zoom All The Way Out?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Minimap|Why Is Clicking The Minimap Imprecise When I Am Zoomed In?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Queuing Orders|Can I Queue Multiple Attack Orders And Movement Orders?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Gifting Ships|What Are The Rules For Gifting Ships Between Players?]]<br />
* Formation: [[AI War:Formation Movement|How To Use Formation Move]]<br />
* Formation: [[AI War:Formation Movement#Arc Movement|How To Use Arc Move]] ''Note: Not implemented in 3.7 and higher''<br />
* [[AI War:Minimizing Micromanagement|How Do I Minimize Micromanagement?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Preferred Targets|How To Use Preferred Targets To Make Up For Deficiencies In Your Ship Mix]]<br />
<br />
=== Defense ===<br />
* New Counterattack Guard Posts: [[AI War:AI Unit - Warp CounterAttack GP|CounterAttack Guard Posts Can Launch A Wave Almost Anywhere]] <br />
* [[AI War:Wormhole Defense|How Do I Barricade A Wormhole?]]<br />
* Gate Raids: [[AI War:Gate Raids|How Do I Prevent Enemies From Sending Waves Against A Planet?]]<br />
* Gate Raids: [[AI War:Gate Raids#Benefits|What Does Gate Raiding Really Accomplish?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Defending Many Fronts|How Do I Defend My Ever-Expanding Fronts?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Are Turrets Useful?|Why Would I Unlock Turrets Instead Of Mobile Ships?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Securing Your Hinterland|How Do I Secure The Area Around My Planets?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Cross Planet Attacks|How Do I Prepare For Cross-Planet Attacks?]]<br />
* [[AI War:High Level AI Planets#What Is The Risk Of Not Destroying A High-Level AI Planet Next To My Home Planet?|What Is The Risk Of Not Destroying A High-Level AI Planet Next To My Home Planet?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Exo-Galaxy Wormholes|Why Is There An Exo-Galaxy Wormhole On My Home Planet?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Astro Trains#Defending Against|How Do I Defend Against Astro Trains?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Rate Of Expansion#Expanding In The Early Game|How Do I Protect Myself While Expanding In The Early Game? (Whipping Boys)]]<br />
* [[AI War:Rate Of Expansion#Keeping Ingress Points Low|How Do I Keep The Number Of Ingress Points Into My Territory Low?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Border Aggression#Defending Against Border Aggression|Defending Against Border Aggression]]<br />
<br />
=== Offense ===<br />
* [[AI War:Supply|How Does Supply Work?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Beachhead|How Do I Establish A Beachhead?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Scouting Best Practices|What's The Best Way To Handle Scouting?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Reinforcements|Why Does An Enemy Planet Get Reinforcements After Its Warp Gate Is Gone?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Capturable Locations|Are The Capturable Enemy Ships Always Away From My Starting Position?]]<br />
* [[AI War:High Level AI Planets|What Is The Risk Of Taking A Planet Next To High-Level AI Planets?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Taking High-Level Planets|How Do I Take A High-Level AI Planet?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Rate Of Expansion|How Fast Should I Be Taking Planets?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Rate Of Expansion#Expanding In The Early Game|How Do I Protect Myself While Expanding In The Early Game? (Whipping Boys)]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Reinforcements#Neutering AI Planets|Neutering AI Planets]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Reinforcements#Creating False Alarm Distractions On AI Planets|Creating False Alarm Distractions On AI Planets]]<br />
* [[AI War:Why Not To Use FRD Mode Offensively|Why Not To Use FRD Mode Offensively]]<br />
* [[AI War:STATS_Button_Overview#Reference_Tab_Q_and_A|If I have something hard to kill like a Superfortress how can I find the best ships to kill it?]]<br />
<br />
=== Economy ===<br />
* [[AI War:Getting More Knowledge|How Do I Get More Knowledge?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Resource Caps|Are There Resource Caps? What Happens When I Hit Them?]]<br />
<br />
=== Ship-Specific Game Mechanics ===<br />
* Cloaking: [[AI War:Cloaking|How Does Cloaking Work?]]<br />
* Cloaking: [[AI War:Cloaking#No Auto-Attack|How Do I Prevent My Cloaked Ships From Auto-Attacking Enemies?]]<br />
* Cloaking: [[AI War:Cloaking#Cloaking Booster|How Do Cloaking Boosters Work?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Unable To Repair|Why Can't I Repair Some Ships (Such As Forts/Warheads)?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Mark V|Am I Ever Able To Build Core/Mark V Units?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Range|Why Do Some Ships (Such As The Fortress) Have Two Range Circles?]]<br />
* Radar Dampening: [[AI War:Radar Dampening|How Does Radar Dampening Work?]]<br />
* Rally Posts: [[AI War:Rally Posts|How Do Rally Posts Work?(beta)]]<br />
* Transports: [[AI War:Transports#Why Can't I Unload My Transports?|Why Can't I Unload My Transports?]]<br />
<br />
=== Ship Strategies & Errata ===<br />
''In an average game, the player's navy revolves around groups of [[AI_War:Ships_and_Structures#Fleet_Ships|fleet ships]] supplemented by [[AI_War:Ships_and_Structures#Starships|starship]]s and support vessels. A comprehensive ship compendium is being added, of which you can currently begin browsing by visiting the basic triangle ships: [[Fighter]]s, [[Bomber]]s, and [[Missile Frigate]]s.''<br />
<br />
* Advanced Research Stations: [[AI War:Advanced Research Stations|Does Losing One Of These Matter After I've Held It Once?]]<br />
* Astro Trains: [[AI War:Astro Trains|What Do These Do?]]<br />
* Astro Trains: [[AI War:Astro Trains#Defending Against|How Do I Defend Against Astro Trains?]]<br />
* Captive Human Settlements: [[AI War:Captive Human Settlements|Do I Gain Anything From Holding These?]]<br />
* Command Posts: [[AI War:Command Posts|What Do These Do?]]<br />
* Counter-Dark-Matter Turrets: [[AI War:Counter-Dark-Matter Turrets|What Are These Good For?]]<br />
* Electric Shuttles: [[AI War:Lightning Turrets And Electric Shuttles|How Do I Effectively Attack Them?]]<br />
* Engineers: [[AI War:Engineers|How Can I Best Use These?]]<br />
* Engineers: [[AI War:Engineers#Repairs|What Restrictions Are There On When An Engineer Can Repair Another Ship?]]<br />
* Force Fields: [[AI War:Force Fields|How Do I Kill Them?]]<br />
* Force Fields: [[AI War:Force Fields#Protection Radius|How Much Of A Ship Needs To Be Covered By A Forcefield To Get Its Protection?]]<br />
* Force Fields: [[AI War:Force Fields#Mobile Force Fields|What Uses Are There For The Mobile Nature Of Force Field Generators?]]<br />
* Golems: [[AI War:Golems|What Are Golems?]]<br />
* Golems: [[AI War:Golems#Benefits And Risks Of Capturing|What Are The Benefits And Risks Of Capturing Golems?]]<br />
* Golems: [[AI War:Golems#Golem Supply|Why Is My Golem Out Of Supply?]]<br />
* Golems: [[AI War:Golems#Killing A Mining Golem|How Do I Kill A Mining Golem?]]<br />
* Golems: [[AI War:Golems#Working With A Zenith Trader|How Do I Work With A Zenith Trader?]]<br />
* Golems: [[AI War:Golems#Surviving A Zenith Devourer|How Do I Survive A Zenith Devourer?]]<br />
* Golems: [[AI War:Golems#Interacting With A Dyson Sphere|How Do I Interact With A Dyson Sphere?]]<br />
* Guard Posts: [[AI War:Guard Posts|What Do These Do?]]<br />
* Guardians: [[AI War:Guardians|What are Guardians?]]<br />
* Guardians: [[AI War:Guardians#AI Difficulty Level Effects On Guardians|How does Changing AI Difficulty Affect Guardians?]]<br />
* Guardians: [[AI War:Guardians#Types_of_Guardians|Types Of Guardians]]<br />
* Ion Cannons: [[AI War:Ion Cannons|What Do I Do About Them?]]<br />
* Lightning Turrets: [[AI War:Lightning Turrets And Electric Shuttles|How Do I Effectively Attack Them?]]<br />
* Mines: [[AI War:Mines|Are Ships Supposed To Be Able To Slip Past Mines?]]<br />
* Mines: [[AI War:Mines#Clearing Mines|How Do I Clear Enemy Mines?]]<br />
* Mines: [[AI War:Mines#Remains|What Is The Best Way To Clear The Remains Of Enemy Mines?]]<br />
* Mines: [[AI War:Mines#PermaMines|How To Kill PermaMines?]]<br />
* Missile Frigates: [[AI War:Missile Frigates|Are These Overpowered?]]<br />
* Orbital Mass Drivers: [[AI War:Orbital Mass Drivers|What Are Orbital Mass Drivers?]]<br />
* Parasites: [[AI War:Parasites|What's The Best Way To Use Them?]]<br />
* Planetary Subcommanders: [[AI War:Planetary Subcommanders|What are Planetary Subcommanders?]]<br />
* Raid Engines: [[AI War:The_Zenith_Remnant#Situational_Awareness_AI_Weapons|What Do These Do?]]<br />
* Shields: [[AI War:Shield_Damage_Reduction|What's This About Units Doing Less Damage When Protected By Forcefields?]]<br />
* Special Forces Alarm Posts: [[AI War:The_Zenith_Remnant#Situational_Awareness_AI_Weapons|What Do These Do?]]<br />
* Special Forces Guard Posts: [[AI War:Special Forces Guard Posts|What Do These Do?]]<br />
* Special Forces Guard Posts: [[AI War:Special Forces Guard Posts#How To Destroy?|How Do I Destroy Them?]]<br />
* Spiders And Weak Ships: [[AI War:Spiders And Weak Ships|What Are These(And Other Weaker Ships) Good For?]]<br />
* Starships: [[AI War:Starships|How Do I Best Use Them?]]<br />
* Starships: [[AI War:Starships#Scout Starships|What Are Scout Starships Good For?]]<br />
* Starships: [[AI War:Starships#Riot Starships|How Do I Use Riot Starships?]]<br />
* SuperFortresses: [[AI War:SuperFortresses|What Do I Do About Them?]]<br />
* Tachyon Beams: [[AI War:Tachyon Beams|Why Do Yellow Beams Come Out Of Nowhere And Hit My Ships?]]<br />
* The Eye: [[AI War:AI Unit - The Eye |What does the AI Eye do?]]<br />
* Warheads: [[AI War:Missiles|How Do I Get EMPs, Nukes, And Other Warheads?]]<br />
* Warheads: [[AI War:Missiles#Nukes|How Do I Use Nukes?]]<br />
* Warheads: [[AI War:Missiles#EMPs|How Do I Use EMPs?]]<br />
* Warheads: [[AI War:Missiles#Lightning Warheads|How Do I Use Lightning Warheads?]]<br />
* Warheads: [[AI War:Missiles#Armored Warheads|How Do I Use Armored Warheads?]]<br />
* Warp Gates: [[AI War:Gate Raids#Warp Gates|How Does A Warp Gate Work?]]<br />
<br />
=== AI ===<br />
* AI Story: [[AI War:AI Story|How Does The AI Think?]]<br />
* AI Story: [[AI War:AI Story#What Does AI Progress Really Represent?|What Does AI Progress Really Represent?]]<br />
* AI Story: [[AI War:AI Story#Why Does The AI Progress Go Up When The AI Destroys Key Structures Of Mine?|Why Does The AI Progress Go Up When The AI Destroys Key Structures Of Mine?]]<br />
* AI Tech: [[AI War:AI Techs|At What AI Progress Does The AI Tech Level Increase?]]<br />
* AI Tech: [[AI War:AI Techs#Tech Display By AI Progress|What Does The Roman Numeral In Parentheses Next To The AI Progress Mean?]]<br />
* AI Tech: [[AI War:AI Techs#Bonus Ship Types For AI|What Bonus Ship Types Does The AI Get?]]<br />
* AI Ship Behaviors: [[AI War:AI Ships|What Are The General Behaviors That AI Ships Can Have?]]<br />
* AI Reinforcements: [[AI War:AI Reinforcements|How Do Basic AI Reinforcements Work?]]<br />
* AI Reinforcements: [[AI War:AI Reinforcements#AI Alert Level|What Causes An AI Planet To Go On Alert?]]<br />
* AI Reinforcements: [[AI War:AI Reinforcements#AI Alert Level|How Does The AI Alert Level Affect Where The AI Reinforces?]]<br />
* AI Reinforcements: [[AI War:AI Reinforcements#How Do AI Reinforcements Work At An Individual Planet?|How Do AI Reinforcements Work At An Individual Planet?]]<br />
* AI Reinforcements: [[AI War:AI Reinforcements#How Do Reinforcements Work After All The Planets "Fill Up?"|How Do Reinforcements Work After All The Planets "Fill Up?"]]<br />
* AI Waves: [[AI War:Why_Do_Enemy_Waves_Get_So_Large%3F#How_Wave_Sizes_Are_Calculated|How Are Wave Sizes Calculated?]]<br />
* AI Progress: [[AI War:AI Progress Strategy|What Happens If The AI Progress Is Lowered After Passing A Tech-Up Threshold?]]<br />
* AI Progress: [[AI War:AI Progress Strategy#When To Worry|When Should I Be Worried About The AI Progress Getting Too High?]]<br />
* AI Progress: [[AI War:AI Progress Strategy#What Causes AI Progress Changes?|What Causes AI Progress Changes?]]<br />
* AI Progress: [[AI War:AI Progress Strategy#AI Only|Does The AI Progress Go Up When I Lose A Command Station?]]<br />
* Cross-Planet Attacks: [[AI War:Cross_Planet_Attacks#How Do Cross-Planet Attacks Work?|How Do Cross-Planet Attacks Work?]]<br />
* Border Aggression: [[AI War:Border Aggression|How Does Border Aggression Work?]]<br />
* AI Design: [[AI War:AI Design|What Makes The Design Of This AI Unique From An Under-The-Hood Perspective?]]<br />
* Exogalactic Strikeforces: [[AI War:How Exogalactic Strikeforces Work|How Do Exogalactic Strikeforces Work?]]<br />
<br />
=== Higher Difficulties Only ===<br />
* [[AI War:Resource Defense|How Do I Defend Against The AI Destroying All My Resources?]]<br />
* [[AI War:No Warning On Waves?|Why Are Waves Coming In Without Warning?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Keeping Astro Trains Away|How Do I Keep Astro Trains Off My Planets?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Why Do Enemy Waves Get So Large?|Why Do The Enemy Waves Get So Large So Fast?]]<br />
<br />
== Design Philosophy ==<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Design Complexity|Why The Complex Interrelation Of Ship Damage Mechanisms?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Design Complexity#Why Does The Game Force Variety On The Player? |Why Does The Game Force Variety On The Player? ]]<br />
* [[AI War:Micromanagement|Why Doesn't The Game Automate Scouting or Reactor Management?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Micromanagement#Why The Emphasis On Taking Many Planets?|Why The Emphasis On Taking Many Planets?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Lack Of Ship Upgrades|Why Are Ships Not Upgradeable?]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Design|What Makes The Design Of This AI Unique From An Under-The-Hood Perspective?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Minimizing Micromanagement|How Does The Game Minimize Micromanagement?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Controlling The Tempo|Why Does The Human Player Always Have The "Tempo?"]]<br />
* [[AI War:The New System That Began In 4.0|The New System That Began In 4.0]]<br />
<br />
== Story ==<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Overall Mission|What Is My Overall Mission?]]<br />
* [[AI War:AI Story|How Does The AI Think?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Zenith Aliens|Who Are The Zenith Aliens?]]<br />
<br />
== Settings ==<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:TBS-Friendly Pause|What Is TBS-Friendly Pause?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Alternate Planet Names|How Do I Use altplanetnames.txt?]]<br />
* [[AI War:Disabled AI Types|How Do I Use disabledaitypes.txt?]]<br />
<br />
== Player-Created Strategy Resources ==<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:Ships and Structures|Ships and Structures]]<br />
* [[AI War:Admiral's General Strategy In AI War|Admiral's General Strategy In AI War]]<br />
* [[AI War:Factors Affecting The Strategic Value of Systems|Factors Affecting The Strategic Value of Systems]]<br />
* [[AI War:Glossary|Glossary]]<br />
<br />
* [http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8598.0.html List of fleet tactics and overall strategies]<br />
* [http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,7514.0.html Can't even make it past the tutorial]<br />
* [http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,1839.0.html Tips for New Players]<br />
* [http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/board,31.0.html AI War Strategy Discussion Forum]<br />
* [http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,11678.msg121099.html User-friendly spreadsheet comparing caps of Mark I ships]<br />
* [http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php?topic=13369.0 Kahuna's Guide To AI War:Find Your Inner Super Cat!]<br />
<br />
== Release History ==<br />
<br />
Please note that there are generally prerelease beta versions available at any given time of the year, and there have been literally hundreds of those in between all of the official releases noted below.<br />
<br />
* Upcoming: [[AI War:Current Post-8.000 Beta|Current Post-8.000 Beta]]<br />
* August 18th, 2014: [[AI War:Current Post-7.000 Beta|8.000 (First Official Release Of Destroyer of Worlds)]]<br />
* June 17th, 2013: [[AI War:Current Post-6.000 Beta|7.000 (First Official Release Of Vengeance Of The Machine)]]<br />
* October 19th, 2012: [[AI War:6.000_Release|6.000 (First Official Release Of Ancient Shadows]])<br />
* January 27, 2011: [[AI War:5.000 Release|5.000 (First Official Release Of Light Of The Spire)]]<br />
* October 28, 2010: [[AI War:4.021 Release|4.021]]<br />
* October 26, 2010: [[AI War:4.000 Release|4.000 (First Official Release Of Children of Neinzul, First Unity Release)]]<br />
* May 6, 2010: [[AI War:3.120 Release|3.120]]<br />
* March 9, 2010: [[AI War:3.060 Release|3.060]]<br />
* January 12, 2010: [[AI War:3.000 Release|3.000 (First Official Release Of The Zenith Remnant)]]<br />
* October 20, 2009: [[AI War:2.000 Release|2.000 (First Release On Steam/Direct2Drive)]]<br />
* September 18, 2009: [[AI War:1.301 Release|1.301]]<br />
* September 1, 2009: [[AI War:1.201 Release|1.201]]<br />
* August 6, 2009: [[AI War:1.013 Release|1.013]]<br />
* August 1, 2009: [[AI War:1.012 Release|1.012]]<br />
* July 31, 2009: [[AI War:1.011 Release|1.011]]<br />
* July 16, 2009: [[AI War:1.010 Release|1.010]]<br />
* July 8, 2009: [[AI War:1.009 Release|1.009]]<br />
* June 29, 2009: [[AI War:1.008 Release|1.008 (First Release On GamersGate)]]<br />
* June 24, 2009: [[AI War:1.007 Release|1.007]]<br />
* June 17, 2009: [[AI War:1.006 Release|1.006]]<br />
* June 10, 2009: [[AI War:1.005 Release|1.005]]<br />
* June 1, 2009: [[AI War:1.004 Release|1.004]]<br />
* May 23, 2009: [[AI War:1.003 Release|1.003 (First Release On Impulse)]]<br />
* May 19, 2009: [[AI War:1.002 Release|1.002]]<br />
* May 14, 2009: [[AI War:1.001 Release|1.001]]<br />
* May 14, 2009: [[AI War:1.000 Release|1.000 (First Official Release)]]<br />
* May 13, 2009: [[AI War:0.940 Release|0.940 (First Public Prerelease)]]<br />
<br />
== Technical Support ==<br />
<br />
* [[AI War:MantisBT Overview|Bug Reporting and Suggestion Tracking using the new Mantis software]]<br />
<br />
* [http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php?board=3.0 Technical Support Forums]<br />
* [http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,4.0.html System Requirements]<br />
* [http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,26.0.html .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Not Installing? ]<br />
* [http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,74.0.html Optimizing Performance In Multiplayer]<br />
* [http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,53.0.html Desync in multiplayer? Check this first.]<br />
* [http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,7657.0.html Trouble applying the latest patch?]<br />
* [http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,7.0.html FIREWALLS - Configure, or use VPN]<br />
* [http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,5.0.html VOICE SUPPORT - Use Skype, Teamspeak, etc.]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39773AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-08-04T16:13:13Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Bug Reports/Feedback */</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
= Feature List/Flavour =<br />
<br />
''Chris, this section is intended as fodder for you for marketing and other writeups. Feel free to change anything to your taste. Also check out the section at the bottom for some ideas and mechanics you might find useful''<br />
<br />
It was thought that the Zenith were long-dead. But they are far from gone; they have come back with a vengeance. A dreadful Zenith Onslaught. It started one day when a strange Zenith probe turned up on your sensors. After checking out a particularly mineral-rich planet, the probe was followed by a giant Zenith Miner who proceeded to devour the planet. And now it seems like everywhere you look there are new Zenith menaces come to make your life harder...<br />
<br />
The Zenith Onslaught is the second expansion for AI War 2. It's an expansion focused on making the galaxy feel rich and complex and changeable in new ways. It primarily provides Zenith-based factions that have their own agendas independent of humanity, unlike The Spire Rises, where all the factions cared about the player.<br />
<br />
=== New Factions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
=== New Map/Galaxy Types ===<br />
<br />
* Squares Map Type: Squares is like the Clusters type, but each cluster is aligned on a grid. There are lots of different tunables so you can get a big range of galaxies.<br />
<br />
* Compass Map Type: Compass starts with a Cluster at the center of the galaxy, then a series of planets in rings around the central cluster that can only be accessed via that central cluster. <br />
<br />
* Nomad Galaxy: All planets in the galaxy will move as if they are nomad planets. Leads to extremely chaotic and unique play.<br />
<br />
=== New AI Types ===<br />
<br />
* Geneticist AI Type: The AI gets Scourge units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Spire Hammer AI Type: The AI gets Spire units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Ragnarok AI Type: The AI gets Dark Alliance units in addition to its own unit types - do not use until chris does unit design<br />
<br />
* Gladiator AI Type: The AI gets Zenith Architrave units in addition to its own unit types - do not use until chris does unit design<br />
<br />
* Vengeful AI Type: Killing this AI's structures will provoke small exogalactic strikeforces against you<br />
<br />
* Praetor AI Type: This AI has an extra-strong praetorian guard which is allowed to roam further from its Homeworld.<br />
** Has 2 implementations, Medium (praetorian can strike 4 planets from homeworld, up from 3) and Hard (praetorian can strike 6 planets from the homeworld).<br />
<br />
=== New AI Abilities and Game Features ===<br />
<br />
* Random Factions : You can now request "Random Factions", and can choose its allegiance and impact.<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers : The AI now has the ability to create wormholes to allow its ships to bypass your defenses. They will spawn "Wormhole Borers", which will create a new wormhole. These are powerful structures, but you can destroy them to prevent the new wormhole from being created. Borers are gated behind an AIP threshold, and can be disabled in the game lobby as well.<br />
<br />
=== Some unique interactions with previous factions ===<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres can be set to spawn on a Nomad Planet if you have Nomad Planets enabled<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres can be killed by Zenith Miners<br />
<br />
=== Backported Features ===<br />
<br />
* The AI can send Exogalactic War Units against minor factions that get too powerful<br />
<br />
= TODOs and patch notes =<br />
<br />
* Nomads should have a "regular orbits" and "Crazy shit" mode, where they can start at unusual spots and change orbits and stuff.<br />
<br />
* Maybe another hack against the ZA ("Take an extra planet of Territory" perhaps? "Trigger an extra powerful Expansion mode (but you get some science)"? Perhaps a "ZA will give up this planet in its Territory, but will take several other planets")<br />
<br />
* ZA do not appear to be spawning their unique Golems (noted by Zeus)<br />
<br />
* Maybe a special interaction with the DZ? Players are not incentivized to interact with them currently. Players like incentives to include factions. Generally, the higher the risk, the higher the reward. Perhaps a unique Golem flagship with a complement of DZ units if players manage to kill a Jormangadur (noted by Zeus)<br />
<br />
== 2.114 ==<br />
<br />
* Both Praetor AI types have a 50% chance of generating a second dragon<br />
<br />
* The Praetor AI types now invest even more resources in their Praetorian Guards<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for the feedback<br />
<br />
* Spire Hammer Units have been made much tankier<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for the report<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to Random Factions; fix a bug where they could keep Allegiances between encounters. Improve the picking of minor faction teams<br />
<br />
* Add a message to the player when the ZA has resumed a truce with you. Untested<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with Vinco<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are now limited to one per galaxy<br />
** Mentioned by Starkelp<br />
<br />
* ZA has some minor buffs<br />
<br />
== 2.113 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix some exceptions with the Zenith Miners<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Spire Hammer ai type was getting the wrong Spire Unit<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting? I think?<br />
<br />
* You can now have Random Factions<br />
<br />
== 2.112 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets now move faster <br />
<br />
== 2.111 ==<br />
<br />
* The compass map type defaults to using two rings<br />
** Thanks to Puppet Master for reporting<br />
<br />
* The ZA now says how many planets it needs to trigger a civil war in the threat menu tooltip. <br />
** Pupper Master requested<br />
<br />
* Turning on nomads with debug mode and nomad galaxy now causes all the planets to move quickly, allowing the gameplay slowdowns to be triggered very quickly<br />
<br />
* Once in a civil war, the ZAs will send their Pioneers home and allow them to despawn<br />
** This prevents the ZA's from expanding during a civil war. This is untested.<br />
** Thanks to Puppet Master for reporting<br />
*** The other choice is to allow ZAs to build only on neutral planets during a civil war? I'm open to this if people would prefer it.<br />
<br />
* Minor buffs to DZ invasion at higher difficulties<br />
<br />
== 2.110 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Compass map type<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Spire hybrids are now less common for the geneticist. Some nerfs to the Spire Hybrid weapons for the geneticist, and general range nerfs for the geneticist<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some additional checks to try to prevent the nomad galaxy from splitting<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where wormholes to destroyed planets would still exist after a Miner ate them<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* Some minor improvements to the ZM code and hovertext<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets can move a bit more quickly. Fewer nomads in a galaxy means they will move a bit faster (the logic here being "I'd like the Nomads to feel like they're doing something, and if you only have one nomad then it needs to move faster in the hopes it will be impactful)<br />
** Thanks to Puppet Master for a bug report<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with the way ZA allegiances were working in the civil war.<br />
<br />
* Minor improvements to the Notification hovertext for civil war and pioneers/expansion<br />
<br />
* After a civil war:<br />
** the ZA's units will all attrition very quickly for a while<br />
** The ZA will also stay peaceful to the AI for a while while the units retreat<br />
<br />
* Thanks to Puppet Master for some saves that brought all of these problems to my attention<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith now gets two wormholes into the galaxy instead of just one<br />
<br />
* The DZ is required to capture a few planets around their homeworlds before going on a domination spree. This will make it harder for counterattacks to reach their home planets and guarantee them at least some sort of defensive perimeter<br />
<br />
* DZ spawns some defensive structures when they warp in appear<br />
<br />
* The DZ now attack more quickly after spawning<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't get around to attacking for a few minutes after each time you loaded a save game<br />
<br />
* Add some variety to the DZ unit abilities and icons. These are still all slated to be replaced by Chris later, but I'd like testing to be a less frustrating experience<br />
<br />
* The DZ would sometimes leave units in 'non-attacker' mode and I don't know why, so the LRP thread will check for such units and make them attack.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where DZ fireteams would sometimes just sit there and never attack<br />
<br />
* The DZ now gets bonus strength for their initial invasion based on the AI difficulty. This should let the DZ adjust for very powerful AIs without being OP against lower difficulty AIs<br />
** Note: this is a major difficulty increase, since I'm not sure the DZ has been scary enough. If this is too much I now have more dials to tune the strength<br />
<br />
* Thanks to ArnaudB for some feedback that started me down this very helpful rabbit hole<br />
<br />
== 2.107 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miner === <br />
<br />
* Buff the Zenith Miner units; this is temporary since Chris will redo the units, but this should make them easier to test<br />
<br />
* Clarify that you can fight the Zenith Miners when they arrive in the Notification tooltip and the journal entry. <br />
* Make ZO specific hacks cheaper, by and large.<br />
<br />
* Killing a Zenith Miner now grants science and hacking points (seems only fitting given how big and powerful they are).<br />
** Plus since hacking the Probes will drain your resources, its only reasonable that the miners should refill your coffers<br />
*** Thanks to Puppet Master for the feedback<br />
<br />
* Add some journal entries for the Zenith Miners when they are attacking a Dyson Sphere<br />
<br />
* Additional tooltip tweaks for specific minor faction interactions<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The AI is not allowed to reconquer planets from the ZA during the civil war<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add text to the faction description for the ZA pointing out that it can make Data Centers or other critical targets harder to get to<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The ZA now defaults to 4 planet Territories<br />
** Thanks to Puppet Master for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Add some journal entries for when the Zenith Architraves break the truce, and add some text to the Notifications saying 'The ZA is violating the truce'<br />
** Thanks for Arnaud for reminding me that this mechanic can be confusing<br />
<br />
* The ZA is no longer allowed to be friendly to the player or the AI; it messes with some other mechanics.<br />
** Note that you can have a truce with the ZA anyway, so removing the "friendly to players" option isn't a big deal<br />
<br />
=== Nomad Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Incremental nerfs to the Nomad Planet hack; the Exostrikes are a bit smaller and a bit less frequent. How does it feel now?<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Clarify the "Crash Nomad Planet" hack description and text<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with DZ serialization. Note this probably breaks all saves with the DZ in it.<br />
<br />
=== Misc ===<br />
* Allow for Spire/Geneticist ship types to show up as unique Exogalactic Strikeforce leaders<br />
* Rejigger Spire Hammer units to stay low health but be much cheaper for the AI to buy<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* The Dyson Sphere now has a "seed me on a nomad if possible" setting<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting, most recently Puppet Master<br />
<br />
== 2.106 ==<br />
<br />
* When a Zenith Miner attacks a Dyson planet, instead of eating the planet it will kill the Dyson Sphere gate. <br />
** Zenith Miners really like eating dyson spheres; they have an increased chance for landing on dyson planets<br />
** Contains a Chris TODO for "Here's a spot in the Sim Stage3 code for when the dyson planet visuals should change"<br />
** Totally untested. <br />
<br />
* Slightly improve the hovertext for ZM notifications<br />
<br />
== 2.102 ==<br />
<br />
* The Dark Zenith now makes a good faith effort to spawn far from any ZA's territory<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Nerf the Geneticist's scourge subjugators; a bit less damage and tankiness, much less lifesteal<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug when serializing dark zenith data<br />
** thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith ships should no longer be counted as Threat. This only applies to new games; existing games will still have high threat numbers.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
== 2.099 ==<br />
<br />
* Change the way Nomad Planets spawn, to make sure they are more evenly distributed through the galaxy and move more cleanly. This in particular is an improvement for the Squares map type.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we weren't updating some Pathing data on the Planet objects when the DZ planets spawn<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Improve the ZA civil war notifier for clarity in terms of what's going on.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Miners were missing a tag<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
==== Journals ====<br />
<br />
* Add a Journal Entry for when the Dark Zenith spawn<br />
* Add two Journal Entries for the Zenith Miners<br />
** One for when the first Probe spawns, one for when the first Miner spawns.<br />
<br />
* Add Zenith Architrave journal entries<br />
** An entry for when we first find the ZA, explaining to be careful about attacking their territory<br />
** An entry for when we've explored all the ZA planets, explaining we might be able to make a truce with them by hacking their Portal.<br />
** An entry for when Pioneers spawn<br />
** An entry for the civil war<br />
** An entry for when a truce is declared (after hacking)<br />
*** If people could make sure these are all being displayed, and give feedback on the text (with a specific focus on mechanics that should be explained), that would be great.<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith Jormugandr ====<br />
<br />
* Add the DZ Jormugandr, to give them a cool new way of defending themselves against attack. The Jormugandr is the most powerful DZ unit, but it can only move fully into our galaxy when one of the initial DZ homeworlds (ie the new planets created when the DZ attack the galaxy) is attacked.<br />
** When there aren't any any attacks going on, the Jormugandr just wander around the homeworlds.<br />
** Once a homeworld is attacked, the Jormugandr are free to demolish any attackers and then start rampaging through the galaxy for a few minutes, then it must retreat to the DZ homeworlds again.<br />
** Each time the DZ homeworlds are attacked, the Jormugandr are unleashed for longer.<br />
** There is 1 Jormugandr spawned for difficulties 1-8, 2 on difficulty 9, 3 on difficulty 10.<br />
*** From a discussion with StarKelp and zeusalmighty.<br />
<br />
== 2.096 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Gladiator AI Type. This AI gets Zenith Architrave units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
* Add the Ragnarok AI Type. This AI gets Dark Alliance units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
<br />
* There are now 3 types of Nomad Nexus; the 'off' one, the 'can be crashed into ai homeworld' one, and the 'en route to ai homeworld one. The Off one is immune to damage. The 'Can be Crashed' on can be attacked by the player. The 'En Route' one can be attacked by anyone<br />
** This should allow players to safely hack the Disabled Nomad Nexus, but also allow minor factions to snipe a nomad nexus that's crashing.<br />
<br />
* Allow wormhole borers to bore from disabled nomads<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets now take between 5 and 13 minutes (give or take a bit) to crash into an AI homeworld, depending on the nomad's distance from the AI homeworld. When you hover over the Hack button, you will get a rough time estimate.<br />
** The first minute features weaker exos, so the player can use this hack to move an unwanted nomad out of the way and then disable it.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith (Nota Bene: This patch breaks all games with the DZ) ====<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wasn't correctly loading all its data. The new error checking will cause all previous DZ save games to break (technically, the DZ didn't really work at all after a reload anyway) <br />
** Noticed by zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.093 ==<br />
<br />
* Major nerfs to the Geneticist AI type; I've rebalanced all the scourge units that the AI owns<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.088 ==<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers can't interact with Nomad Planets (no point; the wormholes would just disappear)<br />
** Practically this means the nomad galaxy won't feature Borers<br />
** Thanks to zeus for spotting this interaction<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.087 ==<br />
<br />
* Make the ZA civil wars more endable by giving other ZA factions ways to send steadily increasing bonus strikes once the civil war goes on long enough<br />
<br />
* Geneticist Scourge generate Hostile To All zombies<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.085 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Praetor AI type, whose Praetorian Guard is extra strong and has extra range. Comes in "Medium" and "Strong" flavours<br />
** Thanks to ynof for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Add a new Map Type for the ZO, "Squares"<br />
** It is like clusters, but all the clusters are aligned on a grid.<br />
** There are lots of settings so you can get some extremely varied galaxies<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to the Spire Hammer AI Type<br />
<br />
* ZA strength drops off faster during civil war<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Rework how the DZ chooses where to spawn planets, to make them less likely to spawn in weird places<br />
<br />
* Add some new unit types to the DZ<br />
<br />
* Give the DZ some additional strength at the beginning of the game<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.082 ==<br />
<br />
* The ZA will never ally with the Dark Spire or Dark Zenith during a civil war<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* The ZA now has different income for its defensive structures, so it should be easier to whittle them down at all times<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix the Spire Hammer AI Type's description<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.077 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Spire Hammer AI type. It's targeted at the "Hard" difficulty level. I messed with the unit balance for the AI copies of the units, so let me know about the balance.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen code now tries to seed multiple copies of the same faction very far apart, with a 'retry with less strict requirements if it fails' mechanism.<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting that my previous mechanism still wasn't good enough<br />
<br />
* More nerfs to geneticist. Make scourge units a bit rarer in general, in particular Evuck Warriors<br />
** Thanks to zeus, demo and oval<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.075 ==<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to Geneticist<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the feedback<br />
<br />
* DZ can now upgrade itself to be able to build Terminii or Epistyles<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to the DZ permanent bonus income<br />
<br />
* Give some DZ and ZA structures enemy-attrition<br />
<br />
* The 'Vengeful' AI type now actually works<br />
** Every time you or a player-allied faction kill an AI structure that is A. a guardpost, B. Changes AIP, C. is a NormalPlanetNastyPick, or D. is a command station (its own category, so reconquest command stations will trigger it too), you will generate an Exo that's 1/3 of a wave (minimum exo size: 0.8 strength).<br />
** A fancier mechanism was suggested, but honestly I think this is fine. And it takes hours less of time to implement and test.<br />
<br />
* Add Wormhole Borers to the game.<br />
** With Wormhole Borers, I'm declaring myself feature complete. Other changes will be done in response to feedback, but this is all the big stuff I wanted to have done.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.074 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't spawn for a week.<br />
<br />
* Actually give the Dark Zenith a beacon<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Make the Geneticist AI much scarier. Please restart your games to get the new changes<br />
<br />
* Give the ZM some scarier Miners to spawn over time<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Completely rework the ZA income code to make them scale up more quickly during a war. This should let them expand more readily<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.065 ==<br />
<br />
* Add a few Achievements<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* The ZA will de-nomadify planets it captures if in the Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
* When seeding multiple ZAs, enforce some distance between each ZA faction; requested by a lot of people<br />
<br />
* The ZA can build tractors and gravity generators near wormholes to make attacking them harder.<br />
<br />
* Allow the player to hack the ZA home spawner for a truce.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.064 ==<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ====<br />
* Fix some DZ null references<br />
<br />
* Some decent improvements in DZ infrastructure logic. <br />
** They are now much more quick to expand to fill recently cleared enemy planets, which should give them a stronger economy<br />
** Improvements to "DZ bootstraps iteself" logic; the DZ will no longer try to build things it can't afford, and will be better at recovering if it takes a lot of damage. It should be able to recover as long as you leave it a single Metal Terminus. For eaxmple, it will no longer attempt to build anything it can't afford.<br />
<br />
* Allow Metal Harvesters to go to a different planet if all the metal terminii are killed<br />
<br />
==== AI Types ====<br />
<br />
* Add the Geneticist AI Type, which has access to both Scourge units and regular AI units<br />
** Its intended to be in the Hard or Brutal categories, and feedback is requested to make sure it feels that way<br />
<br />
* Add the Vengeful AI type; note this doesn't do anything yet.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
* Fix a nomad planet bug<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Lower the DZ's overall power level to prevent the AI from sending extragalactic war ships immediately<br />
** Thanks to Oval's feedback<br />
<br />
* Make the DZ a bit stronger at higher difficulties. Make them more likely to expand into new territory<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback ==<br />
<br />
Please put bug reports here!<br />
<br />
•Add a win condition involving Dark Zenith, so players could ally with the AI (or have allied + enemy AI) and still get a victory. (Win if you succesfully lock down the Dark Zenith planets with a hack for some time?) <=== Badger says "I do have thoughts along this lines, but not likely to DLC2. I think this expansion is already very large"<br />
<br />
**Perhaps an Exodian Blade retcon could be fitting here? (DLC 3) Introduce the Exodian Blade as the arch-enemy of the DZ that arrives to the player galaxy broken and scattered throughout the galaxy. Find the pieces and escort it to fight Jormangdur, etc. (noted by Zeus)<br />
<br />
•The Dark Zenith Ultimate Golem (Norse Dragon of Ragnarok starting with J thing) gets confused between staying in its cluster and rampaging after getting aggroed by an AI reconquest wave targeting the Dark Zenith planets. It loops back and forth between the wormholes of the AI planet and the connected DZ planet. - ArnaudB (https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/698572497171251200/737653691472937030)<br />
<br />
•Architrave portal is frustrating... Seeing health and shields, I expect to be able to attack it and destroy the faction. The fact that I cannot is unwelcome. I understand they can be hacked to enter a truce mode, but being able to actually eliminate them would be welcome.<br />
→Maybe you can destroy the portal, but it only stop them temporarily, and the portal come back 20min or 1h later. - ArnaudB (Zeus 2nded)<br />
<br />
* Make Zenith Miners and the Devourer Golem allied to each other.<br />
<br />
== Suggestions, ideas and mechanics for Chris ==<br />
<br />
<br />
• An UI rework might be needed to deal with the various notifications. It becomes really hard to keep track of what's going on with the growing number of factions. Maybe split the notifications threatening the players and those "informing" the player of events? (suggested by Arnaud, echoed by Puppet Master)<br />
** Badger think something like this might be necessary, given the sheer number of possible Notifications. Players keep requesting new Notifications (since that's how people keep track of things) and that number is getting ever-larger<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.<br />
<br />
* Suggestion: Give the player a mechanism to spawn wormholes like the Wormhole Borer. Maybe "you have a start structure and an end structure, and can activate them to make a wormhole between the planets"?<br />
<br />
* New Units<br />
** Frigate Class<br />
*** Zenith Aggregator<br />
**** Stores 50% of all damage taken as energy, and consumes this energy on death to deal damage in an area around itself.<br />
*** Zenith Compressor<br />
**** Long range, single target weapon that pulls enemies into itself, and high damage, short range, single target, Greater Metabolizing weapon.<br />
*** Zenith Needle<br />
**** Melee range, disables bubble shields on contact, converting them into personal shields.<br />
** Strikecraft Class<br />
*** Zenith Bracketeer<br />
**** All units that are on the same planet act as through they have shared Hull and Shield pools, which damage equally divided among them.<br />
** Mosquito (Exsanguinator)<br />
***Melee swarmer ship (for players/AI) that has "reverse" death grip-harmonic tractor beams. The idea is that it only can tractor super units but the super unit can move as normal, the mosquitoes are stuck to it. The mosquitos get the harmonic and death grip bonus so they do deal a lot more damage when they swarm the same unit.<br />
**Ninja (Melee Frigate)<br />
***Cloaked frigate with NO base weapons. However, launches special torpedos -- "corrosive shurikens" that deal high base damage to a single target (preferably guardian+) and minor AOE acid damage to nearby units. Shurikens are IMMUNE to gravity effects and are high speed.<br />
** Experimental 'Wing' Mechanic<br />
*** Carrier Frigates that fire off sub units like a Tesla Torpedo, which decay over time, that come with their own sub units.<br />
**** Zenith Forcefield Torpedo Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off slow moving Torpedoes that deploy up to 3 Degenerating Forcefield Generators, which lose 2% shield per second.<br />
**** Zenith Spiderweb Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off Minelayer Drones which have a weak melee carving weapon, and deploy Paralyzing Mines while enroute.<br />
<br />
* We could probably put the Zenith Mirror ability back in; probly something like "when we call TakeDamage, spawn a new shot going back to the old shot's target, but cap the mirrored shot's damage"<br />
<br />
<br />
* Vengeful Messages<br />
** My name is {AIName/Type}. You killed my {EntityThatDied}. Prepare to die.<br />
** GuardpostName will have it's revenge from beyond the grave.<br />
** GuardpostName says "Have a nice day! :D"<br />
** I am GuardpostName, son of GuardpostName. You killed my father!<br />
** You have lost reputation with GuardpostName.<br />
** GuardpostName will remember that.<br />
** GuardpostName thinks you are a stinky poo.<br />
** From hell's heart, GuardpostName stabs at you.<br />
** The ghost of GuardpostName is haunting you.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners need some fun mechanics; possibly including damage reduction for long range enemies? Maybe some powerful translocation?</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39511AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-07-17T22:37:47Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Bug Reports/Feedback/Ideas */</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
= Feature List/Flavour =<br />
<br />
''Chris, this section is intended as fodder for you for marketing and other writeups. Also check out the section at the bottom for some ideas you might find useful''<br />
<br />
It was thought that the Zenith were long-dead. But they are far from gone; they have come back with a vengeance. A dreadful Zenith Onslaught. It started one day when a strange Zenith probe turned up on your sensors. After checking out a particularly mineral-rich planet, the probe was followed by a giant Zenith Miner who proceeded to devour the planet. And now it seems like everywhere you look there are new Zenith menaces come to make your life harder...<br />
<br />
The Zenith Onslaught is the second expansion for AI War 2. It's an expansion focused on making the galaxy feel rich and complex and changeable in new ways. It primarily provides Zenith-based factions that have their own agendas independent of humanity, unlike The Spire Rises, where all the factions cared about the player.<br />
<br />
=== New Factions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
=== New Map/Galaxy Types ===<br />
<br />
*Squares Map Type: Squares is like the Clusters type, but each cluster is aligned on a grid. There are lots of different tunables so you can get a big range of galaxies.<br />
<br />
*Nomad Galaxy: All planets in the galaxy will move as if they are nomad planets. Leads to extremely chaotic and unique play.<br />
<br />
=== New AI Types ===<br />
<br />
* Geneticist AI Type: The AI gets Scourge units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Spire Hammer AI Type: The AI gets Spire units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Ragnarok AI Type: The AI gets Dark Alliance units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Gladiator AI Type: The AI gets Zenith Architrave units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Vengeful AI Type: Killing this AI's structures will provoke small exogalactic strikeforces against you<br />
<br />
* Praetor AI Type: This AI has an extra-strong praetorian guard which is allowed to roam further from its Homeworld.<br />
** Has 2 implementations, Medium (praetorian can strike 4 planets from homeworld, up from 3) and Hard (praetorian can strike 6 planets from the homeworld).<br />
<br />
=== New AI Abilities/Units ===<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers : The AI now has the ability to create wormholes to allow its ships to bypass your defenses. They will spawn "Wormhole Borers", which will create a new wormhole. These are powerful structures, but you can destroy them to prevent the new wormhole from being created. Borers are gated behind an AIP threshold, and can be disabled in the game lobby as well.<br />
<br />
= TODOs and patch notes =<br />
<br />
== 2.099 ==<br />
<br />
* Change the way Nomad Planets spawn, to make sure they are more evenly distributed through the galaxy and move more cleanly. This in particular is an improvement for the Squares map type.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we weren't updating some Pathing data on the Planet objects when the DZ planets spawn<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Improve the ZA civil war notifier for clarity in terms of what's going on.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Miners were missing a tag<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
==== Journals ====<br />
<br />
* Add a Journal Entry for when the Dark Zenith spawn<br />
* Add two Journal Entries for the Zenith Miners<br />
** One for when the first Probe spawns, one for when the first Miner spawns.<br />
<br />
* Add Zenith Architrave journal entries<br />
** An entry for when we first find the ZA, explaining to be careful about attacking their territory<br />
** An entry for when we've explored all the ZA planets, explaining we might be able to make a truce with them by hacking their Portal.<br />
** An entry for when Pioneers spawn<br />
** An entry for the civil war<br />
** An entry for when a truce is declared (after hacking)<br />
*** If people could make sure these are all being displayed, and give feedback on the text (with a specific focus on mechanics that should be explained), that would be great.<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith Jormugandr ====<br />
<br />
* Add the DZ Jormugandr, to give them a cool new way of defending themselves against attack. The Jormugandr is the most powerful DZ unit, but it can only move fully into our galaxy when one of the initial DZ homeworlds (ie the new planets created when the DZ attack the galaxy) is attacked.<br />
** When there aren't any any attacks going on, the Jormugandr just wander around the homeworlds.<br />
** Once a homeworld is attacked, the Jormugandr are free to demolish any attackers and then start rampaging through the galaxy for a few minutes, then it must retreat to the DZ homeworlds again.<br />
** Each time the DZ homeworlds are attacked, the Jormugandr are unleashed for longer.<br />
** There is 1 Jormugandr spawned for difficulties 1-8, 2 on difficulty 9, 3 on difficulty 10.<br />
*** From a discussion with StarKelp and zeusalmighty.<br />
<br />
== 2.096 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Gladiator AI Type. This AI gets Zenith Architrave units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
* Add the Ragnarok AI Type. This AI gets Dark Alliance units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
<br />
* There are now 3 types of Nomad Nexus; the 'off' one, the 'can be crashed into ai homeworld' one, and the 'en route to ai homeworld one. The Off one is immune to damage. The 'Can be Crashed' on can be attacked by the player. The 'En Route' one can be attacked by anyone<br />
** This should allow players to safely hack the Disabled Nomad Nexus, but also allow minor factions to snipe a nomad nexus that's crashing.<br />
<br />
* Allow wormhole borers to bore from disabled nomads<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets now take between 5 and 13 minutes (give or take a bit) to crash into an AI homeworld, depending on the nomad's distance from the AI homeworld. When you hover over the Hack button, you will get a rough time estimate.<br />
** The first minute features weaker exos, so the player can use this hack to move an unwanted nomad out of the way and then disable it.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith (Nota Bene: This patch breaks all games with the DZ) ====<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wasn't correctly loading all its data. The new error checking will cause all previous DZ save games to break (technically, the DZ didn't really work at all after a reload anyway) <br />
** Noticed by zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.093 ==<br />
<br />
* Major nerfs to the Geneticist AI type; I've rebalanced all the scourge units that the AI owns<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.088 ==<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers can't interact with Nomad Planets (no point; the wormholes would just disappear)<br />
** Practically this means the nomad galaxy won't feature Borers<br />
** Thanks to zeus for spotting this interaction<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.087 ==<br />
<br />
* Make the ZA civil wars more endable by giving other ZA factions ways to send steadily increasing bonus strikes once the civil war goes on long enough<br />
<br />
* Geneticist Scourge generate Hostile To All zombies<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.085 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Praetor AI type, whose Praetorian Guard is extra strong and has extra range. Comes in "Medium" and "Strong" flavours<br />
** Thanks to ynof for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Add a new Map Type for the ZO, "Squares"<br />
** It is like clusters, but all the clusters are aligned on a grid.<br />
** There are lots of settings so you can get some extremely varied galaxies<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to the Spire Hammer AI Type<br />
<br />
* ZA strength drops off faster during civil war<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Rework how the DZ chooses where to spawn planets, to make them less likely to spawn in weird places<br />
<br />
* Add some new unit types to the DZ<br />
<br />
* Give the DZ some additional strength at the beginning of the game<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.082 ==<br />
<br />
* The ZA will never ally with the Dark Spire or Dark Zenith during a civil war<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* The ZA now has different income for its defensive structures, so it should be easier to whittle them down at all times<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix the Spire Hammer AI Type's description<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.077 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Spire Hammer AI type. It's targeted at the "Hard" difficulty level. I messed with the unit balance for the AI copies of the units, so let me know about the balance.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen code now tries to seed multiple copies of the same faction very far apart, with a 'retry with less strict requirements if it fails' mechanism.<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting that my previous mechanism still wasn't good enough<br />
<br />
* More nerfs to geneticist. Make scourge units a bit rarer in general, in particular Evuck Warriors<br />
** Thanks to zeus, demo and oval<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.075 ==<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to Geneticist<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the feedback<br />
<br />
* DZ can now upgrade itself to be able to build Terminii or Epistyles<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to the DZ permanent bonus income<br />
<br />
* Give some DZ and ZA structures enemy-attrition<br />
<br />
* The 'Vengeful' AI type now actually works<br />
** Every time you or a player-allied faction kill an AI structure that is A. a guardpost, B. Changes AIP, C. is a NormalPlanetNastyPick, or D. is a command station (its own category, so reconquest command stations will trigger it too), you will generate an Exo that's 1/3 of a wave (minimum exo size: 0.8 strength).<br />
** A fancier mechanism was suggested, but honestly I think this is fine. And it takes hours less of time to implement and test.<br />
<br />
* Add Wormhole Borers to the game.<br />
** With Wormhole Borers, I'm declaring myself feature complete. Other changes will be done in response to feedback, but this is all the big stuff I wanted to have done.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.074 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't spawn for a week.<br />
<br />
* Actually give the Dark Zenith a beacon<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Make the Geneticist AI much scarier. Please restart your games to get the new changes<br />
<br />
* Give the ZM some scarier Miners to spawn over time<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Completely rework the ZA income code to make them scale up more quickly during a war. This should let them expand more readily<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.065 ==<br />
<br />
* Add a few Achievements<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* The ZA will de-nomadify planets it captures if in the Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
* When seeding multiple ZAs, enforce some distance between each ZA faction; requested by a lot of people<br />
<br />
* The ZA can build tractors and gravity generators near wormholes to make attacking them harder.<br />
<br />
* Allow the player to hack the ZA home spawner for a truce.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.064 ==<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ====<br />
* Fix some DZ null references<br />
<br />
* Some decent improvements in DZ infrastructure logic. <br />
** They are now much more quick to expand to fill recently cleared enemy planets, which should give them a stronger economy<br />
** Improvements to "DZ bootstraps iteself" logic; the DZ will no longer try to build things it can't afford, and will be better at recovering if it takes a lot of damage. It should be able to recover as long as you leave it a single Metal Terminus. For eaxmple, it will no longer attempt to build anything it can't afford.<br />
<br />
* Allow Metal Harvesters to go to a different planet if all the metal terminii are killed<br />
<br />
==== AI Types ====<br />
<br />
* Add the Geneticist AI Type, which has access to both Scourge units and regular AI units<br />
** Its intended to be in the Hard or Brutal categories, and feedback is requested to make sure it feels that way<br />
<br />
* Add the Vengeful AI type; note this doesn't do anything yet.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
* Fix a nomad planet bug<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Lower the DZ's overall power level to prevent the AI from sending extragalactic war ships immediately<br />
** Thanks to Oval's feedback<br />
<br />
* Make the DZ a bit stronger at higher difficulties. Make them more likely to expand into new territory<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback/Ideas ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having<br />
<br />
* Version 2.101<br />
*Tried to write Int32 PosExceptNeg1, but passed value was: -22, which is out of range! Value set to -1 so your save would work. (Unknown field being saved) <br />
<br />
*at Arcen.AIW2.External.DarkZenithPerUnitExternalData.SerializeExternalData (System.Object[] Source, Arcen.Universal.ArcenSerializationBuffer Buffer) [0x00000] in <03a45136a1ae49f88da9d3452bc3673e>:0<br />
<br />
*https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/698572497171251200/733807714538618993<br />
<br />
*The DZ unit strength is considered threat in the threat bar, resulting in massive numbers that don’t reflect the AI threat.<br />
<br />
<br />
* Version 2.064<br />
** Nomads cause heavy galaxy map lag over the course of a game.<br />
*** Can be quickly seen by enabling fast/debug mode in the lobby with 10 Nomads.<br />
** Reloading the save causes the game to go back to peak performance.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.<br />
<br />
* Suggestion: Give the player a mechanism to spawn wormholes like the Wormhole Borer. Maybe "you have a start structure and an end structure, and can activate them to make a wormhole between the planets"?<br />
<br />
* New Units<br />
** Frigate Class<br />
*** Zenith Aggregator<br />
**** Stores 50% of all damage taken as energy, and consumes this energy on death to deal damage in an area around itself.<br />
*** Zenith Compressor<br />
**** Long range, single target weapon that pulls enemies into itself, and high damage, short range, single target, Greater Metabolizing weapon.<br />
*** Zenith Needle<br />
**** Melee range, disables bubble shields on contact, converting them into personal shields.<br />
** Strikecraft Class<br />
*** Zenith Bracketeer<br />
**** All units that are on the same planet act as through they have shared Hull and Shield pools, which damage equally divided among them.<br />
** Experimental 'Wing' Mechanic<br />
*** Carrier Frigates that fire off sub units like a Tesla Torpedo, which decay over time, that come with their own sub units.<br />
**** Zenith Forcefield Torpedo Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off slow moving Torpedoes that deploy up to 3 Degenerating Forcefield Generators, which lose 2% shield per second.<br />
**** Zenith Spiderweb Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off Minelayer Drones which have a weak melee carving weapon, and deploy Paralyzing Mines while enroute.<br />
<br />
* We could probably put the Zenith Mirror ability back in; probly something like "when we call TakeDamage, spawn a new shot going back to the old shot's target, but cap the mirrored shot's damage"<br />
<br />
<br />
* Vengeful Messages<br />
** My name is {AIName/Type}. You killed my {EntityThatDied}. Prepare to die.<br />
** GuardpostName will have it's revenge from beyond the grave.<br />
** GuardpostName says "Have a nice day! :D"<br />
** I am GuardpostName, son of GuardpostName. You killed my father!<br />
** You have lost reputation with GuardpostName.<br />
** GuardpostName will remember that.<br />
** GuardpostName thinks you are a stinky poo.<br />
** From hell's heart, GuardpostName stabs at you.<br />
** The ghost of GuardpostName is haunting you.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners need some fun mechanics; possibly including damage reduction for long range enemies?</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39510AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-07-17T22:16:39Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Bug Reports/Feedback/Ideas */</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
= Feature List/Flavour =<br />
<br />
''Chris, this section is intended as fodder for you for marketing and other writeups. Also check out the section at the bottom for some ideas you might find useful''<br />
<br />
It was thought that the Zenith were long-dead. But they are far from gone; they have come back with a vengeance. A dreadful Zenith Onslaught. It started one day when a strange Zenith probe turned up on your sensors. After checking out a particularly mineral-rich planet, the probe was followed by a giant Zenith Miner who proceeded to devour the planet. And now it seems like everywhere you look there are new Zenith menaces come to make your life harder...<br />
<br />
The Zenith Onslaught is the second expansion for AI War 2. It's an expansion focused on making the galaxy feel rich and complex and changeable in new ways. It primarily provides Zenith-based factions that have their own agendas independent of humanity, unlike The Spire Rises, where all the factions cared about the player.<br />
<br />
=== New Factions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
=== New Map/Galaxy Types ===<br />
<br />
*Squares Map Type: Squares is like the Clusters type, but each cluster is aligned on a grid. There are lots of different tunables so you can get a big range of galaxies.<br />
<br />
*Nomad Galaxy: All planets in the galaxy will move as if they are nomad planets. Leads to extremely chaotic and unique play.<br />
<br />
=== New AI Types ===<br />
<br />
* Geneticist AI Type: The AI gets Scourge units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Spire Hammer AI Type: The AI gets Spire units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Ragnarok AI Type: The AI gets Dark Alliance units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Gladiator AI Type: The AI gets Zenith Architrave units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Vengeful AI Type: Killing this AI's structures will provoke small exogalactic strikeforces against you<br />
<br />
* Praetor AI Type: This AI has an extra-strong praetorian guard which is allowed to roam further from its Homeworld.<br />
** Has 2 implementations, Medium (praetorian can strike 4 planets from homeworld, up from 3) and Hard (praetorian can strike 6 planets from the homeworld).<br />
<br />
=== New AI Abilities/Units ===<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers : The AI now has the ability to create wormholes to allow its ships to bypass your defenses. They will spawn "Wormhole Borers", which will create a new wormhole. These are powerful structures, but you can destroy them to prevent the new wormhole from being created. Borers are gated behind an AIP threshold, and can be disabled in the game lobby as well.<br />
<br />
= TODOs and patch notes =<br />
<br />
== 2.099 ==<br />
<br />
* Change the way Nomad Planets spawn, to make sure they are more evenly distributed through the galaxy and move more cleanly. This in particular is an improvement for the Squares map type.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we weren't updating some Pathing data on the Planet objects when the DZ planets spawn<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Improve the ZA civil war notifier for clarity in terms of what's going on.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Miners were missing a tag<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
==== Journals ====<br />
<br />
* Add a Journal Entry for when the Dark Zenith spawn<br />
* Add two Journal Entries for the Zenith Miners<br />
** One for when the first Probe spawns, one for when the first Miner spawns.<br />
<br />
* Add Zenith Architrave journal entries<br />
** An entry for when we first find the ZA, explaining to be careful about attacking their territory<br />
** An entry for when we've explored all the ZA planets, explaining we might be able to make a truce with them by hacking their Portal.<br />
** An entry for when Pioneers spawn<br />
** An entry for the civil war<br />
** An entry for when a truce is declared (after hacking)<br />
*** If people could make sure these are all being displayed, and give feedback on the text (with a specific focus on mechanics that should be explained), that would be great.<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith Jormugandr ====<br />
<br />
* Add the DZ Jormugandr, to give them a cool new way of defending themselves against attack. The Jormugandr is the most powerful DZ unit, but it can only move fully into our galaxy when one of the initial DZ homeworlds (ie the new planets created when the DZ attack the galaxy) is attacked.<br />
** When there aren't any any attacks going on, the Jormugandr just wander around the homeworlds.<br />
** Once a homeworld is attacked, the Jormugandr are free to demolish any attackers and then start rampaging through the galaxy for a few minutes, then it must retreat to the DZ homeworlds again.<br />
** Each time the DZ homeworlds are attacked, the Jormugandr are unleashed for longer.<br />
** There is 1 Jormugandr spawned for difficulties 1-8, 2 on difficulty 9, 3 on difficulty 10.<br />
*** From a discussion with StarKelp and zeusalmighty.<br />
<br />
== 2.096 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Gladiator AI Type. This AI gets Zenith Architrave units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
* Add the Ragnarok AI Type. This AI gets Dark Alliance units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
<br />
* There are now 3 types of Nomad Nexus; the 'off' one, the 'can be crashed into ai homeworld' one, and the 'en route to ai homeworld one. The Off one is immune to damage. The 'Can be Crashed' on can be attacked by the player. The 'En Route' one can be attacked by anyone<br />
** This should allow players to safely hack the Disabled Nomad Nexus, but also allow minor factions to snipe a nomad nexus that's crashing.<br />
<br />
* Allow wormhole borers to bore from disabled nomads<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets now take between 5 and 13 minutes (give or take a bit) to crash into an AI homeworld, depending on the nomad's distance from the AI homeworld. When you hover over the Hack button, you will get a rough time estimate.<br />
** The first minute features weaker exos, so the player can use this hack to move an unwanted nomad out of the way and then disable it.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith (Nota Bene: This patch breaks all games with the DZ) ====<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wasn't correctly loading all its data. The new error checking will cause all previous DZ save games to break (technically, the DZ didn't really work at all after a reload anyway) <br />
** Noticed by zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.093 ==<br />
<br />
* Major nerfs to the Geneticist AI type; I've rebalanced all the scourge units that the AI owns<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.088 ==<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers can't interact with Nomad Planets (no point; the wormholes would just disappear)<br />
** Practically this means the nomad galaxy won't feature Borers<br />
** Thanks to zeus for spotting this interaction<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.087 ==<br />
<br />
* Make the ZA civil wars more endable by giving other ZA factions ways to send steadily increasing bonus strikes once the civil war goes on long enough<br />
<br />
* Geneticist Scourge generate Hostile To All zombies<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.085 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Praetor AI type, whose Praetorian Guard is extra strong and has extra range. Comes in "Medium" and "Strong" flavours<br />
** Thanks to ynof for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Add a new Map Type for the ZO, "Squares"<br />
** It is like clusters, but all the clusters are aligned on a grid.<br />
** There are lots of settings so you can get some extremely varied galaxies<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to the Spire Hammer AI Type<br />
<br />
* ZA strength drops off faster during civil war<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Rework how the DZ chooses where to spawn planets, to make them less likely to spawn in weird places<br />
<br />
* Add some new unit types to the DZ<br />
<br />
* Give the DZ some additional strength at the beginning of the game<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.082 ==<br />
<br />
* The ZA will never ally with the Dark Spire or Dark Zenith during a civil war<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* The ZA now has different income for its defensive structures, so it should be easier to whittle them down at all times<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix the Spire Hammer AI Type's description<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.077 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Spire Hammer AI type. It's targeted at the "Hard" difficulty level. I messed with the unit balance for the AI copies of the units, so let me know about the balance.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen code now tries to seed multiple copies of the same faction very far apart, with a 'retry with less strict requirements if it fails' mechanism.<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting that my previous mechanism still wasn't good enough<br />
<br />
* More nerfs to geneticist. Make scourge units a bit rarer in general, in particular Evuck Warriors<br />
** Thanks to zeus, demo and oval<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.075 ==<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to Geneticist<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the feedback<br />
<br />
* DZ can now upgrade itself to be able to build Terminii or Epistyles<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to the DZ permanent bonus income<br />
<br />
* Give some DZ and ZA structures enemy-attrition<br />
<br />
* The 'Vengeful' AI type now actually works<br />
** Every time you or a player-allied faction kill an AI structure that is A. a guardpost, B. Changes AIP, C. is a NormalPlanetNastyPick, or D. is a command station (its own category, so reconquest command stations will trigger it too), you will generate an Exo that's 1/3 of a wave (minimum exo size: 0.8 strength).<br />
** A fancier mechanism was suggested, but honestly I think this is fine. And it takes hours less of time to implement and test.<br />
<br />
* Add Wormhole Borers to the game.<br />
** With Wormhole Borers, I'm declaring myself feature complete. Other changes will be done in response to feedback, but this is all the big stuff I wanted to have done.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.074 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't spawn for a week.<br />
<br />
* Actually give the Dark Zenith a beacon<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Make the Geneticist AI much scarier. Please restart your games to get the new changes<br />
<br />
* Give the ZM some scarier Miners to spawn over time<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Completely rework the ZA income code to make them scale up more quickly during a war. This should let them expand more readily<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.065 ==<br />
<br />
* Add a few Achievements<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* The ZA will de-nomadify planets it captures if in the Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
* When seeding multiple ZAs, enforce some distance between each ZA faction; requested by a lot of people<br />
<br />
* The ZA can build tractors and gravity generators near wormholes to make attacking them harder.<br />
<br />
* Allow the player to hack the ZA home spawner for a truce.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.064 ==<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ====<br />
* Fix some DZ null references<br />
<br />
* Some decent improvements in DZ infrastructure logic. <br />
** They are now much more quick to expand to fill recently cleared enemy planets, which should give them a stronger economy<br />
** Improvements to "DZ bootstraps iteself" logic; the DZ will no longer try to build things it can't afford, and will be better at recovering if it takes a lot of damage. It should be able to recover as long as you leave it a single Metal Terminus. For eaxmple, it will no longer attempt to build anything it can't afford.<br />
<br />
* Allow Metal Harvesters to go to a different planet if all the metal terminii are killed<br />
<br />
==== AI Types ====<br />
<br />
* Add the Geneticist AI Type, which has access to both Scourge units and regular AI units<br />
** Its intended to be in the Hard or Brutal categories, and feedback is requested to make sure it feels that way<br />
<br />
* Add the Vengeful AI type; note this doesn't do anything yet.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
* Fix a nomad planet bug<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Lower the DZ's overall power level to prevent the AI from sending extragalactic war ships immediately<br />
** Thanks to Oval's feedback<br />
<br />
* Make the DZ a bit stronger at higher difficulties. Make them more likely to expand into new territory<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback/Ideas ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having<br />
<br />
* Version 2.101<br />
Tried to write Int32 PosExceptNeg1, but passed value was: -22, which is out of range! Value set to -1 so your save would work. (Unknown field being saved) <br />
<br />
at Arcen.AIW2.External.DarkZenithPerUnitExternalData.SerializeExternalData (System.Object[] Source, Arcen.Universal.ArcenSerializationBuffer Buffer) [0x00000] in <03a45136a1ae49f88da9d3452bc3673e>:0<br />
<br />
https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/698572497171251200/733807714538618993<br />
<br />
<br />
* Version 2.064<br />
** Nomads cause heavy galaxy map lag over the course of a game.<br />
*** Can be quickly seen by enabling fast/debug mode in the lobby with 10 Nomads.<br />
** Reloading the save causes the game to go back to peak performance.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.<br />
<br />
* Suggestion: Give the player a mechanism to spawn wormholes like the Wormhole Borer. Maybe "you have a start structure and an end structure, and can activate them to make a wormhole between the planets"?<br />
<br />
* New Units<br />
** Frigate Class<br />
*** Zenith Aggregator<br />
**** Stores 50% of all damage taken as energy, and consumes this energy on death to deal damage in an area around itself.<br />
*** Zenith Compressor<br />
**** Long range, single target weapon that pulls enemies into itself, and high damage, short range, single target, Greater Metabolizing weapon.<br />
*** Zenith Needle<br />
**** Melee range, disables bubble shields on contact, converting them into personal shields.<br />
** Strikecraft Class<br />
*** Zenith Bracketeer<br />
**** All units that are on the same planet act as through they have shared Hull and Shield pools, which damage equally divided among them.<br />
** Experimental 'Wing' Mechanic<br />
*** Carrier Frigates that fire off sub units like a Tesla Torpedo, which decay over time, that come with their own sub units.<br />
**** Zenith Forcefield Torpedo Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off slow moving Torpedoes that deploy up to 3 Degenerating Forcefield Generators, which lose 2% shield per second.<br />
**** Zenith Spiderweb Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off Minelayer Drones which have a weak melee carving weapon, and deploy Paralyzing Mines while enroute.<br />
<br />
* We could probably put the Zenith Mirror ability back in; probly something like "when we call TakeDamage, spawn a new shot going back to the old shot's target, but cap the mirrored shot's damage"<br />
<br />
<br />
* Vengeful Messages<br />
** My name is {AIName/Type}. You killed my {EntityThatDied}. Prepare to die.<br />
** GuardpostName will have it's revenge from beyond the grave.<br />
** GuardpostName says "Have a nice day! :D"<br />
** I am GuardpostName, son of GuardpostName. You killed my father!<br />
** You have lost reputation with GuardpostName.<br />
** GuardpostName will remember that.<br />
** GuardpostName thinks you are a stinky poo.<br />
** From hell's heart, GuardpostName stabs at you.<br />
** The ghost of GuardpostName is haunting you.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners need some fun mechanics; possibly including damage reduction for long range enemies?</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39496AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-07-16T19:21:13Z<p>Ovalcircle1: Version 2.098 was changed to Version 2.099</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
= Feature List/Flavour =<br />
<br />
''Chris, this section is intended as fodder for you for marketing and other writeups. Also check out the section at the bottom for some ideas you might find useful''<br />
<br />
It was thought that the Zenith were long-dead. But they are far from gone; they have come back with a vengeance. A dreadful Zenith Onslaught. It started one day when a strange Zenith probe turned up on your sensors. After checking out a particularly mineral-rich planet, the probe was followed by a giant Zenith Miner who proceeded to devour the planet. And now it seems like everywhere you look there are new Zenith menaces come to make your life harder...<br />
<br />
The Zenith Onslaught is the second expansion for AI War 2. It's an expansion focused on making the galaxy feel rich and complex and changeable in new ways. It primarily provides Zenith-based factions that have their own agendas independent of humanity, unlike The Spire Rises, where all the factions cared about the player.<br />
<br />
=== New Factions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
=== New Map/Galaxy Types ===<br />
<br />
*Squares Map Type: Squares is like the Clusters type, but each cluster is aligned on a grid. There are lots of different tunables so you can get a big range of galaxies.<br />
<br />
*Nomad Galaxy: All planets in the galaxy will move as if they are nomad planets. Leads to extremely chaotic and unique play.<br />
<br />
=== New AI Types ===<br />
<br />
* Geneticist AI Type: The AI gets Scourge units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Spire Hammer AI Type: The AI gets Spire units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Ragnarok AI Type: The AI gets Dark Alliance units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Gladiator AI Type: The AI gets Zenith Architrave units in addition to its own unit types<br />
<br />
* Vengeful AI Type: Killing this AI's structures will provoke small exogalactic strikeforces against you<br />
<br />
* Praetor AI Type: This AI has an extra-strong praetorian guard which is allowed to roam further from its Homeworld.<br />
** Has 2 implementations, Medium (praetorian can strike 4 planets from homeworld, up from 3) and Hard (praetorian can strike 6 planets from the homeworld).<br />
<br />
=== New AI Abilities/Units ===<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers : The AI now has the ability to create wormholes to allow its ships to bypass your defenses. They will spawn "Wormhole Borers", which will create a new wormhole. These are powerful structures, but you can destroy them to prevent the new wormhole from being created. Borers are gated behind an AIP threshold, and can be disabled in the game lobby as well.<br />
<br />
= TODOs and patch notes =<br />
<br />
== 2.099 ==<br />
<br />
* Change the way Nomad Planets spawn, to make sure they are more evenly distributed through the galaxy and move more cleanly. This in particular is an improvement for the Squares map type.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we weren't updating some Pathing data on the Planet objects when the DZ planets spawn<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Improve the ZA civil war notifier for clarity in terms of what's going on.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Miners were missing a tag<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
==== Journals ====<br />
<br />
* Add a Journal Entry for when the Dark Zenith spawn<br />
* Add two Journal Entries for the Zenith Miners<br />
** One for when the first Probe spawns, one for when the first Miner spawns.<br />
<br />
* Add Zenith Architrave journal entries<br />
** An entry for when we first find the ZA, explaining to be careful about attacking their territory<br />
** An entry for when we've explored all the ZA planets, explaining we might be able to make a truce with them by hacking their Portal.<br />
** An entry for when Pioneers spawn<br />
** An entry for the civil war<br />
** An entry for when a truce is declared (after hacking)<br />
*** If people could make sure these are all being displayed, and give feedback on the text (with a specific focus on mechanics that should be explained), that would be great.<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith Jormugandr ====<br />
<br />
* Add the DZ Jormugandr, to give them a cool new way of defending themselves against attack. The Jormugandr is the most powerful DZ unit, but it can only move fully into our galaxy when one of the initial DZ homeworlds (ie the new planets created when the DZ attack the galaxy) is attacked.<br />
** When there aren't any any attacks going on, the Jormugandr just wander around the homeworlds.<br />
** Once a homeworld is attacked, the Jormugandr are free to demolish any attackers and then start rampaging through the galaxy for a few minutes, then it must retreat to the DZ homeworlds again.<br />
** Each time the DZ homeworlds are attacked, the Jormugandr are unleashed for longer.<br />
** There is 1 Jormugandr spawned for difficulties 1-8, 2 on difficulty 9, 3 on difficulty 10.<br />
*** From a discussion with StarKelp and zeusalmighty.<br />
<br />
== 2.096 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Gladiator AI Type. This AI gets Zenith Architrave units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
* Add the Ragnarok AI Type. This AI gets Dark Alliance units along with their regular units.<br />
** Currently doesn't do anything; waiting for Chris' unit development<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
<br />
* There are now 3 types of Nomad Nexus; the 'off' one, the 'can be crashed into ai homeworld' one, and the 'en route to ai homeworld one. The Off one is immune to damage. The 'Can be Crashed' on can be attacked by the player. The 'En Route' one can be attacked by anyone<br />
** This should allow players to safely hack the Disabled Nomad Nexus, but also allow minor factions to snipe a nomad nexus that's crashing.<br />
<br />
* Allow wormhole borers to bore from disabled nomads<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets now take between 5 and 13 minutes (give or take a bit) to crash into an AI homeworld, depending on the nomad's distance from the AI homeworld. When you hover over the Hack button, you will get a rough time estimate.<br />
** The first minute features weaker exos, so the player can use this hack to move an unwanted nomad out of the way and then disable it.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith (Nota Bene: This patch breaks all games with the DZ) ====<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wasn't correctly loading all its data. The new error checking will cause all previous DZ save games to break (technically, the DZ didn't really work at all after a reload anyway) <br />
** Noticed by zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.093 ==<br />
<br />
* Major nerfs to the Geneticist AI type; I've rebalanced all the scourge units that the AI owns<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.088 ==<br />
<br />
* Wormhole Borers can't interact with Nomad Planets (no point; the wormholes would just disappear)<br />
** Practically this means the nomad galaxy won't feature Borers<br />
** Thanks to zeus for spotting this interaction<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.087 ==<br />
<br />
* Make the ZA civil wars more endable by giving other ZA factions ways to send steadily increasing bonus strikes once the civil war goes on long enough<br />
<br />
* Geneticist Scourge generate Hostile To All zombies<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.085 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Praetor AI type, whose Praetorian Guard is extra strong and has extra range. Comes in "Medium" and "Strong" flavours<br />
** Thanks to ynof for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Add a new Map Type for the ZO, "Squares"<br />
** It is like clusters, but all the clusters are aligned on a grid.<br />
** There are lots of settings so you can get some extremely varied galaxies<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to the Spire Hammer AI Type<br />
<br />
* ZA strength drops off faster during civil war<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Rework how the DZ chooses where to spawn planets, to make them less likely to spawn in weird places<br />
<br />
* Add some new unit types to the DZ<br />
<br />
* Give the DZ some additional strength at the beginning of the game<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.082 ==<br />
<br />
* The ZA will never ally with the Dark Spire or Dark Zenith during a civil war<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* The ZA now has different income for its defensive structures, so it should be easier to whittle them down at all times<br />
** Thanks to Zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix the Spire Hammer AI Type's description<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.077 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Spire Hammer AI type. It's targeted at the "Hard" difficulty level. I messed with the unit balance for the AI copies of the units, so let me know about the balance.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen code now tries to seed multiple copies of the same faction very far apart, with a 'retry with less strict requirements if it fails' mechanism.<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting that my previous mechanism still wasn't good enough<br />
<br />
* More nerfs to geneticist. Make scourge units a bit rarer in general, in particular Evuck Warriors<br />
** Thanks to zeus, demo and oval<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.075 ==<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to Geneticist<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the feedback<br />
<br />
* DZ can now upgrade itself to be able to build Terminii or Epistyles<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to the DZ permanent bonus income<br />
<br />
* Give some DZ and ZA structures enemy-attrition<br />
<br />
* The 'Vengeful' AI type now actually works<br />
** Every time you or a player-allied faction kill an AI structure that is A. a guardpost, B. Changes AIP, C. is a NormalPlanetNastyPick, or D. is a command station (its own category, so reconquest command stations will trigger it too), you will generate an Exo that's 1/3 of a wave (minimum exo size: 0.8 strength).<br />
** A fancier mechanism was suggested, but honestly I think this is fine. And it takes hours less of time to implement and test.<br />
<br />
* Add Wormhole Borers to the game.<br />
** With Wormhole Borers, I'm declaring myself feature complete. Other changes will be done in response to feedback, but this is all the big stuff I wanted to have done.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.074 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't spawn for a week.<br />
<br />
* Actually give the Dark Zenith a beacon<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Make the Geneticist AI much scarier. Please restart your games to get the new changes<br />
<br />
* Give the ZM some scarier Miners to spawn over time<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Completely rework the ZA income code to make them scale up more quickly during a war. This should let them expand more readily<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.065 ==<br />
<br />
* Add a few Achievements<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* The ZA will de-nomadify planets it captures if in the Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
* When seeding multiple ZAs, enforce some distance between each ZA faction; requested by a lot of people<br />
<br />
* The ZA can build tractors and gravity generators near wormholes to make attacking them harder.<br />
<br />
* Allow the player to hack the ZA home spawner for a truce.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.064 ==<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ====<br />
* Fix some DZ null references<br />
<br />
* Some decent improvements in DZ infrastructure logic. <br />
** They are now much more quick to expand to fill recently cleared enemy planets, which should give them a stronger economy<br />
** Improvements to "DZ bootstraps iteself" logic; the DZ will no longer try to build things it can't afford, and will be better at recovering if it takes a lot of damage. It should be able to recover as long as you leave it a single Metal Terminus. For eaxmple, it will no longer attempt to build anything it can't afford.<br />
<br />
* Allow Metal Harvesters to go to a different planet if all the metal terminii are killed<br />
<br />
==== AI Types ====<br />
<br />
* Add the Geneticist AI Type, which has access to both Scourge units and regular AI units<br />
** Its intended to be in the Hard or Brutal categories, and feedback is requested to make sure it feels that way<br />
<br />
* Add the Vengeful AI type; note this doesn't do anything yet.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
* Fix a nomad planet bug<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Lower the DZ's overall power level to prevent the AI from sending extragalactic war ships immediately<br />
** Thanks to Oval's feedback<br />
<br />
* Make the DZ a bit stronger at higher difficulties. Make them more likely to expand into new territory<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback/Ideas ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having<br />
<br />
<br />
* Version 2.064<br />
** Nomads cause heavy galaxy map lag over the course of a game.<br />
*** Can be quickly seen by enabling fast/debug mode in the lobby with 10 Nomads.<br />
** Reloading the save causes the game to go back to peak performance.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.<br />
<br />
* Suggestion: Give the player a mechanism to spawn wormholes like the Wormhole Borer. Maybe "you have a start structure and an end structure, and can activate them to make a wormhole between the planets"?<br />
<br />
* New Units<br />
** Frigate Class<br />
*** Zenith Aggregator<br />
**** Stores 50% of all damage taken as energy, and consumes this energy on death to deal damage in an area around itself.<br />
*** Zenith Compressor<br />
**** Long range, single target weapon that pulls enemies into itself, and high damage, short range, single target, Greater Metabolizing weapon.<br />
*** Zenith Needle<br />
**** Melee range, disables bubble shields on contact, converting them into personal shields.<br />
** Strikecraft Class<br />
*** Zenith Bracketeer<br />
**** All units that are on the same planet act as through they have shared Hull and Shield pools, which damage equally divided among them.<br />
** Experimental 'Wing' Mechanic<br />
*** Carrier Frigates that fire off sub units like a Tesla Torpedo, which decay over time, that come with their own sub units.<br />
**** Zenith Forcefield Torpedo Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off slow moving Torpedoes that deploy up to 3 Degenerating Forcefield Generators, which lose 2% shield per second.<br />
**** Zenith Spiderweb Frigate<br />
***** Shoots off Minelayer Drones which have a weak melee carving weapon, and deploy Paralyzing Mines while enroute.<br />
<br />
* We could probably put the Zenith Mirror ability back in; probly something like "when we call TakeDamage, spawn a new shot going back to the old shot's target, but cap the mirrored shot's damage"<br />
<br />
<br />
* Vengeful Messages<br />
** My name is {AIName/Type}. You killed my {EntityThatDied}. Prepare to die.<br />
** GuardpostName will have it's revenge from beyond the grave.<br />
** GuardpostName says "Have a nice day! :D"<br />
** I am GuardpostName, son of GuardpostName. You killed my father!<br />
** You have lost reputation with GuardpostName.<br />
** GuardpostName will remember that.<br />
** GuardpostName thinks you are a stinky poo.<br />
** From hell's heart, GuardpostName stabs at you.<br />
** The ghost of GuardpostName is haunting you.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners need some fun mechanics; possibly including damage reduction for long range enemies?</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39242AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-06-22T22:53:13Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Bug Reports/Feedback */</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
== TODO ==<br />
<br />
Start with https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/698572497171251200/723710723242459237 for comments<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.077 ==<br />
<br />
* Add the Spire Hammer AI type. It's targeted at the "Hard" difficulty level. I messed with the unit balance for the AI copies of the units, so let me know about the balance.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen code now tries to seed multiple copies of the same faction very far apart, with a 'retry with less strict requirements if it fails' mechanism.<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting that my previous mechanism still wasn't good enough<br />
<br />
* More nerfs to geneticist. Make scourge units a bit rarer in general, in particular Evuck Warriors<br />
** Thanks to zeus, demo and oval<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.075 ==<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to Geneticist<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the feedback<br />
<br />
* DZ can now upgrade itself to be able to build Terminii or Epistyles<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to the DZ permanent bonus income<br />
<br />
* Give some DZ and ZA structures enemy-attrition<br />
<br />
* The 'Vengeful' AI type now actually works<br />
** Every time you or a player-allied faction kill an AI structure that is A. a guardpost, B. Changes AIP, C. is a NormalPlanetNastyPick, or D. is a command station (its own category, so reconquest command stations will trigger it too), you will generate an Exo that's 1/3 of a wave (minimum exo size: 0.8 strength).<br />
** A fancier mechanism was suggested, but honestly I think this is fine. And it takes hours less of time to implement and test.<br />
<br />
* Add Wormhole Borers to the game.<br />
** With Wormhole Borers, I'm declaring myself feature complete. Other changes will be done in response to feedback, but this is all the big stuff I wanted to have done.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.074 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't spawn for a week.<br />
<br />
* Actually give the Dark Zenith a beacon<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Make the Geneticist AI much scarier. Please restart your games to get the new changes<br />
<br />
* Give the ZM some scarier Miners to spawn over time<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Completely rework the ZA income code to make them scale up more quickly during a war. This should let them expand more readily<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.065 ==<br />
<br />
* Add a few Achievements<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* The ZA will de-nomadify planets it captures if in the Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
* When seeding multiple ZAs, enforce some distance between each ZA faction; requested by a lot of people<br />
<br />
* The ZA can build tractors and gravity generators near wormholes to make attacking them harder.<br />
<br />
* Allow the player to hack the ZA home spawner for a truce.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.064 ==<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ====<br />
* Fix some DZ null references<br />
<br />
* Some decent improvements in DZ infrastructure logic. <br />
** They are now much more quick to expand to fill recently cleared enemy planets, which should give them a stronger economy<br />
** Improvements to "DZ bootstraps iteself" logic; the DZ will no longer try to build things it can't afford, and will be better at recovering if it takes a lot of damage. It should be able to recover as long as you leave it a single Metal Terminus. For eaxmple, it will no longer attempt to build anything it can't afford.<br />
<br />
* Allow Metal Harvesters to go to a different planet if all the metal terminii are killed<br />
<br />
==== AI Types ====<br />
<br />
* Add the Geneticist AI Type, which has access to both Scourge units and regular AI units<br />
** Its intended to be in the Hard or Brutal categories, and feedback is requested to make sure it feels that way<br />
<br />
* Add the Vengeful AI type; note this doesn't do anything yet.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
* Fix a nomad planet bug<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Lower the DZ's overall power level to prevent the AI from sending extragalactic war ships immediately<br />
** Thanks to Oval's feedback<br />
<br />
* Make the DZ a bit stronger at higher difficulties. Make them more likely to expand into new territory<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
== Known Issues/Bug reports ==<br />
<br />
=== Links to Faction descriptions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
Other new things:<br />
<br />
Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
Geneticist AI Type<br />
<br />
Vengeful AI Type<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having<br />
* Version 2.078<br />
**The description for the Spire Hammer AI type is the same as the Geneticist<br />
<br />
* Version 2.064<br />
** Nomads cause heavy galaxy map lag over the course of a game.<br />
*** Can be quickly seen by enabling fast/debug mode in the lobby with 10 Nomads.<br />
** Reloading the save causes the game to go back to peak performance.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.<br />
<br />
* Suggestion: Give the player a mechanism to spawn wormholes like the Wormhole Borer. Maybe "you have a start structure and an end structure, and can activate them to make a wormhole between the planets"?</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39197AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-06-17T21:14:58Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Beta 2.075 */</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.075 ==<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to Geneticist<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the feedback<br />
<br />
* DZ can now upgrade itself to be able to build Terminii or Epistyles<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to the DZ permanent bonus income<br />
<br />
* Give some DZ and ZA structures enemy-attrition<br />
<br />
* The 'Vengeful' AI type now actually works<br />
** Every time you or a player-allied faction kill an AI structure that is A. a guardpost, B. Changes AIP, C. is a NormalPlanetNastyPick, or D. is a command station (its own category, so reconquest command stations will trigger it too), you will generate an Exo that's 1/3 of a wave (minimum exo size: 0.8 strength).<br />
** A fancier mechanism was suggested, but honestly I think this is fine. And it takes hours less of time to implement and test.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.074 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't spawn for a week.<br />
<br />
* Actually give the Dark Zenith a beacon<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Make the Geneticist AI much scarier. Please restart your games to get the new changes<br />
<br />
* Give the ZM some scarier Miners to spawn over time<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Completely rework the ZA income code to make them scale up more quickly during a war. This should let them expand more readily<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.065 ==<br />
<br />
* Add a few Achievements<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* The ZA will de-nomadify planets it captures if in the Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
* When seeding multiple ZAs, enforce some distance between each ZA faction; requested by a lot of people<br />
<br />
* The ZA can build tractors and gravity generators near wormholes to make attacking them harder.<br />
<br />
* Allow the player to hack the ZA home spawner for a truce.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.064 ==<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ====<br />
* Fix some DZ null references<br />
<br />
* Some decent improvements in DZ infrastructure logic. <br />
** They are now much more quick to expand to fill recently cleared enemy planets, which should give them a stronger economy<br />
** Improvements to "DZ bootstraps iteself" logic; the DZ will no longer try to build things it can't afford, and will be better at recovering if it takes a lot of damage. It should be able to recover as long as you leave it a single Metal Terminus. For eaxmple, it will no longer attempt to build anything it can't afford.<br />
<br />
* Allow Metal Harvesters to go to a different planet if all the metal terminii are killed<br />
<br />
==== AI Types ====<br />
<br />
* Add the Geneticist AI Type, which has access to both Scourge units and regular AI units<br />
** Its intended to be in the Hard or Brutal categories, and feedback is requested to make sure it feels that way<br />
<br />
* Add the Vengeful AI type; note this doesn't do anything yet.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
* Fix a nomad planet bug<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Lower the DZ's overall power level to prevent the AI from sending extragalactic war ships immediately<br />
** Thanks to Oval's feedback<br />
<br />
* Make the DZ a bit stronger at higher difficulties. Make them more likely to expand into new territory<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
== Known Issues/Bug reports ==<br />
<br />
=== Links to Faction descriptions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having<br />
<br />
* Version 2.048 (Strategic Sage) - Zenith Miner Golem disappears shortly after showing up for unknown reasons. <br />
** Nomad movement when heading to homeworld is probably too fast - suggest at least doubling to 30s if not 45s to give the AI exo attacks time to have an effect. Also, I think AI response should be based mostly on AI difficulty. It's always going to be best to try to hack a planet close to the homeworld, which means there's not going to be much time for the AI to get the job done. An intense, short-term response (not Imperial Spire exo level, but severe) is IMO appropriate given the variability there. Other factors such as AIP I recommend to be minor, because this is best done as a late-game tactic and it should assume a strong player fleet/turret presence. <br />
** You can do the Crash hack after it has already been done, which is pointless and should probably be disabled. <br />
** Weird exo unit behavior as well, Chimera ignoring key targets and hitting FF frigate repeatedly as an example. I was able to hold it at bay indefinitely just by having that frigate in-system. <br />
** Suggest Crash hack not being available until all planets have been scouted. I didn't know where the AI homeworld was until it told me by heading there.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.<br />
<br />
* Version 2.064<br />
** Nomads cause heavy galaxy map lag over the course of a game.<br />
*** Can be quickly seen by enabling fast/debug mode in the lobby with 10 Nomads.<br />
** Reloading the save causes the game to go back to peak performance.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39196AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-06-17T21:13:56Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Beta 2.075 */</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.075 ==<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to Geneticist<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the feedback<br />
<br />
* DZ can now upgrade itself to be able to build Terminii or Epistyles<br />
<br />
* Nerfs to the DZ permanent bonus income<br />
<br />
* Give some DZ and ZA structures enemy-attrition<br />
<br />
* The 'Vengeful' AI type now actually works<br />
** Every time you or a player-allied faction kill an AI structure that is A. a guardpost B. Changes AIP C. is a NormalPlanetNastyPick D. is a command station (its own category, so reconquest command stations will trigger it too), you will generate an Exo that's 1/3 of a wave (minimum exo size: 0.8 strength).<br />
** A fancier mechanism was suggested, but honestly I think this is fine. And it takes hours less of time to implement and test.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.074 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't spawn for a week.<br />
<br />
* Actually give the Dark Zenith a beacon<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Make the Geneticist AI much scarier. Please restart your games to get the new changes<br />
<br />
* Give the ZM some scarier Miners to spawn over time<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Completely rework the ZA income code to make them scale up more quickly during a war. This should let them expand more readily<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.065 ==<br />
<br />
* Add a few Achievements<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* The ZA will de-nomadify planets it captures if in the Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
* When seeding multiple ZAs, enforce some distance between each ZA faction; requested by a lot of people<br />
<br />
* The ZA can build tractors and gravity generators near wormholes to make attacking them harder.<br />
<br />
* Allow the player to hack the ZA home spawner for a truce.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.064 ==<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ====<br />
* Fix some DZ null references<br />
<br />
* Some decent improvements in DZ infrastructure logic. <br />
** They are now much more quick to expand to fill recently cleared enemy planets, which should give them a stronger economy<br />
** Improvements to "DZ bootstraps iteself" logic; the DZ will no longer try to build things it can't afford, and will be better at recovering if it takes a lot of damage. It should be able to recover as long as you leave it a single Metal Terminus. For eaxmple, it will no longer attempt to build anything it can't afford.<br />
<br />
* Allow Metal Harvesters to go to a different planet if all the metal terminii are killed<br />
<br />
==== AI Types ====<br />
<br />
* Add the Geneticist AI Type, which has access to both Scourge units and regular AI units<br />
** Its intended to be in the Hard or Brutal categories, and feedback is requested to make sure it feels that way<br />
<br />
* Add the Vengeful AI type; note this doesn't do anything yet.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
* Fix a nomad planet bug<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Lower the DZ's overall power level to prevent the AI from sending extragalactic war ships immediately<br />
** Thanks to Oval's feedback<br />
<br />
* Make the DZ a bit stronger at higher difficulties. Make them more likely to expand into new territory<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
== Known Issues/Bug reports ==<br />
<br />
=== Links to Faction descriptions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having<br />
<br />
* Version 2.048 (Strategic Sage) - Zenith Miner Golem disappears shortly after showing up for unknown reasons. <br />
** Nomad movement when heading to homeworld is probably too fast - suggest at least doubling to 30s if not 45s to give the AI exo attacks time to have an effect. Also, I think AI response should be based mostly on AI difficulty. It's always going to be best to try to hack a planet close to the homeworld, which means there's not going to be much time for the AI to get the job done. An intense, short-term response (not Imperial Spire exo level, but severe) is IMO appropriate given the variability there. Other factors such as AIP I recommend to be minor, because this is best done as a late-game tactic and it should assume a strong player fleet/turret presence. <br />
** You can do the Crash hack after it has already been done, which is pointless and should probably be disabled. <br />
** Weird exo unit behavior as well, Chimera ignoring key targets and hitting FF frigate repeatedly as an example. I was able to hold it at bay indefinitely just by having that frigate in-system. <br />
** Suggest Crash hack not being available until all planets have been scouted. I didn't know where the AI homeworld was until it told me by heading there.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.<br />
<br />
* Version 2.064<br />
** Nomads cause heavy galaxy map lag over the course of a game.<br />
*** Can be quickly seen by enabling fast/debug mode in the lobby with 10 Nomads.<br />
** Reloading the save causes the game to go back to peak performance.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39183AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-06-16T21:57:15Z<p>Ovalcircle1: Beta 2.066 has been renamed to Beta 2.073</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.073 ==<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ wouldn't spawn for a week.<br />
<br />
* Actually give the Dark Zenith a beacon<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Give the ZA some buffs early game<br />
<br />
* Make the Geneticist AI much scarier. Please restart your games to get the new changes<br />
<br />
* Give the ZM some scarier Miners to spawn over time<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.065 ==<br />
<br />
* Add a few Achievements<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* The ZA will de-nomadify planets it captures if in the Nomad Galaxy<br />
<br />
* When seeding multiple ZAs, enforce some distance between each ZA faction; requested by a lot of people<br />
<br />
* The ZA can build tractors and gravity generators near wormholes to make attacking them harder.<br />
<br />
* Allow the player to hack the ZA home spawner for a truce.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.064 ==<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ====<br />
* Fix some DZ null references<br />
<br />
* Some decent improvements in DZ infrastructure logic. <br />
** They are now much more quick to expand to fill recently cleared enemy planets, which should give them a stronger economy<br />
** Improvements to "DZ bootstraps iteself" logic; the DZ will no longer try to build things it can't afford, and will be better at recovering if it takes a lot of damage. It should be able to recover as long as you leave it a single Metal Terminus. For eaxmple, it will no longer attempt to build anything it can't afford.<br />
<br />
* Allow Metal Harvesters to go to a different planet if all the metal terminii are killed<br />
<br />
==== AI Types ====<br />
<br />
* Add the Geneticist AI Type, which has access to both Scourge units and regular AI units<br />
** Its intended to be in the Hard or Brutal categories, and feedback is requested to make sure it feels that way<br />
<br />
* Add the Vengeful AI type; note this doesn't do anything yet.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
* Fix a nomad planet bug<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Lower the DZ's overall power level to prevent the AI from sending extragalactic war ships immediately<br />
** Thanks to Oval's feedback<br />
<br />
* Make the DZ a bit stronger at higher difficulties. Make them more likely to expand into new territory<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
== Known Issues/Bug reports ==<br />
<br />
=== Links to Faction descriptions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having<br />
<br />
* Version 2.048 (Strategic Sage) - Zenith Miner Golem disappears shortly after showing up for unknown reasons. <br />
** Nomad movement when heading to homeworld is probably too fast - suggest at least doubling to 30s if not 45s to give the AI exo attacks time to have an effect. Also, I think AI response should be based mostly on AI difficulty. It's always going to be best to try to hack a planet close to the homeworld, which means there's not going to be much time for the AI to get the job done. An intense, short-term response (not Imperial Spire exo level, but severe) is IMO appropriate given the variability there. Other factors such as AIP I recommend to be minor, because this is best done as a late-game tactic and it should assume a strong player fleet/turret presence. <br />
** You can do the Crash hack after it has already been done, which is pointless and should probably be disabled. <br />
** Weird exo unit behavior as well, Chimera ignoring key targets and hitting FF frigate repeatedly as an example. I was able to hold it at bay indefinitely just by having that frigate in-system. <br />
** Suggest Crash hack not being available until all planets have been scouted. I didn't know where the AI homeworld was until it told me by heading there.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.<br />
<br />
* Version 2.064<br />
** Nomads cause heavy galaxy map lag over the course of a game.<br />
*** Can be quickly seen by enabling fast/debug mode in the lobby with 10 Nomads.<br />
** Reloading the save causes the game to go back to peak performance.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Building_Multiplayer&diff=39119AI War 2:Building Multiplayer2020-06-09T18:34:34Z<p>Ovalcircle1: Democracy was talking about it, not me.</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled but coming very soon.''' We first focused on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]), so thanks for your patience!<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
Now that we've got the first expansion under our belt, and the game is feeling large and solid at the equivalent of "first AI War plus four expansions," we're ready to tackle the next big thing: multiplayer! We also are going to be adding interplanetary weapons to the base game as a free update (that's the last of the kickstarter stretch goals). This phase should wrap up all our kickstarter promises (including a laundry list of other smaller items), and we expect to have multiplayer fully functional by June or July. <br />
<br />
Multiplayer should be in a beta form where folks can test on it and run into bugs long before then. While Chris is mostly working on multiplayer and those other little lingering base game features, Badger is going to be doing the bulk of the work on the second expansion, Zenith Onslaught. That should hopefully launch around the same time as multiplayer.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.063 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* The Parasitic Starting Fleet now includes 25 Parasite Hydras in addition to the existing 40 Parasites and 2 Muggers.<br />
** This was a bit of an underpowered starting fleet after having some changes to make it less overpowered a while back.<br />
** Thanks to tadrinth and Lord Of Nothing for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The "strength counting data" experiment we tried last version was a disaster on pretty much every level, causing lots of confusion in the code and definitely showing that that was not the way to go with GameCommand. The strength counting data has been returned to how it used to be, which fixes bugs like the galaxy map not showing your enemy strengths properly.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, Metrekec, and others for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Discovered that some of our changes when we added fleet-wide effects for player ships caused AI ships to show their own healths in a strange way, or outright have the wrong healths. We fixed that partially last release, but overall there were a lot of things that just needed to be separated out for humans and for npcs (AI or otherwise). Those things are now separated out properly and no longer cause any strangeness that we're aware of, like AI ships having "more than 100%" health (when really they were just at full health).<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI reserves were winding up neutral towards the player<br />
** Thanks to x4000 for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where player-allied scourge requested in the game lobby weren't spawning at the beginning of the game<br />
** Thanks to ynof for reporting<br />
<br />
* The AI now responds to players hacking a minor faction beacon to get a new faction; this is the Scourge, Devourer or HRF. The unlock Fallen Spire campaign hack does not provoke an AI response and explicitly says so in the hack description.<br />
** Thanks to Tadrinth for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Some tweaks to the anti-structure Hunter ships; in general fewer are spawned because they felt OP. Also improve their ability to find targets; if you have 2 MDCs then all ships against MDCs will be able to try to make an optimal choice of which to target using generic Fireteam code during the game, instead of being locked in at spawn time.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for some balance concerns<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 Savegame/Networking Data Compaction ==<br />
(Released June 5th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''To play this on Steam, please go under betas and choose current_beta from the drop-down list. We would really appreciate some testers on this so that we can get back out of beta status as quickly as possible! There is not currently a way to get the beta versions on GOG, but we won't be in that status for more than a week, knock on wood. We want to make sure we didn't break anything with all the substantial changes in here, but we fully expect some savegames to throw cosmetic errors at the very minimum. Please report and upload those here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/'''<br />
<br />
* Add some new Planet Names based on ancient Mesopotamia<br />
<br />
* Allow the Outguard to kill Dyson Antagonizers<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Move the "Scout the planets" objective into Beginner Objectives<br />
<br />
* Imperial Spire Ships should now grant vision so you can watch the Fireworks<br />
* When the AI spawns a ship from Spire Debris, it takes the general mark level of the AI, and is no longer just mark 1<br />
** Thanks to ANGRYABOUTELVES for the suggestions<br />
<br />
* Improve the Brownout notification hovertext<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Added a new PKID class, and a PKIDGenerator.<br />
** These are not actually used yet, as they will complicate things and make save files larger again, probably.<br />
** This will be really important for multiplayer sync, particularly not in having rolling cascades of incorrect data that requires corrections. But as Chris started to get this implemented, he decided to wait at least one version for getting this all the way in there.<br />
<br />
* Added a PlanetImportanceUIOnly, which is something we can later use to let players do AIWC-style P1-P9 markings.<br />
** It's just the data storage right now.<br />
<br />
=== General Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference in the experimental astro trains code<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare but longstanding but where the message "Potential bug: planet [name] has no metal generators. This is unexpected" was showing up several times a second in some late-game macrophage games.<br />
** Basically this would be triggered at times where the metal harvester points were all too close together for the macrophage to be able to patrol between. Now they just hang out near the cluster of them when there's a planet with that sort of situation going on.<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another instance of "DoShotMovement: Error at debug stage 3200" that could happen if your background threads raced just wrong.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for the reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue that may or may not have come up before, but where fire teams could not be found, even if they existed, if at least one game second of the long range planning thread had not been run already.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of places in the macrophage code where it was making decisions based on what the humans are able to see of threat, not based on what actually exists for it to see of threat. Totally an accidental discovery, we'll see how that affects macrophage behavior when you don't have vision on its part of the map. It should be much smarter in those cases, now.<br />
<br />
* Improve the Major Data Center objective text.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could result in Spores being unable to move off planet when using smart expansion logic in a small section of the galaxy.<br />
** They were basically trying to go to the midway point between the two planets constantly, which doesn't exist if they're adjacent.<br />
*** Thanks to GreatYng on Mantis for the bug report and saves -- and StarKelp for fixing.<br />
<br />
* Fix several null references in Notifications<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AI Spire Research Labs and Citadels could spawn on neutral planets; they are now required to spawn on AI planets.<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the brownout notification hovertext<br />
** Thanks to fwiffoforce for reporting <br />
<br />
* Partially constructed Logistical Command Stations no longer grant vision<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the lobby text for Risk Analyzers to clarify things<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a very old and very annoying bug where any strike or officer fleets you tried to assign to the None hotkey would reassign themselves a second later.<br />
** Thanks to deo, Ecthelon, and Admiral for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Achievement Fixes ====<br />
<br />
* The "Teach a Man to Fish" achievement should now work<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing, fwiffoforce and Thrankos on steam for reporting. Probably others as well.<br />
<br />
* The "This Will Definitely Make Things Better And Not Worse" should now work<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* The So We're the Bad Guys Now? achievement should now work<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* The achievements for beating the Bar Fighter AI Type should now work<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting<br />
<br />
* The achievements for beating the Kite Master hunter fleet should now work<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Major Fireteams Upgrade For Some Factions (Backported From Upcoming DLC2) ===<br />
<br />
'''''Please bear in mind that none of the work that is happening on DLC2 is slowing down multiplayer at all. These are two independent projects by Badger and Chris at the moment.'''''<br />
<br />
* Fireteams have been reworked to allow for factions that opt in to support requirements for "Which faction(s) or units am I required to attack?"<br />
** Currently only used for the Hunter Fleet in the base game.<br />
<br />
* The goal is to allow the AI have very strong responses against secondary factions that won't also kill you<br />
** For example, lets say you've requested a pretty OP secondary faction team of Nanocaust, Scourge and Marauders.<br />
*** The AI can now spawn Extragalactic War Units that are only allowed to go after that minor faction team (which allows the AI to defend itself much more effectively).<br />
*** When these special Extragalactic War Units defeats its enemies, it will warp out of the galaxy.<br />
<br />
* This lets us make more terrifying minor factions without them just ending the game (by attacking you, when you didn't do anything), and is a required item for DLC2 (because that's going to have some terrifying factions) that is backported to the base game.<br />
<br />
* Somewhat related: allow the Nanocaust and Marauders to have an Overall Power Level.<br />
** This plays into the way that the AI is able to respond to things that are "OP", in the way that we've got them reacting to the Fallen Spire in DLC1. But this lets that sort of response be mounted in purely the base game.<br />
<br />
* Also add a mechanism for hunter fleet fireteams to be created to target specific units in the game. <br />
** We can use this mechanism going forward to try to let the AI have a bonus response if you take certain very powerful objectives, which allows us to create stronger capturable structures (since we can invisibly balance them by just giving the AI a bit more oomph that will force you to defend those structures very carefully.<br />
<br />
* Also non-scourge minor factions can now have explicitly Defensive Fleets. Currently not used for any base game factions.<br />
<br />
=== Balance ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug for the last two weeks where all AI units had the hull/shield values for Mark 1 units. This was a significant unintentional nerf to the AI<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, including Starkelp and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Player-allied minor factions no longer kill warp gates by default. Instead the Hunter Fleet gets lots of bonus ships intended to go after your allies.<br />
** Needs lots of balance testing<br />
<br />
* When Marauders attack with their ships, those ships can now attack other planets through wormholes. Previously those ships were required to be defensive, and the Marauders would need to build Raiders to spread through wormholes. <br />
** This is a potentially significant buff to allowing Marauder Empires to get off the ground quickly in unguarded areas of the galaxy.<br />
<br />
* When you take a Major Data Center the hunter fleet will just get a bit stronger with hunter fleet ships that will be focused exclusively on killing your MDCs.<br />
** This removes the anti-MDC exo waves, which were a hacky/kludgey response at best. This is probably a nerf to the AI right now and will need some tuning<br />
=== Savegame File Size Reduction ===<br />
<br />
* Arcen's xml reader now supports directly reading 16bit integers and individual bytes from xml fields, which fits with the new variance in types that we have coming up in the data stored throughout the game.<br />
<br />
* The game now explicitly mentions that Immediate Invasion Nanocaust is very hard<br />
<br />
* Put in a couple of improvements so that the game is now able once again to load a good savegame after failing to load a bad savegame.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the serialization class to let us specify larger buffers, and buffer growth rates, to prevent cases where incremental small additions cause repeat buffer resizes. This was slowing down even loopback network transport at the moment (aka single player), and slowing down game saves.<br />
** This is a performance improvement, not a data filesize improvement, hence it not being in the section below.<br />
<br />
* Removed all of the types of serialization code that we have except for Keith's BuzzsawBinaryArray.<br />
** We were wasting some cycles -- not a lot, but some -- on checking what mode we were in, and if there were delimiters, and if there were type labels, etc. Since we use none of those features, stripping it down to just the highly-performant core is a good idea for performance of network message encoding and decoding in particular.<br />
** This also does help make the code a bit easier for us to follow, since it's all one mode now.<br />
** This is a performance improvement, not a data filesize improvement, hence it not being in the section below.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Deserialization Data Sizes" debug option in personal settings.<br />
** loading a game, write WorldDeserializationDataSizes.txt in the PlayerData folder. When a savegame is really large, turning this on lets us figure out what is taking up so much space so that we can potentially make some optimizations.<br />
<br />
* Added some complicated new classes and write structures to actually pull out data being read by type, and aggregate it as we wish, so that we can write the above sort of information.<br />
<br />
* Improved the way that the "external data patterns" are saved in savegames.<br />
** On a test case 8mb savegame, this saves half a mb.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of extra instrumentation has been added into the game for savegame deserialization and serialization, both, to let us see what is happening and why.<br />
<br />
* Found a trio of places directly in fleets, and two places in "minor faction common external" data internal dictionaries that were serializing ship names by name instead of index.<br />
** Converting this to use indices instead saves another 0.3 of a MB off of the large test savegame case we found.<br />
<br />
* New debug settings option: Write Deserialization Fireteam Data<br />
** When loading a game, write information about all the fireteams you're loading to disk. When a savegame has a ton of fireteams and you don't know why, or who owns them or what they are doing, this helps debug.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the ExtensionMethodsFor_SpecialFactionData class, which was something that required editing a central file in order to get certain faction features. Those factions features are now implemented as virtual methods that can be overridden by other classes with us blind.<br />
** This did require us to add a FireteamBase class in the main ArcenCore code, but that was a solid tradeoff for making fireteams automatically work with any potential mods in the future without them having to use any central methods to do so.<br />
<br />
* Refactored various fireteams code to get less repetition and more centralized code for a few basic things.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a few places with scourge and nanocaust fireteams to clear our disbanded fire teams each long range planning pass if they were somehow missed before.<br />
** All of the other factions did this already, but adding this to these two shrunk the test savegame we had from 7mb to 4mb on one save and load cycle, then to 2.8mb on the next cycle.<br />
** This tells us that, somehow, duplicate copies of fireteams were probably being logged into at least one of the central lists, which would have this effect as well as make processing a lot slower since it would process a few things multiple times. <br />
<br />
* ArcenLinkedList has been split into two.<br />
** There is now ArcenOverLinkedList, which is still used for the three main GameEntity classes.<br />
*** This one has a couple of funky hooks in for when an entity dies, which is appropriate for them but for nothing else. They're connected on purpose for benefits like performance and cleanup when something dies.<br />
** There is also now ArcenLessLinkedList, which is used for all of them, planets, fire teams, frenzy fleets, and more.<br />
*** These basically treat each list as an independent entity, and there's no concept of an entity "dying and being removed from everything." They're independent on purpose.<br />
<br />
* Converting over so many things to use the ArcenLessLinkedList was a huge number of code shifts, so hopefully we didn't break anything with that.<br />
** We did fix some minor inefficiencies as we made these changes, aside from the efficiency boosts of this being a thing in general.<br />
** Now that this is done, however, we immediately get the benefit of on the first save-load cycle it takes the 7mb save down to 2.8mb. In other words, duplicate fire teams are no longer possible to accidentally have, because their lists reject that.<br />
<br />
* The number of fireteams has been cut down dramatically by the fix to deprecated fireteams hanging around in general, but fireteam history items are still very long compared to what they could be in terms of data size.<br />
** In the example savegame that was originally 8mb, which is now down to 2.8mb, we are left with 790 fireteam history strings, which total 219.6729 KB in savegame space. This is an average of 284 bytes per history item.<br />
** We have implemented a new history item style which stores between 2 and 5 integers, with the most common case being 4 integers.<br />
** Normally a 32bit integer requires 4 bytes, but thanks to Keith's buzzsaw binary array, our average storage space required is 1.79 bytes in practice.<br />
** We can't actually measure the effect on this exact savegame, because old history items will be kept in the less-efficient string format. But it will only keep the most recent 2 history events that are string-style, cutting it down some (often they had 3 or so).<br />
** However, if we take a general average of assuming that we had 790 events that were in the new format, and on average have 4 integers with, let's say, 3 bytes required for each (to be even more pessimistic), then we would go from 219.6729 KB in savegame space for those fireteam histories down to 9.2578 KB. That's a 96% compression!<br />
** Bear in mind that since this formmat is new, we might have introduced some bugs in the display of fire team histories, but hopefully not. It also lets us make the formatting of them be more consistent, since it's all centrally defined now. Testing thus far has been promising on the bugs front.<br />
** Interestingly, after letting the savegame in question run for about 14 minutes (gametime), it did increase in size by about 100 KB (huh?). But upon loading the new 14-minutes-later savegame, the fire team data had dropped from 237.6553 KB down to 21.6162 KB total for the fire teams and their histories. That is with 572 fireteams, and it looks like 10 old-style text histories and all the other histories being in the new style.<br />
<br />
* Mostly as a test case for something we want to do later with GameCommand, but also as a way to improve the data storage requirements (trivial) and calculation requirements (less so) for "strength counting data" for each faction, it has been split into several subordinate data structures which are only calculated when actually relevant.<br />
** In a game with 22 factions on 80 planets, this amount of data drops from 129.9697 KB to 94.9980 KB (see? trivial).<br />
** However, this does translate into only 54,651 integers being calculated 10 times per second, down from 75,238 integers 10 times per second. And that is less trivial, as those integers are not all trivial to calculate.<br />
** We may be able to cut this down even further, but on maps of reasonable sizes it doesn't look like this is a real bottleneck, so this remains for now just a useful test case (the test shows that this sort of thing can work quite elegantly, which is great news).<br />
** In savegames from before this game version, loaded into this game version, there may be strange decision-making for 1/10th of one second. But actually, probably not even that because it recalculates this even while you are paused, so by the time you could possibly unpause the data is there again. This game is kind of a technological beast.<br />
<br />
* Also moved the strength counting data code into its own file for easier editing in the future.<br />
** Also also, this provides the template for us to have more specialized strength counting things added in the future for just some factions without it being something that loads down every faction's processing time. Which could be useful or may not be.<br />
<br />
* The way that entity systems are serialized is now far more granular, using some serialization flags that are written at the time of saving a game (or transmitting across the network) to say what kind of data to expect.<br />
** This lets us omit a lot of data in cases where it is a bunch of blanks or otherwise not needed (becuse of the type of system not needing that type of data, etc).<br />
** The cost of this is one extra 32bit integer, in an enum flag format, and the savings is pretty substantial. This is primarily a test case for what we will do with GameEntity itself, although it's also useful inherently on systems -- to some extent we were avoiding adding too much data onto systems, because of risk of bloating save files. Now we have the mechanisms by which we can do it.<br />
** In our existing large-savegame test case, this moves the system data from being 166.4932 KB (not huge, we know) for 29,123 ship systems, down to 118.4746 KB for those same number of ships. That's not exactly a giant compression of data, but it was the test case after all.<br />
<br />
* There were some very old player profiles stored in a different serialziation format which we simply no longer support. It will probably affect almost nobody, since it's been prior to version 2.012 that profiles were in that format, and if it fails to load the old profile they just create a new one and nothing is really lost.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an internal issue where we were calculating the amount of bytes being deserialized slightly wrong; individual pieces of data are stored in a bitstream that can span a couple of bytes, and so typically this meant that we were overestimating how many bytes of data was actually being read.<br />
** This gives us a more accurate view of how large our data actually is, particularly as we drill down more.<br />
** The overall data size was corrected from being 2.5705 MB to 2.5702 MB, so as you can see at a macro scale it is hardly any difference at all.<br />
** Oddly, we discovered that a lot of bools were not properly being logged, although their macro file size was. Not sure what was up with that, but it gives us a more correct picture now. That does change our total reads of data points in the example file from 1,329,568 to 3,420,471, though -- now sub-tracked all properly. 859,317 bools read out at a size of 104.8971 KB, versus the wrong statement of 107,830 bools read out at 105.3027 KB.<br />
** 32bit integers were in the same boat, more or less, with 1.9432 MB being the agreed-upon correct amount for both new and old formats. But in the new format we can see it was actually 2,362,745 ints making that up, not just 1,143,492 of them. That makes a big difference to how we evaluate the cost of things in our saves.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted how we are saving the data for entity systems, based on how we've learned about things from the deserialization log accuracy improving.<br />
** Essentially, a blank value (empty string, 0 on an int or similar) is just one bit. Using a large int32 bitflag array, we don't save enough space to warrant using them. We should instead be using bool gates.<br />
** BUT, because of the tiny size of blank values, we need to be using them ONLY for places where we would be saving at least a couple of real values, or 2+ blanks, in order to break even on space or save space.<br />
** This is harder to do in small data classes, but an easier rule of thumb and actually a lot easier to read in code.<br />
** In this particular case, the data stored is actually NOT smaller, but this is because of some of the data types we're using, not the methodology of actually doing the saving. So we'll be improving those data types, along with a number of other things.<br />
<br />
==== Revised Serialization Format ====<br />
<br />
* As part of our changes to our serialization buffer writing numbers, we now have it do a few quick comparison checks to do far fewer searches in a loop.<br />
** This is a major CPU timesaver during serializing a number for either disk or the network. Literally in an average savegame it may save as many as 40 million loops, 40 million bitshifts, and 40 million bitwise operators.<br />
<br />
* For our serialization process, we've been extremely efficient at serialiizing things via "buzzsaw binary," which has a lot in common with "variable length quantity" encoding, but is even more aggressive in size reduction. This was something that Keith LaMothe originally designed, and he documented the vast savings at the time that we had in terms of file size compared to other formats (straight out binary, or character strings), and the processing power compared to these other formats if they are then compressed for transport (as they would have to be) is really notable.<br />
** However, we're now taking this further, by quite a bit, and have implemented a new version of the serializer and deserializer that supports smaller data types, tighter packing of certain data types, fewer loops in all cases (as noted above), and a few other features.<br />
** The savings that you get out of the new type is something that you have to look at a savegame in aggregate in order to tell how much space you're saving.<br />
** We've verified that we can now accurately store in the new format:<br />
** strings (more compact) and chars (could not directly do before)<br />
*** We may later add in an Latin-letters-centric version that has heavily stripped-down data. Right now this takes 16 bits per character, and is 15% of the savegame filesize that we're experiencing in our test save.<br />
** bools (literally 1 bit, same as before)<br />
** bytes (now stored in native size, whereas before each byte took an average of 2 bytes to store -- but we also were not using this format).<br />
** 16 bit ints, signed and unsigned.<br />
*** For numbers, we also have the ability for either 0 to take 1 bit, or -1 to be the sole negative number and take 1 bit as the "null case."<br />
**** Previously, a -1 in these circumstances would take a whopping 10 bits, so any code that had -1 as the default instead of 0 was a bloat if it was used commonly.<br />
*** In these cases, because of some "inferred bit" logic that we've also now added (shaving another bit off most numbers), we can't tell the difference between a 0 and 1 in an unsigned zero-not-default format. So there's some extra minor code in there that actually turns 0s into just two bits of storage, while -1s are 1 bit in those formats. Kind of a double bonus, in the main!<br />
** 32 bit ints, signed and unsigned once again, and with the alternative defaults and so on.<br />
*** Not counting the new defaults keeping things so much smaller as described above (and that will make the biggest difference), we're saving something like 3 bits per integer compared to the old version.<br />
*** By the time you get to 32bit or 64bit integers, Keith had squeezed pretty much all out of it that could be squeezed, a few edge cases in our style of data aside. It was mostly in smaller number formats (supporting them directly at and below 16 bits, and using smaller bitlength number formats for 32bit and down).<br />
** 64 bit ints, which are used as the foundation for floats and FInts to be passed around.<br />
<br />
* So, after all that conversion to a new data type work, and drastic code changes, and some 30+ hours of work, we get an improvement in data sizes of...about 10%.<br />
** That's disheartening in the extreme (though we already got huge gains elsewhere on savegames), but one thing that is positive is that the new serialization does far less work to actually do the saving of the data, and that's a notable win for multiplayer.<br />
** We do also have other things we can do to get the data sizes even lower, but mostly those are strategies we could have used without having gone through all of this giant effort to get the data formats themselves 10% more efficient.<br />
** On the other other hand, had we not gone through all this work to get the 10% gains, we would have always wondered if it would have been more gains than that, and by going through the process of getting the 10% gains we gained a better understanding of some aspects of the codebase and fixed a number of other small bugs.<br />
** In the end it wasn't a wasted venture, but the payoff is disappointingly low in terms of performance/savegame gains compared to what we'd hoped it would be.<br />
<br />
* A variety of places in the new ArcenSerializationBuffer were throwing exceptions when data that was out of range was passed in, but now those just show an error message and write to you log, while correcting the data as best it can so that it can save.<br />
** This isn't for overflows or underflows, but is for when a negative number was passed or less than -1 was passed in other cases.<br />
<br />
===== Data Cleanup And Fixes We Found On The Way =====<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the FPoint class, as it's not something we ever use, and we're going to be adjusting how we handle a number of our internal classes.<br />
** We're preparing to implement a number of new custom data types, some of which are targeted at making multiplayer performance possible without worrying about cascading desyncs or other issues of that sort.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the old solar system planet info, which has been completely unused since who knows when.<br />
* The data it was storing should not have been serialized anyhow, but was.<br />
<br />
* Fixing something that has been bothering me for years, the PlanetTypeData stuff has been moved out into its own file.<br />
** We've always kept these type definitions in their own files, separate from the actual object definition, and why this one was an exception is unknown.<br />
<br />
* Basically all the enums in the game now specify their underlying data type directly, instead of just defaulting to int32.<br />
<br />
* A ton of data types have become more specific, as in hundreds of fields, and this will make everything serialize more compactly as well as initialize new objects slightly faster.<br />
** This is going to require basically every mod to be recompiled at bare minimum, along with the new requirements on how data is deserialized.<br />
<br />
* The old serialization gates have been removed, as we only had one in the first place, and have been using something that is xml-driven for the last few years.<br />
** It's apparently spring cleaning time in the code, since we're converting so many things over.<br />
<br />
* The science and hacking points gathered on a planet are no longer stored by faction index, but instead are stored globally for all humans.<br />
** This is how we made the code work anyway, so now the data storage matches. It's a major QOL improvement for players in multiplayer to not have to each gather science on each other's planets, and something we discussed publicly a while ago with a lot of people being happy.<br />
<br />
* There was a whole bunch of code that was using the mark level by RowIndex, instead of by Ordinal.<br />
** This may or may not have been a problem, it's hard to say, but if there were later modded-in mark levels it definitely would have been.<br />
** As it stands, it's possible that this fix might break something else, so if you see any odd mark levels, please let us know.<br />
** Honestly, as the code reads, it's kind of surprising that there weren't problems from this already.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of our "ContainsValueType" list extensions, as that seemed more potentially problematic than anything else. It was also very rarely used.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the "RelatedEnumValue" field on GameCommands, as we only used that for one thing with AI scrapping units for budget refunds.<br />
** That scrap code for refunds was no longer in use, so has also been removed.<br />
<br />
* Preliminary adjustments made to our network library to handle the better data formatting that we are able to send now.<br />
** There's a bunch more to test with that later, but we now get a very nice binary-to-binary style of transfer, super slim, with no conversions to char arrays in the middle, or compression of parts, etc.<br />
<br />
* Renamed a whole lot of variables that were too vague, so that now we know if an "index" means that of a planet or faction or whatever.<br />
** Just general code sanitation.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with effective full membership strengths in fleets being able to be a negative number in some cases if there was not an explicit squad cap set.<br />
** These now correct themselves to 0, but it doesn't seem to have been breaking anything.<br />
<br />
* Turns out there was all sorts of funky data in some older savegames, and we now have optional overrides on the deserializers that let us pass in a field name so that we can easily see what the field that is out of range was.<br />
** This is not something that you need to generally do, if you're a modder. It's just there for if you're having problems.<br />
<br />
* Also added in a new SetIfNextIntErrorsThenCorrect method on deserializers, which lets us correct old data rather than complain about it, for cases where we find it.<br />
** This is something that we should only be using where it actually comes up that there is bad data in some saves, but it's a tool to make those saves load in properly and have correct data, versus failing to load or continuing to have bad data.<br />
<br />
* In general there is more error-checking and self-checking now as we read in and out data, but in a way that doesn't slow the actual read and write process down.<br />
<br />
* Fireteams were variously setting their invalid state to be -1 through -5. By convention we use just -1 normally, and we can read/write that as two bits instead of 10 bits, so we've converted all of it to be -1 now.<br />
** As part of that, places we were serializing the fireteam IDs now auto-correct old data that was less than -1 to be -1.<br />
<br />
* Apparently it was sometimes possible to have negative hull points lost, aka more health than baseline. This is now self-correcting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a transient exception that could happen in PrivateExoNotifier if you were loading a lot of savegames back to back.<br />
<br />
* More detailed serialization logging is now in place for when savegame logging is enabled, which lets us get a lot more info on things that are different between the versions if they are.<br />
<br />
* Fix to loading and then resaving certain very old savegames from around the time extra hacking event data was added (August 2019 saves were where we saw the problem in our testing). This is unrelated to any of our recent changes, but just something we caught during regression testing.<br />
<br />
==== Benchmark Results ====<br />
<br />
* Test case improvements in savegame filesize:<br />
** SPIRER322.save: 8.3507 MB (3,858,950 data points) to 2.4009 MB (3,453,855 data points). '''28.7% size'''<br />
** Last_Hope_16.save: 1.4435 MB (1,699,258 data points) to 1.0071 MB (1,570,970 data points). '''69.7% size'''<br />
** decloakingTest.save: 1.4546 MB (1,752,227 data points) to 1.0690 MB (1,630,603 data points). '''73.4% size'''<br />
** tech history.save: 594.1520 KB (696,137 data points) to 483.9174 KB (629,171 data points). '''81.4% size'''<br />
** golem insane.save: 588.5422 KB (696,573 data points) to 483.7046 KB (628,923 data points). '''82.1% size'''<br />
** fail to deser.save: 541.8727 KB (653,298 data points) to 441.2745 KB (588,517 data points). '''81.4% size'''<br />
** performance_concern.save: 2.2050 MB (2,170,709 data points) to 1.3692 MB (2,127,092 data points). '''62.1% size'''<br />
** LateGameZeusSpire.save: 3.5690 MB (3,073,064 data points) to 1.9468 MB (2,904,438 data points). '''54.5% size'''<br />
** FreshSpireCity.save: 614.7300 KB (678,371 data points) to 500.2831 KB (642,760 data points). '''81.3% size'''<br />
** assist menu.save: 412.8888 KB (545,698 data points) to 385.0891 KB (503,506 data points). '''93.2% size'''<br />
** manychanges.save: 415.7845 KB (487,742 data points) to 356.0349 KB (430,439 data points). '''85.6% size'''<br />
** extragalactic slow.save: 1.1419 MB (787,800 data points) to 615.9395 KB (730,003 data points) '''52.6% size'''<br />
** TurretTest Dec7 2019.save: 388.5265 KB (500,837 data points) to 365.4358 KB (445,445 data points) '''94.0% size'''<br />
** Releasing Nanocost Aug 29 2019.save: 1.7157 MB (2,142,369 data points) to 1.1955 MB (1,992,190 data points) '''69.6% size'''<br />
** Aug 5 2019.save: 1.5154 MB (1,615,230 data points) to 1.0923 MB (1,599,636 data points) '''72.1% size'''<br />
** 000 bug Nov 8 2019.save: 598.0068 KB (789,163 data points) to 447.1401 KB (613,200 data points) '''74.8% size'''<br />
** spire save scourge 3.save: 851.2179 KB (962,252 data points) to 643.9442 KB (881,762 data points) '''75.6% size'''<br />
** Please note that all of these savegames (among others) were used as regression tests, and we verified that the data went in and came out identically. A number of these failed regression tests at various points, which we fixed before moving on. They all pass now.<br />
<br />
* Here are some specific subsets of data sizes based on data type, in real-world average case savegames:<br />
** Bools take exactly 1 bit to store. '''100% size'''<br />
** Bytes (normally 8 bits) take 4.74 bits to store on average, depending on the save. '''59.2% size'''<br />
** 16-bit integers that are not allowed to be null take an average of 1.78 bits instead of 16. '''11.1% size'''<br />
*** Largely this is probably because a very small minority of them have data, or they have very low numbers in them that can be represented in a small size.<br />
** 16-bit integers that cannot be less than -1 take an average of 11.38 bits instead of 16. '''71.1% size'''<br />
*** Largely this is because a ton more of them have data, but not all of them. And we have a special case for the -1 value where it only costs two bits. 0 costs 1 bit.<br />
*** These are used heavily to identify fireteams, planets, and factions by index.<br />
** 16-bit signed integers are barely used in the game, to the point we don't have enough data to give any sort of average.<br />
** 32-bit integers that are signed are used almost exclusively for coordinates, and take an average of 12.71 bits (instead of 32) '''39.7% size'''<br />
** 32-bit integers that are not allowed to be null take an average of 5.27 bits instead of 32. '''16.4% size'''<br />
*** Largely this is probably because a very small minority of them have data, or they have very low numbers in them that can be represented in a small size.<br />
** 32-bit integers that cannot be less than -1 take an average of 2.71 bits instead of 32. '''8.46% size'''<br />
*** Largely this is because a ton more of them have data, but not all of them. And we have a special case for the -1 value where it only costs two bits. 0 costs 1 bit.<br />
*** These are used heavily to identify ships/squads, shots, and wormholes by ID.<br />
** 64bit signed integers are not used enough for us to have valid averages for them. But the worst case is pretty much used for the single instance of one, and it winds up using 70.00 bits instead of 64 bits. '''109.0% size'''<br />
** Strings are highly variable in size, but they require one Int16 non-negative for the length, and then the equivalent of one signed Int16 for each character. '''100.0% size'''<br />
*** We can cut this down in a future update, but rarely do strings use more than 14% of our total savegame size on a late-game savegame.<br />
*** There IS at the moment a floor of about 100KB of data that is being used by strings in the saves, and cutting that in half (ish) with future improvements would be nice.<br />
** Floats are not used for any sim-related since they are not reliably deterministic between machines.<br />
*** But we do store some of them for purposes of some purely visual aspects, and internally we convert them to an FInt first. Under the hood, THAT is an Int64, and at any rate they wind up taking 26.54 bits instead of 64bits in our case. '''41.4% size'''<br />
*** Basically none of them are zero, but they are small enough numbers that we save a lot of space. Yes, smaller numbers take fewer bits in this crazy format.<br />
** FInts, or fixed-int numbers, which have three significant digits of precision at the moment (we are thinking of changing the format up soon, but must investigate first) take an average of 5.48 bits instead of 64. These are Int64s internally. '''8.56% size'''<br />
<br />
== Version 2.048 Bugfixes ==<br />
(Released May 22nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The text of forcefield frigates no longer mentions (erroneously) that ships under them deal half damage.<br />
** Additionally, they now benefit from the Heavy hull type, letting them get above mark 4 if you invest in enough upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to Nyteblade for reporting both.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo in the hack for claiming the new Fleet Research Station ships that was not charging you their AIP properly.<br />
** Thanks to kasnavada and Spook for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new cheat code:<br />
** <code>heal me</code><br />
*** The issuing human player gets all of their deployed ships on the planet they are currently view completely healed in terms of shields, hull, and cloaking points.<br />
*** This is incredibly useful for testing, if you're trying to accomplish something but your test ships are getting shot to bits.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "LocalMultiplierWhenNoDeltaTime" on planets, which factors in two things:<br />
** Firstly, if game speed is running faster. Secondly, if there is coarse background processing going on.<br />
** For things that normally just happen "every sim step" at a flat rate, which are few and far between, they should now be multiplied by this.<br />
** The lack of this is why it was taking 16 realtime seconds to decloak ships when at 4x sim speed when normally it would take 4 seconds in 1x sim speed.<br />
** Thanks to wm46, DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY, and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some code that makes decloaking far more efficient, and far more clear.<br />
** Essentially, as it tries to find tachyon targets it only looks at ships that can possibly be cloaked.<br />
** But secondarily, it then only issues orders to decloak ships that are currently cloaked.<br />
** This makes it so that you can tell something is busy decloaking because it haas a beam out to decloak an enemy, NOT because it has a beam out to all the things it has decloaked or could decloak on a planet (that got intense).<br />
** The end result is functionally the same but visually more clear and computationally vastly more efficient.<br />
<br />
* Found an incredibly old style of profiling logging data that we have not used for years, but which was in there slowing things down on random occasions, writing to disk in things we did not even need.<br />
** We've implemented several new kinds of profiling since this, and this was supposed to be toggle-on in the first place, but somehow it was getting toggled on some of the time. It has now be stripped out to be sure it is never accidentally on and wasting your CPU and disk cycles.<br />
<br />
* For reasons we can't at all trace, it was possible to sometimes get extra flagships of both the correct and incorrect types in a fallen spire city.<br />
** It now detects and removes these extras, and logs a "soft warning" invisibly to your local log. If you see these sorts of soft warnings, it won't hurt anything, but it does let you know it fixed the error.<br />
** This was reasonably rare, and we're taking care to make sure and add in missing flagships if there ever are any, too.<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for the sole two repo cases and reports we had of this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a very annoying issue where if you had ships selected directly (as in not by fleet), then when they went through a wormhole they would become unselected. This was basically working as-coded, but why we had it that way is a big question mark. When we reworked the selection code, we had thought we'd removed all things of that sort. And with the ability to give cross-planet commands (move to a point on a planet you are not on, or attack a unit on a planet you are not on), the desire to keep selections consistent regardless of where you go is definitely longstanding.<br />
** Thanks to FDru and Benkyo for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 Perks By Another Mother ==<br />
(Released May 21st, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the tips to no longer mention EXP, and to mention the direct science upgrades.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where if you were C-clicking a fleet's upgrade without having enough science to do the upgrade, it wouldn't show the popup with info about what the upgrade would be like.<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a divide by 0 in the scourge code<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tweak the rules for when nanocaust spawners are allowed to spawn<br />
** Thanks to Histidine for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make sure AI Reserves are friendly to All AIs and hostile to all Players<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting some oddities<br />
<br />
* Added a new cheat code:<br />
** <code>my potluck</code> OR use the short form <code>mp</code><br />
*** The issuing human player gets a random grab bag of ships spawned on the center of the planet they are viewing in a new fleet named "Potluck [Something]." Many of the ships will not be ships that a player could normally get.<br />
*** This is incredibly useful for testing hacks, for instance.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Agile Transports now have half the health and shields of other transports, to match their description.<br />
** Thanks to Waladil for noticing the inconsistency.<br />
<br />
* Raiders, Daggers, and so on now have basically double the hull health that they did before, except vicious raiders have a bit more than double the prior.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* All of the player and AI mobile forcefield generators, which already no longer shrink when taking damage, also no longer cause a firing penalty for ships firing from under them (aka they are now great-forcefields). This is consistent with AIWC, and makes them a lot more useful.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! and StarKelp for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The AI guard post with a shield, and shield generator in general, also no longer have firing penalties for out from under them (though they do shrink). This is also now consistent with AIWC, and is basically because they are more "finely tuned."<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== Fireteam Changes ====<br />
<br />
* When a bunch of fireteams are deciding on a new target, the code correctly now figures out when a target is being significantly overkilled, and stop assigning fireteams to that target.<br />
** The practical upshot of this is that fireteam-based factions (Scourge, Hunter Fleet, etc) are now much better at dividing their attention and striking at multiple points simultaneously<br />
** This code has been in for some time, but there was a bug that was preventing it from working right<br />
** A faction can choose to keep the previous behaviour by setting NoDeathballing = false on all its fireteams.<br />
** For right now, the Nanocaust is going to keep its old deathball behaviour, pending discussion/polling at https://steamcommunity.com/app/573410/discussions/0/2246679252927977012/<br />
<br />
* Reduce a fireteam's speed bonus when attacking a planet. They were going a bit too quick, and this nerf should help compensate for the intelligence buff<br />
<br />
=== Fleet Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Previously, you could only have 5 ship lines per fleet. This led to a lot of juggling of ship lines, and other unpleasant things. This limit has been increased to 40 ship lines.<br />
** One reason among many that this was a restriction was because of how the EXP system was set up previously. At this point there is no good reason to have things be so limited... with the possible exception of some units that give fleet-wide bonuses, like Raiders. It may be that we need to rethink Raiders having this advantage, as it may simply be too powerful.<br />
** At any rate, fleets can basically be whatever size organizational unit you need them to be, now, which lets them function a bit more like control groups once did.<br />
** Thanks to SplitterWind and others for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Any ships in fleet lines that you swap between fleets no longer are destroyed if the member is on the same planet as its new flagship.<br />
** Aka, if 20 of your ships from that line are on a different planet, they would still be destroyed, but if 40 from that same line were with their new flagship, they would be preserved.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== New Hackable: Fleet Research Stations ====<br />
<br />
* Technical details: ARSes and similar can now be modded via xml to give different numbers of options of strikecraft and frigates with these options:<br />
** grants_stuff_to_be_added_to_player_fleets_strikecraft_options and grants_stuff_to_be_added_to_player_fleets_frigate_options.<br />
** The defaults remain 4 and 1, respectively.<br />
<br />
* Technical details: Added a new "Fleet Research Station," or FRS, which is a lot more rare than the Advanced Research Station (ARS). These are also only on the other side of the galaxy, mainly.<br />
** These are the first of a new group of structures to use a "grants_stuff_to_be_added_to_player_fleets_required_tag" xml attribute, which lets us limit what sort of specific ships they can grant. Modders can make us of this to do more things, if they desire.<br />
** This is paired with a new fleet design "OtherHackables," which can keep these new ship types out of the main rotations but still able to be gotten by special buildings.<br />
** Since it has to match by tag, this is really great for mods to be able to do all sorts of specific ship-granting sub buildings. And we can do that in the game if we so wish, as well.<br />
<br />
* Technical details: There is a new "aip_when_granted_by_hack", which is on the new FRS ship types. These are things that cost you more than mere hacking points.<br />
** Here again, mods can do some very intersting things!<br />
<br />
* The idea behind the FRSes is that they grant you costly, but very powerful and rare ship types that you can't get any other way, which give you fleet-wide bonuses.<br />
** The actual ships from the FRS are barely the point -- yeah, they can be cool, but the main point is the sort of bonus that they give to the entire fleet as a whole.<br />
** These are basically a new way of handling the Perks system, letting you get Perks from FRSes instead of what we had thought about via EXP gains in the past.<br />
** AND these perks are transferable between fleets, since the perks are in the form of a specialized ship.<br />
** It's worth noting that your fleet gets the perk even if none of the ships of the line are actually built at the moment (or at all).<br />
<br />
==== 6 New FRS Ships To Capture (Fleet-Wide Perks) ====<br />
<br />
* The ability that Raiders had that supercharges the speed of the rest of the fleet was indeed too powerful to just have as a random one-off ability on a variety of ships. That has been removed.<br />
<br />
* Added three new supercharge abilities, which caused a LOT of code changes.<br />
** These let a ship buff the hulls, shields, or attack power of their entire fleet.<br />
** This is ONLY meant to be used for player factions.<br />
** The strength of fleets and the ships within them get recalculated properly to account for these changes, which is a bigger deal than you might think.<br />
** We can also build upon this framework in a lot of various ways in order to allow for ambient effects at a planet to affect player ship stats, as another example.<br />
*** Trying to use this for ambient effects on any form of NPC ships would absolutely not work, and also this would assume that an entire fleet is on one planet, so there are some pitfalls even there.<br />
** Trying to keep these things computationally-brief is tough if we're not careful, but we've been careful.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Turbo Raider ship, which you can only get via hacking an FRS, and which costs you 40 AIP to get, but which gives you 90 raider-like ships (wow powerful), and also makes the entire rest of the fleet (except flagship) super fast.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Tutelar Pulsar Tank that you can get from an FRS for 40 AIP, giving you 50 pulsar-tank-like ships (holy smokes) that ALSO buff the health of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.5x.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Inciting Parasite that you can get from an FRS for 60 AIP, giving you 90 parasite-like ships (holy smokes) that ALSO buff the attack power of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.5x.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Encircling Spider that you can get from an FRS for 50 AIP, giving you 120 spider-like ships (wow) that ALSO buff the shields power of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.5x (including bubble shields, if there are any, which is why some of the cost here in AIP).<br />
<br />
* There is a new Ireful MLRS Corvette that you can get from an FRS for 30 AIP, giving you 70 mlrs-like ships (wow) that ALSO buff the attack power of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.25x.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Ultima Fusion Bomber that you can get from an FRS for 80 AIP, giving you 80 heavy-bomber-like ships (holy smokes) that ALSO buff the attack power AND hulls of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.5x.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.046 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released May 20th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where any savegame that you loaded that had drones in a fleet with a dead centerpiece would cause an exception in PerFrame_CalculateEffectiveFleetData, debugStage 784600.<br />
** Thanks to choam, DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY!, and Lord Of Nothing for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where C-clicking a fleet's direct science upgrade button was not properly showing the past science upgrades to a fleet in terms of the comparison of mark levels.<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 Scientific Emergence ==<br />
(Released May 20th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where if you started a new game and opened the factions menu and clicked back and forth between the AI and then the human faction, you'd get an exception.<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The fallen spire (expansion 1) code that allows for neural nets to grant new types of frigates and destroyers has been made a lot more general-purpose so that people can mod in their own neutral nets with specific frigates and destroyers (or whatever else, frankly) and have that function properly. Previously it was not possible to add custom neutral nets, but now you can do it just via xml alone.<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for the request.<br />
<br />
* Starting from this version, the game now also tracks direct science upgrades to fleets, and not just the central tech upgrades. Any past upgrades you spent science on prior to this version will not be reflected, but future ones are.<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* In the fleet management screen where you can directly upgrade either flagships (plus any drones they have) or the entire fleet, it now notes in its tooltip that you can C-click to see what all will be upgraded.<br />
** Once in the C-click screen, it shows you all the benefits in great detail, just like it does on the tech upgrade screen for non-direct techs. This way you have so much more information about what the benefit of an actual tech is. This is pretty important now that there's so much more that we can upgrade by science!<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully add support to some new voice lines related to the Dyson Sphere<br />
** Not very well tested.<br />
<br />
* Drones of all sorts, be they AI-based or part of a combat factory, or off a hive golem, now all inherit the mark level of their spawner. If their spawner dies (in the case of AI stuff, mainly), then they will stick at the mark level they were.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo, Poppy, Mitsuha, and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* There's an experimental change where any drones that happen to have had techs that benefit them as a type applied, making them centrally higher than mark 1, now get those added marks on top of whatever their parent spawner's level is. This isn't used in the main game, but should help some mods.<br />
** Thanks to -NR-SirLimbo for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Easier To Mod Direct Science Costs ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed up several places where the game would let you get infinite upgrades after the 6th for a given fleet, or things like that. These would not do anything, but seemed very strange.<br />
<br />
* The direct science upgrade costs (and number of upgrades possible) are now handled via data in the usual tech format, and assigned using a new tech_upgrade_that_is_used_for_my_direct_science field on ships.<br />
** This makes it so that people can mod in their own direct science costs for things, or differentiate further between specific ship types, as needed.<br />
** It also lets us adjust the data so that we can differentiate things for certain units ourselves, as well.<br />
** Please note that for anything where the flagship/centerpiece can change, like command stations, you really don't want to differentiate since this data is on the fleet itself. So the direct upgrade cost will always be the same for all command stations in general, is the main case of this right now. All other fleets tend not to have flagships that change (fallen spire aside).<br />
** Big thanks to -NR-SirLimbo for suggesting this refactor. It makes things way more flexible, without really changing anything you see on the interface.<br />
<br />
* A form of self-checking has been added for anything that it thinks should be directly-upgradeable by science.<br />
** This winds up catching some non-player ships, and potentially some ships from mods or expansions doing unusual things. If you want to suppress the exception in your mod, just add tech_upgrade_that_is_used_for_my_direct_science="Direct_ActuallyUnused"<br />
<br />
* Basic battlestations no longer benefit from the help of the central Citadel tech. They are only upgradeable by direct science, now.<br />
** They were far too similar to citadels in terms of their ability to tech up, otherwise, which kind of devalued citadels. It doesn't seem like they warrant their own full separate tech, though.<br />
** The direct science upgrades are now a bit cheaper than last build for battlestations, and a bit more expensive for citadels. Nothing giant in either case, but it skews them both a bit more, which is good.<br />
** Thanks to -NR-SirLimbo for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The regenerator golem now costs 1.5x as much as the other golems to upgrade via science, except for the top two marks which are not that steep.<br />
** Same with the botnet golem, except it is 2x as much, top two marks aside.<br />
** And same with the hive golem, which is about halfway between those two, on average.<br />
** Thanks to -NR-SirLimbo and StarKelp for suggesting these values.<br />
<br />
=== Exotic Transports ===<br />
<br />
* Cloaked transports can now be found throughout the galaxy, not just as part of the cloaked starter fleet. They are not super common, but they are not as rare as the regenrator golem.<br />
** They also now have their own tech line, separate from the regular transports, and their techs are 3x as expensive as normal. Except for the last mark, which is toned down because that would be crazy.<br />
<br />
* Agile transports can now be found throughout the galaxy, not just as part of the one of the starter fleets. They are the same rarity as the cloaker transports.<br />
** They also now have their own tech line, and their techs are 2x as expensive as normal. Except for the last mark, which is toned down because that would be crazy.<br />
** Thanks to Endovior, Fluffiest, Strategic Sage, and others for suggesting that these two above be something you can find, as well as noting that the agile ones have no downsides. If these seem too hard or easy to find in practice, please let us know.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 Scientific Equality ==<br />
(Released May 19th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Experimental: Add a new Debug Setting, 'Enable Astro Train Power Increase'<br />
** When enabled, the Astro Trains will start spawning stronger trains once the player has killed enough trains. For testing/feedback purposes.<br />
<br />
* In order to make entering commands more rapid, particularly if you're doing many at once -- or have a small typo you need to fix -- it now remembers the last 50 commands you've entered in the chat window.<br />
** To cycle through past commands you've entered, hit the up arrow on your keyboard. If you passed what you wanted, hit the down arrow.<br />
** This only works with commands, not with actual general text chat, which it excludes on purpose.<br />
** So if you want to spawn some ships (or do whatever else), you can now enter the command for that once, then just hit up arrow and enter repeatedly to keep repeating what you just said.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for inspiring this addition.<br />
<br />
* There is now an alias for "player potluck" which is just "pp"<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a one-line error in the code in the last beta version, which led to any clicks to choose your home planet making it give you an error and then seed you on an enemy planet.<br />
** Thanks to Endovior for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that could happen in shot visualizer if ships were being fired on at just the wrong millisecond as the ship was visually destroyed.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Direct Science Upgrade Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_upgradeable_by_direct_science xml tag, which lets certain centerpieces allow for upgrades like golems or arks do.<br />
** This is assigned to combat factories and transports.<br />
<br />
* Also added is_spire_lone_wolf, which does the same thing, but uses its own cost schedule that is separate from those of arks, golems, and "other."<br />
** This is applied to the lone spire frigates.<br />
<br />
* Added a new this_centerpiece_grants_its_direct_science_upgrades_to_rest_of_fleet, which now must be true in order for anything beyond the centerpiece in a fleet to get upgrades from the centerpiece's science upgrades.<br />
** This was basically true for all the command stations, previously, which were all that used direct science upgrades. And it needs to be used for fallen spire cities, which use science upgrade data under the hood (though not in the interface). But for things like golem fleets, they REALLY need to not apply to their ships.<br />
<br />
* Added a new this_unit_gets_direct_science_upgrades_from_central_fleet, which now must ALSO be true on specific ship lines in order for the this_centerpiece_grants_its_direct_science_upgrades_to_rest_of_fleet to pass to themm.<br />
** This simply defaults to true. In cases where for some reason we want to turn it off, this exists. This is probably overkill and can be ignored, but is useful to have just in case.<br />
<br />
* Various parts of the interface have been improved to further explain the mechanics as needed, and clarify if something upgrades just the golem/ark itself, or if it upgrades the rest of the fleet along with it.<br />
<br />
* TLDR of most of the above:<br />
** Combat Factories and Transports can now be upgraded by spending direct science. But it is configured to not benefit their fleets.<br />
** Unlike the last two beta versions, upgrading a golem or ark now won't upgrade its fleet as well. That was crazy OP, and different from how things worked when EXP was a thing.<br />
** Lost Spire Frigates now work like the golems.<br />
** Fallen Spire cities should continue to work like they always have.<br />
** Arks, Golems, Lost Spire Frigates, Battlestations, Command Stations, and "anything else" all now can have their own upgrade costs that are separate from one another.<br />
** Thanks to Pireciter and Poppy for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Related Science Cost Adjustments ====<br />
<br />
* After a lot of discussion from people looking at the beta and going "wow, golems are just not attractive anymore without EXP because of their absurd science costs," we thought about it some and decided that the simplest thing would be to adjust some science costs a bit more for now.<br />
** Command stations (which also benefit their entire fleet) were: 1000, 3000, 6000, 9000, 18000, and 36000.<br />
*** This is just patently absurd past a point, and very few people even give one upgrade to them. Granted, we didn't want them to be used to over-upgrade them, but the later costs might as well be "infinity" for how costly they are.<br />
*** We're shifting this to 500, 1500, 3000, 4000, 5000, and 7000.<br />
** Battlestations were the same as command stations, cost wise, and they do also involve upgrading all the ships in their fleet, but that's still too little benefit for it to be commonly worth it. They don't give economic upgrades, for instance.<br />
*** We're shifting them to 300, 900, 2000, 3000, 4000, and 6000.<br />
** Golems and arks in the last few beta versions were 500/600, 900/1000, and then 2000, 3000, 4000, 6000.<br />
*** They WERE upgrading their entire fleets, which was a Bad Idea (tm), and that doesn't happen anymore. But even for just the golems, this was too expensive.<br />
*** For the golems, arks, and lone spire frigates, we're switching them all for now to be 100, 300, 500, 2000, 3000, 5000<br />
*** Investing a little bit into these is SO cheap and tempting now, and the payoff is great. Investing a lot into one really costs a lot, but not so much that it is infeasible.<br />
** "Other" stuff, meaning transports and combat factories, upgrade only themselves (and their drones), and in the recent beta versions could not be upgraded at all.<br />
*** Now they cost 50, 150, 300, 1000, 1500, 3000.<br />
*** This may be TOO cheap, but probably not. The idea is that these are definitely tempting and cheap for just a couple of marks at least. Upgrading them all the way is kind on the expensive side and doesn't seem worth it.<br />
<br />
* While we're at it, regular tech costs:<br />
** Light, medium, and heavy all previously cost 10k and then 10k for their two upgrades. Now it's 7k and then 10k.<br />
** Turrets previously cost 7.5k and then 7.5k for their two upgrades. Now it's 3.5k and then 7.5k.<br />
*** Turrets should be a lot more viable in various interesting ways with the battlestation and citadel changes, and the changes here and to the command station costs. Being able to have fixed defenses that are able to keep the peace without getting your fleets involved as much is good.<br />
** Sentries and minefields are both a bit cheaper now.<br />
** Citadels are very slightly cheaper now.<br />
<br />
=== Major New "Hooks" Framework For Modding ===<br />
<br />
* Added a major new framework to the game to support modders in particular being able to subscribe to various events that might happen.<br />
** Each hook is defined in GameData\Configuration\ExternalCodeHook, or optionally in equivalent folders for expansions or mods themselves.<br />
*** As we did with the expansion external data, however, we might wind up keeping the expansion ones with the base game for simplicity. That may keep mods in particular as compatible as possible.<br />
** Each hook has a name, which is what event handlers reference.<br />
** Each hook has a description which explains what the heck it is for, in terms that a modder or another developer will hopefully understand. These are not ever seen by players.<br />
** Each hook has a mainobject_is, which defines for the modder what type the "MainObject" parameter will be (so they can cast to that from type object).<br />
** Each hook has a secondaryobject_is, which defines for the modder what type the "SecondaryObject" parameter will be (so they can cast to that from type object).<br />
** Each hook has a additionalobjects_are, which defines for the modder what the heck is in the "AdditionObjects" array parameter (this can be an array of unlike type objects, or a list of multiple of the same type of objects, or more commonly just a null array).<br />
** Each hook has a context_is, which defines for the modder if there is anything unusual to know about the ArcenSimContextBase that is being passed in.<br />
*** Generally speaking there is nothing to say, but sometimes it will always be null, for instance. It will also generally be something you want to cast to ArcenSimContext from ArcenSimContextBase, but we define it as ArcenSimContextBase so that we can call this even from the ArcenUniversal dll.<br />
<br />
* Event handlers are defined in GameData\Configuration\ExternalCodeHookHandler, or the equivalent folder for expansions or mods.<br />
** These would typically be what people are actually modding in, rather than adding actual hooks (unless their mod is that huge).<br />
** These just define the dll and class names of the handler, and then the hook that they are attached to, and a name that needs to be unique but doesn't get used for anything.<br />
** It's worth noting that every time a hook handler object is defined, it instantiates a new copy of it that object. So if four different handler entries in xml all reference the same class, there would be four objects of the type of that class. You CAN store permanent data on those, but it's not recommended in most cases. You also can do something like define a static Instance variable to try to have a singleton pattern, but if more than one xml entry calls the same class, you'd have three classes not properly referenced, and then the static Instance pointing to the last-instantiated version. So a static List<> or similar would be better.<br />
<br />
* Full documentation now provided for hooks in general: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Code_Hooks<br />
<br />
* Four hooks have been added to start:<br />
** OnJournalFirstQueued<br />
*** Executed the first time a specific final journal entry is queued. Will only ever execute once, even if the journal can occur multiple times.<br />
** OnJournalQueued<br />
*** Executed whenever a journal entry is queued. Can occur multiple times per campaign, but only if the journal can occur multiple times.<br />
** OnJournalOpened<br />
*** Executed whenever the journal is opened to be read by the player, just before the text is displayed.<br />
** OnJournalClosed<br />
*** Executed whenever the journal entry is closed.<br />
** Al of these are related to journals, as you may notice, but overall the functionality of hooks is unrelated to journals. It can be used for many different things in the future, but this is just what it happens to be first used for.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for suggesting these four events and thus inspiring the whole new hooks system.<br />
<br />
* There is documentation for the journal hooks here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Journal_Entries#Code_Hooks_For_Journals<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 The Missing Human King ==<br />
(Released May 18th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Map planet size ranges changed for the following:<br />
** Concentric from 40-250 to 40-160.<br />
** X, Grid, Maze, Clusters, Wheel, Honeycomb, Encapsulated, Octopus, and Simple from 40-200 to 40-160.<br />
** Realistic from 40-100 to 40-160.<br />
** Linked Rings, Swirl, and Bubbles from 10-300 to 40-160.<br />
** Below about 40 planets, it's rare to be able to fully generate a map properly.<br />
<br />
* Fixed several bugs that could happen if you had no planet or were not viewing a planet at the moment.<br />
** Those states should not have been happening in the first place, but if they do we want to not flood the error log with that sort of downstream error.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of funky bugs that could lead to the player or an AI not seeding properly on their homeworlds on excessively small maps.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and Ymir for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 Journals, Cheats, And EXP Retirement ==<br />
(Released May 13th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''To play this on Steam, please go under betas and choose current_beta from the drop-down list. We would really appreciate some testers on this so that we can get back out of beta status as quickly as possible! There is not currently a way to get the beta versions on GOG, but we won't be in that status for more than a few days, knock on wood. We want to make sure we didn't break anything with all the substantial changes in here, but also with the EXP stuff we want to make sure that good alternatives exist to something that was a bit... hacky.... before.'''<br />
<br />
* Added a new (optional to override) method DoOnFactionDismantle_ThisIsAGameBeingExited( Faction ) that provides a hook for cleaning up whatever faction data someone has amassed prior to the game exiting. This lets you clean up prior to a new game being started or loaded, and most factions don't need to do this. But some mods definitely could make use of this, we've been informed.<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for requesting this feature.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo that said "prompty" instead of "prompt" in one screen.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* A variety of citybuilding structures in The Fallen Spire (The Spire Rises Expansion) stated that they required local shard reactors and engineering centers, but none of them really did. We were going to add that sort of extra requirement a while back, but in the end the city level limitations and socket limitations (plus energy costs in general) were the right mix of limiting and flexible.<br />
** We've fixed it so that it no longer refers to some requirements that were never really enforced.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the CPA notification hovertext<br />
** Thanks to Joey on steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that have a tech assigned to them (usually from inheritance) to be able to be upgraded, but which are markless and thus non-upgradeable, should no longer appear in the "things that benefit from this" lists on the tech window. This would most notably at the moment include the Zenith Forcefield Generator.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The list of ships that benefit from a tech was sometimes cut off at the bottom a bit if the list was too long, but now should never be.<br />
** Thanks to info on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully make sure that the AI Reserves can no longer be allied to the player<br />
** Thanks to info on steam for reporting<br />
<br />
* Minor code cleanup for Exo generation code. No functional change<br />
<br />
* Slight performance enhancement for scourge code<br />
<br />
* The game should no longer allow you to center your view on enemy units that are not visible to you because they are cloaked or otherwise invisible to you.<br />
** Thanks to rkfg and Stormking2010 for reporting. This has not been tested, but should work.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mis-transcription of one of the "funny" dialogue lines from the AI, and one not-funny one.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of obscure bugs where if the game had multiple factions of the same type, then looking for the "first entity on a planet belonging to a faction of that type" would only check the first faction of that type.<br />
** So far as we know, this has not actually caused any issues ever, but we found it in a code review while adding some new bits.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where if you clicked a sidbar tab while the chat window was open, it would instead open to the tab you last had open.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen when an exception popup appeared with the chat log window open, where it would try to start a coroutine on an inactive game object.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an error that would happen if you tried to click "Change Music" in the debug tools when music was disabled. Now it just gives you a popup saying that it's not playing any music right now.<br />
<br />
=== No More Fleet EXP ===<br />
<br />
* All of the stuff relating to ships granting EXP, and fleets gaining EXP, and the (planned for sometime in the future) fleet perks from EXP has all been removed.<br />
** There was just absolutely no way to do this that did not encourage grinding. Plain and simple. This one aspect of the game had to be scaled back over and over again to the point where it was barely present since back in the 0.800ish days of the game. But even where it was still present, its been something people find annoying at best.<br />
** Additionally, when it comes to too many fleets on a planet having a penalty for being there in terms of EXP gains, that was sending a rather punitive message that people didn't appreciate. Overall this whole thing wasn't working well, and the addition of exciting perks would have just made it worse, not better.<br />
<br />
=== Direct Science Upgrades For Golems And Arks! ===<br />
<br />
* There are now explicit flags for units that say is_ark and is_golem, for letting them behave certain ways.<br />
** Arks and Golems are now able to be directly upgraded by science like command stations are.<br />
** Golems are more expensive than Arks, but both are a lot cheaper than command stations. It needs to be tempting enough to use science on something that is single-fleet only but not holding your position.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for suggesting that we move to science here.<br />
<br />
* Any fleets in old savegames that were upgraded by EXP now have those levels transitioned over to be science upgrades instead.<br />
** For some things like combat factories, you will thus see "fleet levels from science (unexpected)" on them.<br />
<br />
=== Journals, Chat, And Cheats ===<br />
<br />
* void QueueLogMessageCommand( string Message, JournalEntryImportance Importance ) has been removed, since the old-style "journal entries are just retained chat messages" is going away.<br />
** Essentially chat messages can still be logged, of course, but they won't stay any longer than any other chat message does.<br />
** The new way to log a chat message is void QueueChatMessageOrCommand( string Message ), which also allows for scheduling cheat codes.<br />
** Additionally, there is now void QueueLogJournalEntryToSidebar( string UniqueID_ToUseIfGroupIDNotPresent, string OptionalGroupID ), which allows for writing the new-type journal entries.<br />
<br />
* Rather than having a journal entry importance (which has gone away), voice groups now have the potential to be linked to journal entries if you want to have them appear that way.<br />
<br />
* The old "InGameStatistics" object is no longer saved into savegames, as it was a waste of space and not really used like we thought it was going to be.<br />
<br />
* Holy cow! There was a huge and wasteful "Local Message Log" buried in the savegames, which was really old code that was saving every last message that ever appeared on the right-hand side of your campaign.<br />
** This was not ever showing those messages again, and had a lot of bloated metadata on the subject, and was in general just an awful thing to have hanging around because it made savegames way larger than need be.<br />
** We were being very cautious with how we saved chat messages, not saving too many, but all along we were saving a SECOND copy of EVERYTHING, which partly unravels the mystery of why some savegames were so large despite having relatively few raw ships.<br />
** This also was something that would cause processing slowdown to at least a minor degree, as the GUI for the right-hand sidebar had to iterate over every last message ever shown to decide if it should still be showing it or if it had expired.<br />
** Now it has a non-serialized version of this that it keeps for just the messages that should be showing RIGHT NOW. When it's time to no longer display them, they are removed.<br />
** Update: in the end it was not as inefficient as we had hoped. In an 8mb savegame, this only was half of a mb. Where the heck is that other 7.5mb of data?? We will be investigating that this week.<br />
<br />
==== Journals ====<br />
<br />
* The journal sidebar is now fully functional, based off of the specifications you can read here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Journal_Entries<br />
** There is even some text replacement capability in there, and a lot of other goodies.<br />
** Right now it is only possible to programmatically create and log journal entries, but we will soon be adding some triggers from when you encounter ships for the first time, destroy them for the first time, etc. Basically things that a modder or other designer could include via xml only, without having to touch code.<br />
<br />
==== Chat Logging From Voice Lines ====<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch of data relating to the text and "is funny" status of voice commands, as well as how frequently they play individually or as a group, has been moved over to our core xml and is no longer part of the embedded resource packs.<br />
** This lets us make tweaks and changes far more easily, as well as allowing for modding of them.<br />
<br />
* As a part of this, a number of things the watch commander says which are important to not miss are now written out as well as having the voice clip play.<br />
<br />
* Also, even if you have audible voice stuff turned off, the watch commander and AI items vocal items which would normally log text messages will continue to do so.<br />
** These usually accompany something important, and it's nice to see in the chat log so that you don't miss something that is happening. A lot of what the watch commander says is not written to the log on purpose, though.<br />
<br />
==== Cheats / Debugging Commands ====<br />
<br />
* Cheats have been added to the game in a format you can type into your text box (like the first game): https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Cheats<br />
** The following old cheats from the debug menu have been removed:<br />
*** Decrease AIP, Increase AIP.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting!<br />
<br />
* The following debug menu buttons have been removed, as they are now cheat codes / commands you can type with more control:<br />
** give metal.<br />
** give hacking.<br />
** give science.<br />
** give wave and CPA points.<br />
** give energy<br />
** spawn wave<br />
** spawn player ships<br />
** kill enemies on planet<br />
** finish construction on planet<br />
** spawn relic<br />
** clear local achievements<br />
** give metal<br />
** increase or decrease AI difficulty<br />
** test local achievement<br />
** lose instantly<br />
<br />
* The following debug menu buttons have simply been removed with nothing added back:<br />
** grant exp to fleet.<br />
*** EXP for fleets are going away.<br />
<br />
* In the debug menu, there's now a "Wiki: Cheats And Command List" button that links to the wiki for quick access if someone wants to discover cheat codes.<br />
** The buttons for exploring or watching all planets are still in there, as those were not cheats and are things that people use quite a lot as a lifestyle choice.<br />
<br />
* The new "scrub foes" cheat now works properly with stacks of units, which the old button in the debug menu did not.<br />
<br />
* The new cheat command "player potluck" is basically the old "spawn player ships" button from the debug menu, but improved to actually create a new fleet that has the ships in it. It gives the fleet the name "Potluck [Something]," and is a whole lot more useful and interesting this way.<br />
** It also randomly gives you AI golems in small numbers, too, with these.<br />
<br />
* A new cheat/debugging command has been added that logs journal entries with some parameters of your choosing. The cheats page has example usages which all work.<br />
** https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Cheats#Debugging<br />
<br />
* There are a variety of "test case" journal entries included with the game now, which are used for testing individual calls to one journal entry infinitely, calls to a group that has three entries, and calls to a cascade of two individual entries. All of these use cases have been tested via the new journal debugging command, and do work.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.032 Savegame Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* When a savegame fails to deserialize, it now mentions what version it was serialized as, and what it's trying to deserialize into. This takes some guesswork out on our part.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where savegames made in 2.026 could not be loaded in 2.031. A few weeks ago we had some internal confusion over version numbering that led to this. The fix will make all mainline 2.026 savegames function again, and anything saved in 2.025 or prior was already fine.<br />
** It's possible that a very few savegames from the beta branch that were saved in an "alternate timeline" sort of 2.026 will now fail to load, but there should be a handful of those at most, and mostly in the hands of our developers or most-core testers. And for most of them, their saves were already on 2.029, which again would not have been affected previously or now.<br />
** Thanks to Arc-3N-4B, Lystraeus, Aedris, Mada, and Wowzer for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 Faction Color Choice ==<br />
(Released April 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The rule that drones never cost energy is now more strictly enforced.<br />
<br />
* Previously ships that were not yet fully claimed could still produce and consume energy, both of which were wrong.<br />
** This led to things like them not being claimable without having double the energy they consume, and also the potentially that claiming something would cause a brownout.<br />
** They now work consistently with remains, not costing energy until they are fully built/rebuilt.<br />
** This is different from things that are self-constructing, where you need the energy at the time of construction. You can fully control when you place new structures, and it won't ever brown you out because you can't overspend your energy that way. But things that get claimed or auto-rebuilt are just a different category, really.<br />
** Do please note that if you don't have enough energy to finish claiming a unit, like the 50k you need for a hive golem, engineers and such still won't work on repairing it. But in the case of existing saves with an unclaimed golem that belonged to you, you now have 50k more energy compared to the prior build, so that works out just fine.<br />
** Thanks to NR-SirLimbo for reporting, and providing a save where the hive golem was consuming 50k energy too soon and thus causing these problems. That save now works as expected.<br />
<br />
=== Viewing / Editing Factions Once The Game Has Started ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new should_not_be_shown_even_as_separate_line_items_in_game_factions_menu attribute for faction entries, which lets us control which ones should not even show up in the in-game editing of factions (which shows more factions than the lobby, so you can adjust their colors at minimum -- for things like outguard and zombies, etc).<br />
** All of the various faction entries in xml have comments on why they are or are not visible in-game, for purposes of us understanding this. We may make some changes in the future to which ones should be shown.<br />
** These ones now specifically show up in an "other factions" section of the in-game view/edit factions window, where it just lets you adjust their colors.<br />
<br />
* The view/edit factions window in the game now properly shows all the factions, including beacon factions, and gets at the root of their in-game data rather than just their more loose config data.<br />
<br />
* Added show_only_if_faction_with_this_name_is_present, so that the tamed and enraged macrophages will only appear in the factions edit window if there is actually a general macrophage infestation.<br />
<br />
* On the window where you see the colors for all the various other factions, it now shows their description in the tooltips for their colors.<br />
<br />
* A new gamecommand has been added, along with some numerous changes to allow for post-lobby editing of certain pieces of certain factions.<br />
** It will complain if you try to make changes that are not allowed, such as basically any non-color-info about factions that are already in the game (aka not beacons).<br />
<br />
* The game now allows you to change the colors of any faction in the game at any time after you've started. Any player can do this in multiplayer, and it will be multiplayer-safe synced for everyone.<br />
<br />
* For factions that are still in beacon form, you can now change any of their settings in that same window after the game has started (but before you hack the beacon), and the faction will then have those properties when they join the game, if they ever do.<br />
** This is really useful for late-addition factions, where you might want to have a stronger nanocaust or something along those lines but you were not originally thinking of having them in your game.<br />
<br />
* For all the fields that you are not allowed to edit once the game has already started, it just shows those in a textual format, but still with the various tooltips and so on.<br />
<br />
* The discoverable factions are no longer directly shown in the escape (system) menu, but instead are shown only in the view/edit factions window.<br />
<br />
* The formatting of the starting fleet display in the player tab in the lobby is now a lot nicer, using the actual display name rather than the underlying lookup key.<br />
** In the during-game display version of this, it now instead shows which player is controlling that faction, or if there are multiple or no players controlling it.<br />
*** It's entirely possible to have a faction named "Adam" which is controlled by "Dave" and "Adam" if you wanted to do that. That could be because you are in multiplayer sharing control of a faction called "The Davadium Empire," perhaps, or because you've loaded someone else's savegame.<br />
*** It's ALSO possible that in multiplayer, for whatever reason, Dave and Adam decided to switch which factions they were controlling, but not to rename what their factions were. We'll get to odd cases like that later, but for now it shows things properly so you can understand things. This will certainly get more complicated as multiplayer is built out, and we aim to make it a bit more flexible and simple than in the first game.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.029 Journal And Faction Edit Framework ==<br />
(Released April 21st, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rather inexplicable "bug" (really a design choice in code that made no sense in retrospect but has been there since the fleet redesign well over a year ago) where if a unit was put into a different fleet than initially expected, it would wipe out all levels from EXP or science.<br />
** The main practical effect of this was that anytime a command station died, then any levels that you got from science upgrades to its fleet were reset to zero, which was a huge negative of course. This is now fixed.<br />
*** This did lead to some ships or turrets being a higher level (based on the old science upgrade levels) compared to newer ones. Basically items that are a certain level won't level-down, so even though the science was taken away, they wound up still being at the higher level. But new items built would be at the lower level. This isn't something that we can fix in existing savegames (same thing with the lost levels from science in existing saves in general. But for all future upgrades, including in existing savegames if the upgrades happen in this or future versions, they will now be retained.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug from the last few weeks where if you changed your player color in the lobby, it would quickly reset to default. We couldn't duplicate this with any other factions at this time, so if you see any other factions getting set back to defaults please do let us know with steps for reproducing it.<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The mugger frigates have zombification, making them extra powerful. Normally you only get one of them where you would get two of many other frigate types. However, the parasitic starting fleet was giving you FOUR, which is crazy powerful. It now gives you two.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some rather substantial changes to things to now have a DamageSource Damage instead of a bool IsSelfDamage/WasFromSelfDamage.<br />
** This now lets us differentiate the following:<br />
*** SomeSortOfEnemy: used for any sort of external hostile weapon, attrition, or other bad thing someone else does to this unit.<br />
**** All the normal death effects should happen, and things like being able to be regenerated by regenerators to prevent death, etc. This was already working fine.<br />
*** SelfDamageFromMyOwnWeapons: used for any sort of self-inflicted damage, such as attrition to myself over time, or using my own health to regenerate someone else or power an explosion (minefields).<br />
**** Some death effects should happen, but very few. Basically if I die to remains, I should go ahead and still do that (aka minefields). But beyond that, regenerators can't save me, etc.<br />
** BeingScrapped: used for something that needs to die for some reason, and it really just needs to go. Often this is literally a player scrapping something, either directly or by swapping lines between fleets, or the AI scrapping one set of units to move them into a new stack, etc.<br />
**** The absolute minimum case. We're supposed to DIE, so we don't even go to remains if we normally would. This last case was being used for minefields self-damaging themselves in the last few weeks for the game, and is why we had to make this a tri-state thing instead of a boolean self/other damage source. If you scrap a minefield it should not go to remains, but if it damages itself to death it should go to remains.<br />
** Basically minefields were never going to remains recently unless enemies were decloaking them and shooting them in the final shots, or some edge case like that.<br />
** Thanks to Valkyr, Strategic Sage, and Mischief Maker for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If the AI has too few planets they won't spawn Relic Trains anymore<br />
** Thanks to Scout1Treia, who clearly has too much time on their hands, for reporting<br />
<br />
* A new "Journal" sidebar tab has been added, although it is not really functional yet. But the framework is there.<br />
** We'll be filling this in this week before we come back out of beta, but meanwhile we wanted other fixes to get to you.<br />
** The hotkey "J" was amazingly available, and is now used for switching to this tab.<br />
<br />
* We also made both Intel and Journal show up higher than Outguard, with Outguard now being the bottommost tab.<br />
<br />
* In the system menu (hit escape), there is now a "View/Edit Factions" button that currently does nothing, but soon will let you pre-edit beacon factions, as well as see other details about existing factions and change faction colors. It will also let you see "hidden" factions like the zombies, to adjust their colors if you so desire.<br />
<br />
* If some UI element has an exception in its tooltip generation (or mouseover code in general), it now reports that instead of breaking the whole UI.<br />
<br />
* If a text element errors out while trying to init, it now gives you useful info rather than breaking the entire load process of the game, too.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.028 Eat Bad Lobby Saves ==<br />
(Released April 20th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The fleet management sidebar popout now uses the display name for sidebar (which is shorter) instead of the full display name, to keep things from wrapping.<br />
** Thanks to -NR-SirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If a savegame would be loading in and fails for some reason, then it now shows what the savegame name is rather than writing ???.<br />
** In the event that for some reason your game version's name can't be found, it now shows you what game version it was trying to find. Sometimes this can be as simple as an artifact of someone doing custom development.<br />
** Thanks to Badger and mofowe4644 for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Previously if you tried to load a savegame that was broken for some reason, then it would give you a warning about that but then keep on trying to load stuff, cascading errors upon errors. Now it just stops and doesn't keep letting things get worse!<br />
** This also makes it so that loading a broken save doesn't mean you have to restart the entire program or else things are funky and broken until you do, too!<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, previously if you had an exception while trying to load the "last settings" savegame for the lobby when you do a new custom start, it would just be all kinds of broken, making custom starts not possible. Now it instead notices the failure and just does a fresh "reset to defaults" type of start for you.<br />
** In this path, to keep things smooth it doesn't even bother warning you now.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added three new settings to the Performance section of the personal settings:<br />
** Disable Tachyon Beam Visuals<br />
*** If you have absolutely giant battles beyond the norm, and there are too many tachyon emitters in play, it can cause serious performance degradation. For the people who run into that, or are on lower-end hardware, this is a great way to get more performance at basically very litte drawback.<br />
** Disable Tractor Beam Visuals<br />
*** If you have absolutely giant battles beyond the norm, and there are too many tractor beams grabbing ships, it can slow things down. This is a lot less likely to be a problem than tachyon beams, but can be helpful in some cases.<br />
** Disable Beam Weapon Visuals<br />
*** If you have absolutely giant battles that we can't fathom, all with beam weapons, then the load of that is higher than that of other shots. This should basically never happen, but this lets you turn them off if it's ever a problem for you for some problem. This would be missing a lot of info during play, though.<br />
** Thanks to Emeritus Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Bugs From The Beta ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where any scouting was scouting all planets in the prior beta version. This was one of those sorts of things that happens when you make widespread code changes and sometimes mangle a bit of code that doesn't directly translate.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* For some reason, there was a version issue or something along those lines with certain lobby settings in the beta version for some (most?) players. The game now recovers from that either way, but we're not sure what was up with that. Possibly there was an intermediate version that was needed in the xml, and we added that, which will fix things either way. It wasn't hurting quick starts or savegames, just the custom start lobby, so the existing larger fixes above will prevent this beta issue from happening anyhow.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.027 Planetary Mathematics ==<br />
(Released April 16th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''To play this on Steam, please go under betas and choose current_beta from the drop-down list. We would really appreciate some testers on this so that we can get back out of beta status as quickly as possible! There is not currently a way to get the beta versions on GOG, but we won't be in that status for more than a few days, knock on wood.'''<br />
<br />
* Code has been added in (but is untested) to remove destroyed planets from the galaxy map.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception that could happen in RemoveIncomingShot when multiple threads were racing.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Techs that have already been fully unlocked now continue to show up on the tech sidebar, since having those disappear was freaking confusing.<br />
** They now show up with a line item saying "COMPLETE" instead of some sort of science cost.<br />
<br />
* When viewing the tooltip for a unit, it now shows how many upgrades have happened out of how many upgrades for each tech line that benefits the unit.<br />
** This way you can tell WHY it is the mark level it is, aside from things at the fleet itself that are leveling them up.<br />
<br />
=== Dangerous Changes Useful For Future Features For Both Free Multiplayer And Paid DLC ===<br />
<br />
* The game used to allow for a list of galaxies (more than one at once), but we only ever used one at a time. We've now restructured it to just be a CurrentGalaxy object rather than a List<Galaxy>. This is very slightly more efficient for whenever we need to loop over planets, etc, since there's no array lookup that needs to happen to Galaxies[0] and instead we just call a direct object reference. This is a minor improvement, but we do it so very much that it's good to have every little bit of improvement.<br />
<br />
* There is a new DoForPlanets on the World_AIW2 and the Galaxy object that allows you to iterate over all the planets, with a boolean flag to let you skip destroyed planets if you want.<br />
** The existing Planets list on galaxies has been renamed to the long-and-discouraging name AllPlanetsIncludingDeadOnes_GenerallyDoNotReferenceDirectly, so hopefully people really only use that when there is a true need to do so.<br />
** There is also a version of DoForPlanets on World_AIW2 that lets you pass in a faction that must be controlling or influencing the planet. We can add other overloads as need be. In the case of this one we assume that the planet isn't destroyed, since it's hard to own something that doesn't exist.<br />
** It IS worth noting that for anything that is in mapgen, the galaxy object is being passed around and so using the methods on the world are NOT a good thing to be using.<br />
*** With that in mind, AllPlanetsIncludingDeadOnes_GenerallyDoNotReferenceDirectly is still used quite a lot when we're talking about things that are in mapgen. Technically those could use the DoForPlanets on the galaxy they are passing around, but since there are never any dead planets during mapgen that does seem a bit pointless.<br />
<br />
* Also added in some new methods for things like ensuring all the planets are in a galaxy are linked, to specifically AVOID ones that are destroyed, since those should probably not be linked and we don't care.<br />
** In a bunch of semi-related methods, looking at things like neighbor planets and such, there is now a bool saying if you want to include destroyed ones, etc. Hopefully the destroyed ones are unlinked already, but in case not this lets us ignore them here.<br />
<br />
* Added in various other methods, like GetRandomPlanet() on the galaxy object to get a random planet that can be limited down to just the ones that are non-destroyed.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that we found purely by accident in code review where threatToLeaveBehind was being calculated extremely incorrectly -- using the indexer i instead of the indexer pairIndex. This could have led to anything from stuff not staying behind properly to a hard-lock of the AI thread (where the AI stops responding at all). It would have been incredibly rare, and basically only happened when the AI was fighting on a non-king planet and wanted to leave some threat behind but take some away because they were over-running the planet.<br />
<br />
* It's worth noting that there are a TON of changes in here that may cause some other bugs that are unexpected, so we're going to go to the beta branch on this after all (which is funny because just yesterday Chris was talking about not doing that for a while).<br />
** There are also probably some further uses of AllPlanetsIncludingDeadOnes_GenerallyDoNotReferenceDirectly that we have right now that we can clean up, so we may go ahead and do that, too.<br />
<br />
* ''A day passes.''<br />
<br />
* Added a funky new data structure called ArcenTwoDimensionalFlexibleLists<T>, which is basically a generic and flexible replacemenet for things like bool[][].<br />
** This lets us have things like two-dimensional arrays for pathfinding that get larger as the number of planets increase.<br />
** Previously if we added planets to the game late, without a save and load it was going to have some major issues with pathfinding in particular.<br />
** ProjectedMultiPathData has been updated to use this new data structure.<br />
<br />
* After some thinking, AllPlanetsIncludingDeadOnes_GenerallyDoNotReferenceDirectly has been made private to Galaxy, and there are instead nicer wrapper methods for getting at the data in that.<br />
** This reduces the duplication of code that we otherwise have, and most importantly helps to make the intent of how each method is used more clear by their names.<br />
<br />
* Wow this is a lot of changes, all throughout. We're totally doing a beta for a few days at least to see if things break or what happens. So far everything works perfectly, which always makes us suspicious.<br />
** But now we have a lot more flexibility for adding or removing planets during gameplay, which is a pretty neat new thing to be able to do in general, for a variety of reasons.<br />
** Adding extra planets for players who join late in multiplayer is an example of one thing that we want to be able to eventually do, so that if player 2 joins in 2 hours into a campaign they still get a homeworld of their own, but it's a new one. One thing at a time, but that's something for during the later beta stages of multiplayer implementation, probably.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.026 The Faction Duality Problem ==<br />
(Released April 14th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The linux version of the game now has code in place to not even try to launch anything GOG-related, since GOG Galaxy does not exist on linux.<br />
** For most people it was failing silently (as it should), and basically causing no harm. But for at least one person, it was causing a crash on startup. This should work around that. When GOG galaxy support is added on linux at some point, then we'll revisit.<br />
** Thanks to shampoocat for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a regression where if you were logged into GOG Galaxy and not Steam, it wasn't shown your username properly on the main menu.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of expansion spire hybrids from getting invulnerability from thoraxian hybrids when they should not.<br />
** Thanks to DHR Valkyr and Puffin Emeritus for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes to planet tooltip generation in the event that the player faction is null for some reason.<br />
** Thanks to Valkyr for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Made the exports for data about factions in a game a lot more detailed.<br />
<br />
* Made it so that if you get a "no human king found" error, it also writes a report about what factions are there.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug during deserialization of savegames/quickstarts that made it so that you had duplicate copies of the WorldSetup used for the lobby and the long-term storage, and that in turn led to chaos like deleting players or other factions or creating many duplicate factions when starting a new quickstart.<br />
** This bug has been in place since April 1st (go figure), but it wasn't really fully rearing its head until yesterday when some unrelated changes made it suddenly more apparent.<br />
** In fact we even had a second copy of this error from the same day in a second spot for loading quickstarts, so it was really going crazy.<br />
** This is less a case of "how did we break this yesterday" and more of a case of "how has this been working at all prior to yesterday for the two weeks prior?"<br />
** Thanks to AreU4Cereal, esassaman, GalateanGemmate, Strategic Sage, and Mischief Maker for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If you have an old savegame with duplicate factions in them (multiple outguard or something), it will warn you about that when you load it, so that you know it's there, but it can't fix it. If you load that as a template for something else, that should fix it.<br />
** There is a vague possibility that you might be able to create a new game with duplicates again in the new version, simply by having old bad settings in your PlayerData/Save/_Internal/LastLobbySettings.save file.<br />
*** Simply hitting "Reset To Defaults" in the lobby, or loading a quick start or savegame into the lobby would remove that problem. But even with a known-bad save in LastLobbySettings.save, we can't duplciate having a new custom game with the problem now, so maybe it's not possible. If you're able to make it happen we'd be grateful for having your LastLobbySettings.save if it's something that you can make happen over and over again.<br />
** None of this would affect any savegames except for those that were created in 2.025 (yesterday's build), or MAYBE via a LastLobbySettings.save from 2.025.<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.025 The Twenty Million Problem ==<br />
(Released April 13th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential bug with macrophage notifications after the player is dead<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the most recent two versions of the game where the various zombie factions and the outguard faction were not seeding UNLESS you happened to go into the lobby and hit Set to Defaults and then start the game. It's possible that quick starts were working properly, but not definite.<br />
** This won't affect existing savegames regarding outguard being summonable, but will affect any new ones created. For zombies, it will fix any problematic existing saves.<br />
** Thanks to Valkyr, Strategic Sage, Lord Of Nothing, DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY, Scout1Treia, and Poppy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where certain savegames could have not all the expansions in use actually noted as in use. This was going to be a problem for multiplayer, but we will probably have some further changes to make to that in the future.<br />
** In the short term, this could also cause some problems with detecting if relic trains were supposed to be enabled if you used certain quick starts or older savegames.<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Somehow or other, Ovalcircle managed to get the game to remember his last settings as being those from the test chamber. That shouldn't have been possible, and we can't replicate it, but we've put in extra fixes to hopefully keep it from happening to anyone again.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in a fix that makes it so that if there are more factions than planet factions, it won't give an index out of range exception.<br />
<br />
* Put back in some code that will now add AI Reserves (and the zombies and outguard) to existing savegames that don't have them.<br />
** It won't actually seed any outguard beacons if those are missing, but it will make all the various sorts of zombies function properly if they were missing, which is a pretty big deal.<br />
** Previously we had taken this out, and only had it run when loading as a template of some fashion or from the lobby, because it caused a mismatch in factions and planet factions.<br />
<br />
* Put in some code that automatically fixes any missing planet factions for any galaxy-wide factions that are missing in a savegame that is loaded or other things that are created.<br />
** This fixes some serious issues in the test chamber, for one, but also makes it so that the other fixes above don't break the world.<br />
<br />
* Put in some more defensive code for a rare threading race condition exception that could happen in TryUpdatingTargetPoint of ShotVisualizer.<br />
** Thanks to Endovior for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved the wording in the quick start menu to say "no scenario selected" and similar, instead of "no save selected," so it's more clear what to do if you are having an error.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting the confusion.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the quick start window and in the load savegame window where your old settings would be kept, but invisibly, when you exited the screen but went back in. You'd still have a scenario/save selected, but not visible.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in a fix that ignores an exception in GenerateCaret() for text mesh pro when we disabled a canvas. This has only been popping up recently for whatever reason, but should now just ignore the problem and keep moving when the canvas is next showed.<br />
** Thanks to Endovior and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where, inexplicably, if we had a primary key for ships or shots that was more than 20 million it would start just giving them all the same primarykeyid which would then lead to all manner of problems.<br />
** This is not new, but it's only being encountered now, which is probably due to some particular factions in the specific savegame setup which cause a high ship PKID turnover. It still took 13 hours for this to come about.<br />
** The new cap is now properly a bit over 2 billion, which is 100x as high (and nearing the limit of 32bit integers). In the same sort of extreme scenario, with the same amount of churn, we can then assume it would take 1300 hours in one campaign to hit that new limit, so that's... certainly okay.<br />
** Huge thanks to choam and DarkWing for reporting and providing a save where we could reproduce this.<br />
<br />
* Because of the prior bug, when a savegame is loaded that has an entity with id 20000001, it now reassigns it on load. This will definitely cause some problems in those saves, but definitely fewer problems than them all sharing a primary key ID.<br />
** The PKIDs are supposed to be unique, but in the case of one particular savegame we had 9895 ships with all the ID 20000001, which meant all sorts of problems like ships not being selectable, not able to decollide, not able to get movement orders in general, and not able to get orders from the player or other factions. Instead, they could kind of sit in place and autotarget and that was it.<br />
** Reassigning PKIDs is itself one of those "never do this" things, so probably any save affected by this (very few, if any beyond the single one we have on hand) may find some inexplicable bugs like fire teams missing entries or pointing to the wrong thing, etc. Things seem to load and run fine, but if there are boogeymen in a save of this sort then you know it's probably related to this.<br />
** Huge thanks to choam and DarkWing for reporting and providing a save where we could reproduce this.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.024 UI Focus Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 10th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a complicated bug where the game was not properly able to detect when an input field lost focus by virtue of its whole ui canvas (window) being disabled. This led to large parts of the ui being disabled at times after showing an input field in the prior version of the game.<br />
** Two logic inversions in semi-related code also made that even worse, although one of them made it "better" enough that the ui worked at all. Nonetheless, this was a fix that needed to happen quickly.<br />
** Thanks to Valkyr for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare bug that could happen in fire teams updating and getting an index out of range exception at debug code 3100.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.023 Chat Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 10th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Allow non-scourge factions that use fireteams to stack when/where appropriate<br />
** Thanks to Swizzlewizzle for the bug report and save.<br />
<br />
* Fixed several nullref bugs relating to regenerator golems.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added in new targeting logic for melee units that should allow them to better attack moving targets.<br />
** If issues crop up, or you prefer the old style, this can be enabled and disabled under the Units tab in Galaxy Settings.<br />
<br />
=== UI / Chat Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* The hotkey for opening the chat window is now Return/Enter rather than C. This actually lets you do C-clicking still and C-hovering, etc, which has been impossible since adding the chat.<br />
** Thanks to UFO and Strategic Sage for reporting.<br />
<br />
* All of the various modifier keys for doing things like hiding tooltips no longer function while you are entering text into a textbox.<br />
<br />
* Simply having the chat window open no longer causes all other input to be blocked. Now you actually have to have the cursor in the chat textbox for that to be the case.<br />
<br />
* Hitting the escape key while you are in the chat window now properly closes that window, even if you are in text entry at the moment.<br />
<br />
* Hitting the escape key to close whatever window or popup no longer comes with a risk of opening the in-game escape/system menu. That has been annoying for a long time.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of people for reporting over the last few years.<br />
<br />
* When you first go into that chat window, or the modal textbox window, it now focuses the textbox there for immediate typing.<br />
** Additionally, after you send a chat message it immediately re-focuses the chat textbox.<br />
<br />
* The chat log now actually uses gametime timestamps, rather than "how many gametime seconds ago was it" to show things. This is a lot easier to read, since every second every line isn't changing width because of all the lines changing numbers every second.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.021 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 8th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fix to a deserialization error with AI Reserves in the prior build which was affecting quick starts but not existing savegames. Sorry about that!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.019 Regenerator Sanity ==<br />
(Released April 7th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* When the AI Reserves decide to attack, they now give you a Notification saying "AI Reserves arriving in X seconds" instead of just appearing instantly. This gives you the chance to scrap units, retreat, snipe the command station, etc...<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting including Iocaine, swizzlewizzle, Lord of Nothing and his Inimitable Puffinness<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception in in the Spire Debris notification; could only be hit if you were hovering the notification when the debris vanished<br />
** Thanks to Endovior for reporting<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now also free ships in Guard Posts<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tidied up some names.<br />
** Extragalactic Thunderbird is now Extragalactic War Thunderchild. <br />
** Extragalactic Chimera is now Extragalactic War Chimera. <br />
** Extragalactic AI Hunter / Seeker is now Extragalactic War Hunter / Seeker.<br />
** Extragalactic AI Hunter / Annihilator is now Extragalactic War Hunter / Annihilator.<br />
** Extragalactic Jackalope is now Extragalactic War Jackalope.<br />
** Extragalactic Mothership is now Extragalactic War Mothership.<br />
** Extragalactic Planet Cracker is now Extragalactic War Planetcracker.<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for noting some of the inconsistencies.<br />
<br />
* For at least a month or so now, ever since we switched in the linked lists for storing entity lists instead of List<> and ArcenMob<>, and possibly slightly before that, if you were to do a swap between ship lines on a planet with a regenerator golem on it, you'd get a crash to desktop and a ton of extra ships in general.<br />
** In general, for some time now it has been allowing for various things to happen when you self-kill units (by scrapping or otherwise) that should not have been happening. This includes things like zombification copies being made, entities spawning on death in terms of things like hydra heads out of hydras, dying to remains, and regenerator golems spawning replacement ships. In this particular instance it could cause an infinite loop, but it was problematic in general.<br />
** There are still various other things that DO need to happen on-death even for scrapped units, like various loss conditions, AIP gains, and so on. And in the past, prior to us making some changes here that have led to this crash, we weren't running those things, which is problematic.<br />
** The game now does a much better job of telling all the sub-factions and so on what is happening and letting it react properly in the event of death from self-damage. So that solves the most recent problems, but keeps the longer-term benefits we've had for a while now.<br />
** Thanks to Bob for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked a couple of things in the "regenerator golem" code so that they should take the proper amount of damage now, rather than too much or too little. They also shouldn't be able to kill themselves anymore by taking too much damage.<br />
** Additionally, crippled regenerators stop helping at all.<br />
<br />
* Regenerators can't regenerate one another anymore (the AI could have multiple of them regenerating one another).<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game now has 3 Pathing Modes to let ships figure out which planets to move through. Shortest (always use shortest path), Safest (always take the safest path) and Default (take the safest path unless it's significantly longer than the shortest path, in which case use the shortest path).<br />
** By default all player commands use the Default mode, but the player can hold a modifier key for the Safest or the Shortest path <br />
** Note to modders: FindPath() calls now take an extra argument.<br />
** Resolves pathing problems reported by a number of people, including UFO and Sigma7<br />
<br />
== Version 2.018 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 6th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix to a bug that was causing some-but-not-all savegames to fail to load in the previous version of the game. Mainly saves that were games started in 2.016 that were being loaded in 2.017. This was to do with fixing the AI reserves missing. Turns out those should not be added in mid-save. Now that no longer happens, but in the other cases where AI reserves were missing, it adds them properly.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Also added in a helpful method on the World_AIW2 singleton object which lets us just quickly write all the factions (invisible and otherwise) to the log.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.017 GOG Achievements ==<br />
(Released April 7th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The Scourge now have some power scalings based on the Overall Power Level of enemy factions. It maxes out at a 10% increase in Neophyte spawning rates if the scourge's enemy factions have an overall power level of >= 5. <br />
** Thanks to swizzlewizzle among others for requesting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that can happen in the fallen spire code.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue that could have AI Reserves not appearing in the prior version of the game sometimes.<br />
<br />
=== Achievement Fixes And Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* The Steam and GOG Galaxy client integrations have been moved out into their own sections of code, and a bunch more of GOG Galaxy integration has been included now.<br />
** As networking is added via Steam, its code will grow enough that it really needs to be on its own.<br />
<br />
* The GOG Galaxy client now logs you in (if you are logged into that program on your system), if you are on Windows or OSX.<br />
** This is a prerequisite for both GOG Achievements, as well as for networking through GOG.<br />
<br />
* GOG Achievements now log in the same manner that has worked for Steam -- it's about time we got this in!<br />
** It took us longer to get into their API than it really should have, but we need this sort of thing for multiplayer anyhow, as well as in general this being great for GOG players in the first place.<br />
<br />
* Steam and GOG now properly only get sent achievements that it doesn't think you've already unlocked.<br />
<br />
* Apparently we were saving the "all time statistics" but never actually loading them. Fixed to just not have them, now, as they contained very little aside from local achievements and that was not working.<br />
<br />
* Added local achievements tracking that actually remembers what the heck you have previously unlocked.<br />
** This also prevents your achievements from popping up every time you restart the game program and enter a savegame with the conditions for the achievements met.<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The "resubmit offline achievements to Steam and GOG" code now actually does what you'd expect, since it now logs things offline.<br />
** We tightened this up a bit, anyway, to make it run a little more efficiently on the main menu.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.016 Thunderchild ==<br />
(Released April 2nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
* HRF has received many buffs to their budget, and how they use it<br />
** Maximum budget increased by 500%<br />
** Budget per second increased by 450%<br />
** Minimum budget required to attack increased by 3000%<br />
*** Thanks to the a large portion of the community for their notes on HRF<br />
<br />
* Make the "Enable HRF" hack cost fewer hacking points<br />
** From a discussion on discord<br />
<br />
=== Extragalactic Surprises ===<br />
<br />
* The AI will spawn more extragalactic ships at AI difficulty >= 7<br />
** There's been a good amount of feedback that the spire is too easy.<br />
<br />
* Jackalope and Thunderchild extragalactic war units now make their debut. Expect to run into them when using the Fallen Spire, and potentially with other factions in the future. These are SCARY...<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Fixes And Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* We're now using the ability to load savegames into the lobby to make it so that every time you open the lobby, it now has the selected options that you last used -- factions and otherwise.<br />
** This fixes several bugs with things showing values that were not a match to the underlying data, as well as making it a lot more convenient in general.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth, Histidine, NRSirLimbo, Fluffiest, Ecthelon, and deo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Reset To Defaults button in the lobby, which lets you change the lobby back to the default settings and build up fresh again if you want to (now that it instead remembers your settings from last time).<br />
<br />
* The "this is experimental" warning on loading savegames and quickstarts into the lobby is now removed.<br />
** We're using this pipeline for very central things in a lot of places now, and have beat the heck out of it testing permutations.<br />
** If you find any problems with it, please let us know and we'll fix that as soon as we can, rather than treating it like an optional side feature.<br />
<br />
* When you load any old savegame or quickstart or whatever into the lobby, it now uses your profile's player color properly.<br />
<br />
* If you try to load an old savegame into the lobby and it has a fleet that is no longer valid (or was from a mod or something that you don't have), it now loads properly and just randomizes the fleet in question.<br />
<br />
* When loading a quick start in general, or a savegame/quickstart into the lobby, it was previously possible to have the underlying map seed be different from the one on the UI, which was confusing for sure.<br />
<br />
* When you are in the lobby and the map regenerates, it now refreshes all the faction data rather than potentially keeping some stale data in there. This solves several problems with it showing out of data info for starting fleets in particular.<br />
<br />
=== Other Fixes And Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Fix an exception with the Extragalactic War: Ignore Player-Allied Minor Factions option<br />
** Thanks to Greatmar2 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the player overall power level was being miscalculated<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hacking Menu looked incorrect at game load time<br />
** Thanks to Arc-3N-4B for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with setting the game mode on background threads where it would crash the game because it was trying to instantiate some planet visual objects on those background threads; that's a main-thread-only thing, and was quite the cascade of things to chase down.<br />
** In general it now protects it against itself, and waits to do it later on the main thread as needed.<br />
** We also tidied up some code into separate methods to make it easier to find things that are crashing in this area if it ever happens again, but it should not.<br />
** Also made it so that it can center on a planet from a background thread if it has to.<br />
<br />
* The game had very old multiplayer sync code that has been partially running in place the entire time (even in single player), and which is very outdated compared to what we want to do in the near future. We've commented out the old in preparation for the new, which will be adaptive and scan some entities/planets at a time; the old method was about detecting wholesale problems as soon as possible and halting the simulation, which is not the approach we're taking with this game.<br />
<br />
* If the game is missing a surrogate table for some reason, it now gives an appropriate visible message rather than just hanging game load.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception that could happen when loading certain savegames or quick starts into the lobby for further editing. As part of this, was able to verify that all the custom settings are properly being loaded in properly, too, when loading highly-customized saves.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of added robustness and fixes to some strange edge cases when loading worlds either from disk or across the network, or from savegames or directly.<br />
** Also some things to robustness in the display of galaxies when things go wrong during this load and you get in afterward.<br />
<br />
* Fixed it so that if you are trying to generate a galaxy with a null map type (possibly by loading a quick start or savegame that is using a map type that no longer exists), then it will choose a random map type and use that instead, rather than erroring and dying.<br />
<br />
* Really fixed a ton of different things that would give funky errors that were hard to interpret if the data was messed up enough.<br />
** These were all cases where we never have had data that messed up "in the wild," but as we get into multiplayer's alpha we may run into that from time to time and we want to make sure that we are able to have it recover more gracefully.<br />
<br />
* The way that savegames and quick starts and the lobby are loaded under the hood has been streamlined and simplified a lot, and made much more clear.<br />
** This is good news for them functioning really well with the new ability to load savegames and quickstarts into the lobby, and also very relevant for loading multiplayer savegames and into multiplayer lobbies. This was quite a thing to untangle, but now it makes our lives much easier in the future as we get into multiplayer alpha soon.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a harmless but annoying bug that could randomly pop up when trying to load some savegames and would give the message "ArcenDynamicTable<MercenaryGroupData>.GetRowByName() called with null/empty name"<br />
** Thanks to Malformata for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen when trying to load a faction that was referencing a named color that is not installed on the local machine for whatever reason. Whether that's for an expansion or mod, or the color was removed for some reason. It now assigns a random color instead, rather than failing to generate the game.<br />
** This was interfering with loading the Helping Hands scenarios for some reason in the most recent version of the game if you didn't have the expansion installed.<br />
** Thanks to ArkTheSpark, minnow990, Vola, and Roadrunner for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of issues where the game could not load quick starts that were created with expansions enabled if you didn't have those same expansions and there were beacon-enable-able factions in that quick start.<br />
** The game now is able to deserialize expansion content no matter what by moving the "external data pattern" definitions into the main game, and also by making it so that missing ship entities get a dummy stub created for purposes of deserialization (and then being tossed away).<br />
** Thanks to Thanks to ArkTheSpark, minnow990, Vola, and Roadrunner for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.012 Populous ==<br />
(Released March 26th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where allied nanocaust could be hostile for a second or two after loading a save game<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Marauder Outpost strength wasn't appearing in the galaxy map<br />
** Thanks to Parch for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Spire Debris intended for a recently killed AI faction could cause a null reference<br />
** Reported by Cadbury and Admiral<br />
<br />
* Quiet some dev-only debugging code visible in the Threat window<br />
** Thanks to the crew of the USS Defiant for the report<br />
<br />
* Fix a crash in the BuildingDronesInternally metal flow planning code<br />
** Thanks to LCEnzo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Dyson Spheres antagonized by hacking weren't actually doing anything<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for a nice bug report with a save game<br />
<br />
* AI Mines on a given planet now decloak once the AI command station on that planet is killed<br />
** Should be a nice little QoL improvement. Suggested by a number of people, including corfe83<br />
<br />
* Fixed centerpieces occasionally reporting being under self construction, thus breaking them entirely.<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing and Mayheim for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Exogalactic Attacks are not eligible to come through the Exogalactic Wormhole from Wormhole Invasions until the first other ships have come through the wormhole. It's still very hard, but you can see it coming so there's less RNG.<br />
** This is primarily for the DLC (since there are a lot more Exos there), but applies to the base game as well<br />
** Suggestion from Lord of Nothing, with additional bug reports by Strategic Sage and The Puffinster<br />
<br />
* Risk Analyzers now show their intensity-analogue in the Escape menu<br />
** Suggested by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Remove some deprecated settings<br />
** Thanks to Sombre and ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Exos could sometimes wind up idle after killing their target<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed the issue with loading Quickstarts/saves into the lobby, but not playing at all<br />
** Thanks Fluffiest for reporting, Democracy for testing, and Puffin for helping figure out the issue<br />
<br />
* Fixed a few more achievements that weren't triggering correctly<br />
** Thanks Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Added menu to the debug menu that allows players to select the currently playing music track.<br />
** Thanks DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting, as well as Steam user "Micah" and "NB_FlankStrike" for reporting similar requests.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where usurpers would sometimes leave planets instead of capturing them<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the Montserrat-Thin font, which would get very distorted when shown in small pixel space on the game. Now it has enough data in there to render precisely even when very small.<br />
** This should help in a variety of parts of the interface, but most notably in the chat window when your screen resolution is very small.<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Fixes / Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* The "can edit presets" debug setting has been removed, and the editing of savegames and presets into the lobby is now supported for everyone.<br />
** There may still be problems with this that we need to iron out, but we're getting there and everyone should at least be aware of the option.<br />
<br />
* When loading a savegame or quick start into the lobby, it no longer has any problems with "factions that must be discovered" showing up inappropriately.<br />
** Thanks to a lot of players for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Loading a quick start into the lobby no longer requires you have a campaign name first.<br />
<br />
* The factions that are discoverable in a game, but not yet discovered, are now shown at the bottom of the list of factions as (Discoverable) in the escape menu.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that was allowing you to add more than one Zenith Trader or Devourer Golem or other "must only be one" factions.<br />
** This had then led to a variety of other bugs after that, but we're less concerned about those since the core thing can no longer happen.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and StarKeep for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Forward-Compatible Settings and Profiles ===<br />
<br />
* Made it so that settings files and input bindings files -- from this version onward -- are now forwards-compatible.<br />
** Aka, if you load a version 2.016 settings file in version 2.012, then it would let you do that. In the past, loading a version 2.012 file in 2.011 would cause it to show an error message and toss out all your settings.<br />
<br />
* The player profile is now stored in an xml format rather than the char field format that it was using before, which allows for hand-editing if we ever need to and is more flexible in general.<br />
** The player profile also now is forward-compatible from version 2.012 onwards, like the settings and player inputs.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of players, but including Shnatsel, for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Changes for The Spire Rises DLC ===<br />
<br />
* Shifted the values for Fallen Spire exogalactic-strikes around, resulting in low AIP being stronger, and higher AIP not increasing as much.<br />
** Big thanks to Astilious for reporting and assisting in sorting out the problem.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with the hacking sidebar that was causing numbers not to display properly<br />
** Thanks to Dominus for doing some useful debugging. Thanks to ParadoxSong and Ranakastrasz for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where mark 7 scourge would try to refuse to fight by constantly thinking they could upgrade<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where player or minor faction allied scourge wouldn't realize that the AI Overlord was a legit target<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Fallen Spire beacon was available even if the Fallen Spire faction was enabled in the game lobby<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where relic trains could go to the AI overlord early<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Imperial Spire Fleet was attacking an invulnerable Overlord instead of destroying the guard posts<br />
** Thanks to Oryutzen for reporting<br />
<br />
* Exos that kill a Spire City no longer get stuck afterwards<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* The scourge was getting stuck if the only path to any target was extremely well defended<br />
** This was only happening in very late game scenarios with the fallen spire on for certain map types<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Macrophage Phase 3 - Multi Phage Takeover ===<br />
* The Macrophage are now a credible threat. You can have as many of them as you want, and they are fully capable of eating entire chunks of the galaxy on higher intensities. Be warned.<br />
<br />
==== Base Game Changes ====<br />
<br />
* You can now have multiple Macrophage per game, and they can have seperate allegiences set.<br />
** If Spores from different Macrophage factions meet; and there are enough unique Spores on the planet to spawn a Telium, one of the spores at random gets priority for deciding whom the new Telium belongs to.<br />
*** Tamed still has absolute priority.<br />
** There is still only a single Tamed faction.<br />
*** You are still unable to tame any Macrophage subfactions that are friendly to players.<br />
** There is still only a single Enraged faction.<br />
*** They will still eat everything.<br />
<br />
* Added in two new spawn options for Macrophage: Lone Telium and Clustered Telia.<br />
** Lone Telium spawns a single Telium for the Subfaction.<br />
*** This Lone Telium is always berserk, never produces spores, its harvesters are much more defensive, and its harvesters only enrage when it dies.<br />
** Clustered Telia spawns Telia on half as many planets, but spawns 2 Telia per planet.<br />
*** Added in a new quickstart, the Buggalactic War, which makes use of all the spawning styles.<br />
<br />
* Spawn event costs now scale with the number of harvesters that a Telium owns.<br />
** Base event cost reduced to 125k Metal. (175k for hostile-to-player)<br />
** On Intensity 5, the cost is increased by 35% for each (non enraged) harvester owned.<br />
*** This value scales with intensity, being 20% at Intensity 10, and 47% at Intensity 1.<br />
*** Tamed is considered Intensity 10 for this purpose.<br />
<br />
* Spore event chance now decreases by 2% for every Telia in the galaxy.<br />
* Spore event chance is now clamped between 25% and 75%.<br />
* Higher Mark Macrophage break and snack for longer.<br />
* Enraged Macrophage snack on homeworlds for thrice as long as they do other planets.<br />
* Updated the Macrophage Attacking message to no longer spam the log when you kill a large Telium.<br />
* Tame Telium hack reduced to 25 HaP cost.<br />
* Chance for Enraged Harvesters to attack the ai starts at 50%, and increases as your Tamed Telia start to outnumber Wild, up until they reach 90%.<br />
* Gave a facelift to various descriptions such as hacking and entity appenders.<br />
<br />
==== The Spire Rises DLC Changes ====<br />
<br />
* When a Macrophage faction gets debris, it will upgrade one of its Telia into a powerful Spire Infested Telia.<br />
** A Spire Infested Telia is equipped with a multitude of short ranged Reaper beams, and is capable of (slow) movement. Be wary.<br />
*** If you manage to kill this Telia, the Macrophage that its part of will be unable to build new Spire Infested Harvesters until they acquire new Debris.<br />
*** You can optionally attempt to hack it to steal the debris, gaining double the science you would from a normal debris.<br />
**** Perhaps its not the best idea to enrage the already powerful bugs that are more powerful than normal.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Halved durability of AI Tachyon Sentinels.<br />
<br />
* Black Hole Machines affect units of engine gx 20 and lower, rather than 14. Crippled units can now leave regardless, preventing possible softlocks. Flagship engine gx reduced slightly to be affected.<br />
<br />
* Black Hole Machine, Raid Engine and Magnifier now die with the Command Station.<br />
<br />
* AI Turrets are now at least 75% of the range of player ones.<br />
<br />
* Added numerous AI Ship Groups.<br />
** Some things of note:<br />
** There are 50ish Turret Groups, 37 Strikecraft/Frigate groups, and 14 Dire Guard Post groups all added.<br />
** Swarmer AI has more variety/difference in what it likes to bring.<br />
** Fortress Baron is the only AI type to have Mini Forts, as a unique thing for it.<br />
** Turtle AI has 6x the reinforcement group count as before.<br />
*** These vary as to which AIs they are assigned. More specific AI types don't have all of them, while Full Ensemble has most.<br />
*** Many Turret groups require the first DLC to ever show up, and some groups use both base game and DLC Turrets. If you don't have the DLC, those'll just look like normal mono-Turret groups.<br />
<br />
* Some range nerfs to some Extragalactic units. Range and speed nerf to AI Dragon.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian no longer has Overdrive effect, instead is just a larger Plasma Guardian.<br />
** Nasty interactions with Fallen Spire, particularly the Great Shield.<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Upgraded AI Fortress power. Large upgrade to AI Super Fortress power.<br />
<br />
* Increased Stingray damage and durability by 40%, metal cost by 60%.<br />
<br />
* Tripled Ion Disruptor damage.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboat damage increased 60%, metal cost doubled.<br />
<br />
* Ranger damage increased 60%, metal cost increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Medic Gunboat now has vampirism, metal cost doubled.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod and Aggressor damage increased 30%.<br />
<br />
* Raider and Dagger damage increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette and Molotov reload time 12s -> 9s.<br />
<br />
* Guard Posts and Dire Guard Posts now use the same armour/albedo stats as their relevant Guardian, if they have one.<br />
<br />
* Put a small bit of Dire Guard Post shield into hull, going from a 1:5 ratio to a 1:3.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks (The Spire Rises DLC) ===<br />
<br />
* Both Spy Cradles vision range increased by 1, both have very powerful planet wide tachyon systems.<br />
<br />
* Buttress has same durability as normal structures rather than less, requires MK4 city rather than 5, uses 2 sockets rather than 4, has the same effects as a Black Hole Machine, but the gravity part is planet wide.<br />
** Made the lower tier Extra-Galactic War units susceptible to this.<br />
<br />
* Small tweak to Relic chase force sizes as you progress through Fallen Spire.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.009 Plenty Of Tuning ==<br />
(Released March 9th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fix several bugs related to forcefields not handling norris effect stuff properly<br />
** reported by Fluffiest, Xenorius, ussdefiant and gigastar<br />
<br />
* Centerpieces are now always visible even when crippled on both planets and the galaxy map, though still no longer grant vision of anything else when crippled<br />
** reported most recently by Chthon<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to the Overall Power Level code paths<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting<br />
<br />
* When trying to find a random AI faction for things, try to pick a living faction<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with tooltips for units in Fireteams<br />
** Thanks to a number of people including ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The icons in the bottom right corner, under the selected ships, no longer try to draw text. That was way too small and thus always hard to read and looked blurry. That happens in any text editor, too. Instead, it just relies on the icons, which are now larger and thus also themselves draw more clearly. There are tooltips for anyone forgetting what they do. The hotkeys for these functions are still shown via text, no problem, though.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the Save Presets code<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for the bug report and Dominus for the fix<br />
<br />
==== Dyson ====<br />
<br />
* New Dyson Antagonizer rules<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers must spawn on Explored planets<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers are Always Visible, even if you have out of date information about the planet<br />
*** Requested by a number of people<br />
<br />
* Fix the Dyson Antagonizer not respecting the Dyson Intensity for spawning, and spawning much more often than intended.<br />
<br />
==== Marauders ====<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Marauders weren't spawning turrets for their outposts. <br />
* Hopefully fix a bug where hostile-to-all marauders weren't killing AI command stations <br />
* Fix a bug where marauder outposts were spawning much too quickly.<br />
** Net nerf to the marauders; they require much more time to scale up after capturing a planet. I've heard some complaints that the marauders are really getting out of control quickly, and that should no longer be possible.<br />
** Thanks to the crew of the USS Defiant for reminding me about this <br />
<br />
=== Spire Rises changes ===<br />
<br />
* Further clarify the description text on the AI Spire Research Lab<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Spire Debris is no longer allowed to join fireteams<br />
** Thanks to Smaug for reporting<br />
<br />
* Prevent multiple Spire Cities from being built on the same planet.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* AI-allied scourge at intensity > 5 have a chance of building an additional guard post next to any spawner or armory they create. Should make trying to attack the scourge infrastructure a bit more challenging. This code is readily expandable to spawning other AI structures as well if desired<br />
** From a conversation with a particularly depraved Peltian sympathizer<br />
<br />
* Make doubly sure that spire relics can't spawn on AI homeworlds<br />
** pointed out by XTRMNTR2K on steam<br />
<br />
* Improve player-allied scourge target selection in the mid/late game <br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for a useful save game for debugging<br />
<br />
* If the Imperial Spire Fleet detects your home planet is under attack, they will prioritize defending it<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Add additional debugging code to the Spire Sim code<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for the bug report<br />
<br />
== Version 2.008 Transport Loading Hotfix ==<br />
(Released March 4th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where ships would unload properly from transports, but never load into them again, in the prior version.<br />
** This was a casualty of the many changes we made in order to facilitate the performance improvements, but was quick to fix once people reported it. Apologies for that and anything else that crops up!<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage and Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Imperial Spire vessels are now MK7.<br />
<br />
* There is now extra debugging information shown visibly if the fallen spire actually has an issue.<br />
** Before it would just silently spam the log.<br />
<br />
* When a unit is trying to transform and it is in an invalid state, it now gives a more clear error message.<br />
<br />
* When centerpieces die, they are now blanked out properly; previously it held onto them in a dead format but mostly-removed, and this could cause some funky errors in the fallen spire in particular, but possibly other places eventually.<br />
** This was something that the squad wrappers we used to use automatically filtered for, so that's why it pops up now but not previously. It's a lot more efficient the new way, but we needed this extra check for this strange edge case.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.007 Speed Boost ==<br />
(Released March 4th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* When hovering a tech line in the science sidebar, it now lists the ships lines to be upgraded first by mobile ships, then by turrets, instead of always in alphabetical order<br />
<br />
* If remains cannot be rebuilt for some reason, it now shows the reason in the hovertext for those remains. This fixes a lot of ambiguity!<br />
** It also includes the countdown timers for things that can't be rebuilt for a certain amount of time with/without enemies.<br />
<br />
* Improved the priorities of repairs and other metal expenditures so that it makes more sense. Command stations with next to no health will now be prioritized extra for repairs even if there's a big ship to complain.<br />
** In cases where there was a giant golem to expensively complain, it often would not let you even choose to override that and spend metal on repairing the command station. Now that works properly, and at least some engineers will break off to repair things even with a giant capturable there.<br />
** Thanks to Smaug for a savegame where the command station was just impossible to repair while the unclaimed golem was still present.<br />
<br />
* The 'cancel hack' popup now reminds the player that you still pay the full hacking points value<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Remove a debugging line related to Dyson Spheres that was left enabled by accident<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make it much harder for structures to start to rebuild themselves mid battle.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a very long-standing bug where the Threat Count in the resource bar was sometimes counting Warden or Praetorian units<br />
<br />
* Fixed Fleet Centerpieces vanishing from the galaxy map if they were crippled, then moved to a planet that was only Explored.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan, Daniexpert and Histidine for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where command stations still under construction could still help with claiming other ships.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really longstanding bug where ships that were overkilled that were in a stack were not rolling over their damage properly.<br />
** They actually were winding up over-healing the health of the next ship in the stack, not causing over-damage.<br />
<br />
* It was somehow possible to have ships with zero health that did not die, seemingly only since the other performance improvements below but frankly the code was pretty unrelated to the area we can think of.<br />
** These now automatically re-check for dying within the next sim step, and do so properly. This is a nice safety net in general to have, we suppose.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where it would usually return a spurious "." at the start of type names it could not find.<br />
<br />
* When PerFrame_CalculateEffectiveFleetData on fleets has an exception, it now gives more info on where that happened.<br />
** Fixed an exception that could happen due to centerpieces not fully deserializing into their fleet lines properly. That only seemed to matter for drone producers, but it was a thing.<br />
*** This fix also fixed a common thing that could happen when exiting out of really large savegames to the main menu.<br />
<br />
=== Performance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Improved performance slightly on player planetary fleets without a centerpiece (aka command station), to basically not do all the checking and counts for them. Every planet has a fleet like that for every human player, so doing some checking like that on all of them was a mild expense that was not worth it.<br />
<br />
* Put in some more debugging variables that let us turn off more parts of the simulation to find performance hotspots.<br />
<br />
* Moved some logic for entity removal to be slightly more centralized, which makes it less common and also thus something that doesn't ever accidentally add the same entity to a big list more than once. There is some performance gain from this, but it's not huge in the current scheme of things.<br />
<br />
* SquadCountsByType is now an int array rather than an ArcenSparseLookup, which makes it much much faster.<br />
<br />
* MetalIncomePerPlanet_ForUI and EnergyProducedPerPlanet_ForUIOnly have become simple integers on the actual planet, and are handled in a much more efficient fashion since they are local-player-UI-only.<br />
<br />
* Added a new ArcenLinkedList<> class, which is a new specialist collection that is thread-safe, multiplayer-safe, and extremely high performance to iterate over, add to, and remove from.<br />
** We're replacing all instances of ArcenMob<>, and the rollup uses of List<>, with this new class.<br />
** This sees a massive improvement in speed in a lot of savegames, and the removal of micro-stutters relating to entities being removed from lists in general. This also sees a big improvement in how quickly you can get back out to the main menu.<br />
** It's a lot of code changes, though, so it's always possible we made some sort of mistake in this and are causing a new bug somewhere. Fingers crossed that's not the case, but the places it would be a problem are usually central enough that it should be wildly obvious. So far we're not seeing that.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the savegame that helped us pinpoint the fact that ship/shot removal was being the biggest performance drain at the moment. His savegame went from a choppy 45-55% performance to smooth 100% performance.<br />
<br />
* Revised the Fleets class to no longer use Squad Wrappers, but instead to directly use squads.<br />
** This causes a slight performance boost in general, and will allow us to use performance-boosting collections that don't work on structs like SquadWrapper.<br />
** There's also the possibility for some errant bugs here and there, but we think we caught all of those, as they followed a specific pattern.<br />
<br />
* The list of ships inside each fleet membership are now handled via the new linked lists rather than normal lists, extending the speed benefits to them.<br />
** Most of the "performance trouble" saves that we've collected over the last months now run at full speed, where some used to run at 5%. A couple still only run at about 80%, but those are by far the minority.<br />
*** It is worth noting that just starting a new game at 300 planets will put you immediately at 70-80% sim speed right from the start. Apparently there is something we're doing that is still inescapably planet-bound in terms of calculation cost, even though the number of ships is 1/3 or less of that of much beefier later-game saves that now run at 100% speed. We may need to lower the max number of planets in any map to being more like 140 or so.<br />
<br />
=== DLC changes ===<br />
<br />
* AI extragalactic response no longer counts its own scourge allies when deciding whether to spawn extragalactic war ships<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Make the Scourge Beacon Hack more costly and harder<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Awakened Scourge allies should show up in the escape menu now<br />
** Thanks to vinco for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Imperial Spire wasn't pressing home its attacks<br />
** Thanks to Astillious<br />
<br />
* Fixed the new Arks being unable to rebuild remains.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The Objectives for killing the AI Spire Citadel/Research Lab only appear once you have Explored those planets<br />
<br />
* There is now a Spire Beacon, and hacking it activates the Spire Quest.<br />
** This is only available for new games, it's not retroactive <br />
** Thanks to SCUD on steam for reminding us about this. <br />
<br />
* The Scourge's Overall Power level can now go up to 1.5 if it has a Nemesis<br />
** Only relevant for player or minor faction allied scourge<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks (The Spire Rises DLC) ===<br />
<br />
* Increased durability of Scourge Spawners and Armouries by 50%. Added Forcefields to both.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks (Base Game) ===<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate, Bounty Hunter and Apparition mass 4 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate damage 5,000 -> 3,500.<br />
<br />
* Dyson and Dark Spire units are immune to being captured.<br />
** This solves some nasty faction interactions, such as an AI Wendigo finding a nice tasty group of Dark Spire to eat, or the Nanocaust gaining enormous hordes of units.<br />
** Also fixes some possible player shenanigans using Hacks.<br />
*** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting a Dark Spire and Nanocaust incident, Histidine for reporting a Wendigo problem, and Fluffiest for suggesting (all separately).<br />
<br />
== Version 2.006 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 29th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Viral Shredders now inherit pursuit mode<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Quiet some text in the galaxy view hover-planet view. We don't want planets being suddenly Nomadic or anything...<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for AI Spire Research Labs to clarify that they violate other city placement rules<br />
** As a result of some discussions on discord<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where you couldn't build Spire structures if the Spire Flagship (but not the city) was crippled<br />
** Thanks to WolfWhiteFire for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Spire Debris; Debris can no longer be captured by another faction while you are hacking it. The Spire Debris spawn message now shows the correct time that the debris will last for the first debris.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some additional debugging code to PreFillFactionBasedData.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Outguard hacks were causing the hacking history menu to crash. Add some defensive code there too<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage's thot bug reporting ways<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'ai stops doing anything once it's killed' code to make sure that Anti-MDC exos are no longer spawned after the Overlord is killed<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for the bug report<br />
<br />
* You now know which faction will capture Spire Debris if you don't get to it in time. This lets you make informed decisions about which debris you want to prioritize.<br />
** You also get 3 debris per City instead of 2.<br />
** Suggested by Starkelp<br />
<br />
* Fixed Viral Shredder copies being swappable, allowing for infinite lines in a single Fleet.<br />
** Thanks to Lampshade for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in defensive coding against some rare nullref exceptions that could happen during some combination of scourge and fallen spire, but which we weren't able to directly duplicate.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Removed the maximum Mark restriction set on Battlestations, Citadels, and Home Forcefields.<br />
** They now go to Mark 7 like normal.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.005 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed an invalid cast exception that could happen in GetScourgeGlobalDataExt for unexpected reasons if the scourge had wrong metadata for some reason.<br />
<br />
* Definitely fixed the minor capturables exception in mapgen, so that even if it ever happens in the future (even mods could validly cause this), it will just silently log a note in case developers need it, but keep everything on the interface running smoothly. The actual error in this case was related to an expansion, but a mod could easily cause the same thing, and in neither case is it actually a bug or something to notify the user about.<br />
** Thanks to Jodan008 for letting us know this was still happening.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the most recent hotfix related to dyson antagonizers not being found.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB and Yog-Sothoth for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.004 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed units with ShouldNeverBeCapturedByAnotherFaction set to true, such as Tesla Torpedo Frigates, from being loaded into Transports.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the Scourge Neinzul Fortress text to mention that it produces hostile to all zombies<br />
** Thanks to vinco for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mapgen error that could happen for people without the new expansion installed. Apologies for that!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.002 Turret Icons ==<br />
(Released February 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* All 30 of the new turrets now have updated flair denoting what they are. Definitely important for seeing from a distance and in the sidebar what they are!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.001 Expansion 1: The Spire Rises! ==<br />
(Released February 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The new expansion is out now!<br />
** More info is here on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1196420/AI_War_2_The_Spire_Rises/<br />
** Or on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/ai_war_2_the_spire_rises<br />
** Or on Humble: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/ai-war-2-the-spire-rises<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Grand New AI]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39108AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-06-08T17:01:54Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Beta 2.063 */</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.063 ==<br />
<br />
* Fixed the bug that Ovalcircle was seeing with -1s being serialized in the Dark Zenith in a place they should not have been.<br />
** Also added some extra info for deserialization errors on Dark Zenith.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
== Known Issues/Bug reports ==<br />
<br />
* Architrave can spawn close to each other (in one case, on adjacent planets). While not necessarily a bug, its not very interesting when they fight.<br />
** Should add a minimum hop distance between multiple.<br />
<br />
* ZAs need some adjusting on Nomad Planet Mode<br />
<br />
=== Links to Faction descriptions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having<br />
<br />
* Version 2.048 (Strategic Sage) - Zenith Miner Golem disappears shortly after showing up for unknown reasons. <br />
** Nomad movement when heading to homeworld is probably too fast - suggest at least doubling to 30s if not 45s to give the AI exo attacks time to have an effect. Also, I think AI response should be based mostly on AI difficulty. It's always going to be best to try to hack a planet close to the homeworld, which means there's not going to be much time for the AI to get the job done. An intense, short-term response (not Imperial Spire exo level, but severe) is IMO appropriate given the variability there. Other factors such as AIP I recommend to be minor, because this is best done as a late-game tactic and it should assume a strong player fleet/turret presence. <br />
** You can do the Crash hack after it has already been done, which is pointless and should probably be disabled. <br />
** Weird exo unit behavior as well, Chimera ignoring key targets and hitting FF frigate repeatedly as an example. I was able to hold it at bay indefinitely just by having that frigate in-system. <br />
** Suggest Crash hack not being available until all planets have been scouted. I didn't know where the AI homeworld was until it told me by heading there.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=39104AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-06-06T00:45:35Z<p>Ovalcircle1: Version 2.049 was changed to be Beta 2.062</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 ==<br />
<br />
==== What I am looking for starting this release ====<br />
<br />
* The code is essentially feature complete for all the DLC2 factions. So I am now looking for more types of feedback; these are all things I'd love to hear how you feel about.<br />
<br />
* Notifications<br />
** Typos. Clarity; do you understand what's being conveyed? Is there more information you want/need? <br />
<br />
* Overall Gameplay bugs. This includes things that you think are probably features but feel uncertain about.<br />
<br />
* Balance! Overall here's about how I feel on the impact of all the Factions. Overall everything but the DZ should feel "texturing"; it should add new stuff to the game, feel interesting and unique, but unless you crank the difficulty really high they shouldn't dominate. It's about making the galaxy feel big and complex and alive. <br />
** Zenith Miners: You should be able to defeat a Miner with a reasonably late game fleet, but otherwise it should be a major challenge. This faction isn't intended to be super scary; it's intended to give you a new objective to think/plan about.<br />
** Nomad Planets: These should be relatively low impact (except the Nomad Crash event, which should be extremely hard, like the Imperial Spire final battle).<br />
** Zenith Architrave: These should be medium impact; they should take over and be able to hold their chunk of the galaxy; fighting them should be winnable but a lot of effort. The ZA civil war should be Scary.<br />
** Dark Zenith: These should be the scariest minor faction in the game. This is where the "Zenith Onslaught" name comes from, and they want to live up to it. <br />
<br />
* Any other feedback that seems apropos.<br />
<br />
==== Miscellaneous ====<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs with ships/pathfinding trying to interact with already dead planets (in particular, threat waiting against dead planets)<br />
<br />
* Add the Nomadic Galaxy to the game; this is a setting in the Game Lobby that will cause all planets to move around the map like Nomad Planets. <br />
** This was originally manifested as a bug when the ZMs nomadified planets, but Starkelp suggested making it an an actual feature.<br />
<br />
* Started adding support for Wormhole Borers<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Architrave ====<br />
<br />
* Some buffs at the highest intensity levels<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
* Improve the notification for incoming Pioneers<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the report<br />
<br />
==== Dark Zenith ==== <br />
<br />
* DZ has a balance mechanism for its invasion and a first pass at balance. The DZ are intended to have their initial invasion force scale based on the OverallPowerLevel of all factions in the galaxy.<br />
** Open Season!<br />
<br />
* DZ fireteams will start as Defensive for a brief time you a chance to respond to the invasion<br />
<br />
* DZ can in theory build defenses; I'd love some feedback as to whether this is happening.<br />
<br />
* The Dark Alliance code is functional. Enabling the Dark Zenith in "Dark Alliance" mode will make the Dark Spire join them in their invasion. Having the Dark Zenith and Dark Spire enabled at once should be SCARY<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Miners ====<br />
* Zenith Miners have improved notification hovertext<br />
* Zenith Miners no longer vanish instantly<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Zenith Probes were never appearing<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow Zenith Miners to 'Nomadify' a planet; the planet will then move around the map like a Nomad planet. However, the planet lacks a Nomad Nexus so you won't be able to stop the planet wandering, or to crash the planet<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for the suggestion<br />
<br />
==== Nomad Planets ====<br />
* Nomad planets can't be hacked to crash if an AI Overlord hasn't been found. If you've only found some of the Overlords it will use the closest visible Overlord<br />
* Nomad Planets don't have the crash hack available after being hacked<br />
* Nomad Planets always take about 6 minutes to crash into the AI homeworld, regardless of where in the galaxy you hack it. Also the AI now actually sends some responses to this.<br />
** All thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Some nomad planets move clockwise, others widdershins<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Give the DZ some units when they invade<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
* Add some unique units. Much more to be done, but it's a start<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
== Known Issues/Bug reports ==<br />
<br />
* Architrave can spawn close to each other (in one case, on adjacent planets). While not necessarily a bug, its not very interesting when they fight.<br />
** Should add a minimum hop distance between multiple.<br />
<br />
* ZAs need some adjusting on Nomad Planet Mode<br />
<br />
=== Links to Faction descriptions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports/Feedback ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having<br />
<br />
* Version 2.048 (Strategic Sage) - Zenith Miner Golem disappears shortly after showing up for unknown reasons. <br />
** Nomad movement when heading to homeworld is probably too fast - suggest at least doubling to 30s if not 45s to give the AI exo attacks time to have an effect. Also, I think AI response should be based mostly on AI difficulty. It's always going to be best to try to hack a planet close to the homeworld, which means there's not going to be much time for the AI to get the job done. An intense, short-term response (not Imperial Spire exo level, but severe) is IMO appropriate given the variability there. Other factors such as AIP I recommend to be minor, because this is best done as a late-game tactic and it should assume a strong player fleet/turret presence. <br />
** You can do the Crash hack after it has already been done, which is pointless and should probably be disabled. <br />
** Weird exo unit behavior as well, Chimera ignoring key targets and hitting FF frigate repeatedly as an example. I was able to hold it at bay indefinitely just by having that frigate in-system. <br />
** Suggest Crash hack not being available until all planets have been scouted. I didn't know where the AI homeworld was until it told me by heading there.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Variations (Starkelp)<br />
*** For both the Architrave and players in the form of a rare GCA drop<br />
*** Optionally as a potential Architrave hack?<br />
**** Layered: Reduced damage the farther away a target is.<br />
**** Hardened: Heavily reduced damage while above 50% Shield strength.<br />
**** Impact: Radius (substantially) increases in Radius as it takes damage, starting small.<br />
**** Fortified: Much higher shield value, but much lower shield Radius.<br />
**** Glue: Also acts as a Tractor Array; does not decrease in size with damage.<br />
**** Corrosive: Also comes with a built-in Aoe Acid effect.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Building_Multiplayer&diff=39103AI War 2:Building Multiplayer2020-06-06T00:44:49Z<p>Ovalcircle1: The previous version is Version 2.062</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled but coming very soon.''' We first focused on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]), so thanks for your patience!<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
Now that we've got the first expansion under our belt, and the game is feeling large and solid at the equivalent of "first AI War plus four expansions," we're ready to tackle the next big thing: multiplayer! We also are going to be adding interplanetary weapons to the base game as a free update (that's the last of the kickstarter stretch goals). This phase should wrap up all our kickstarter promises (including a laundry list of other smaller items), and we expect to have multiplayer fully functional by June or July. <br />
<br />
Multiplayer should be in a beta form where folks can test on it and run into bugs long before then. While Chris is mostly working on multiplayer and those other little lingering base game features, Badger is going to be doing the bulk of the work on the second expansion, Zenith Onslaught. That should hopefully launch around the same time as multiplayer.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.063 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.062 Savegame/Networking Data Compaction ==<br />
(Released June 5th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''To play this on Steam, please go under betas and choose current_beta from the drop-down list. We would really appreciate some testers on this so that we can get back out of beta status as quickly as possible! There is not currently a way to get the beta versions on GOG, but we won't be in that status for more than a week, knock on wood. We want to make sure we didn't break anything with all the substantial changes in here, but we fully expect some savegames to throw cosmetic errors at the very minimum. Please report and upload those here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/'''<br />
<br />
* Add some new Planet Names based on ancient Mesopotamia<br />
<br />
* Allow the Outguard to kill Dyson Antagonizers<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Move the "Scout the planets" objective into Beginner Objectives<br />
<br />
* Imperial Spire Ships should now grant vision so you can watch the Fireworks<br />
* When the AI spawns a ship from Spire Debris, it takes the general mark level of the AI, and is no longer just mark 1<br />
** Thanks to ANGRYABOUTELVES for the suggestions<br />
<br />
* Improve the Brownout notification hovertext<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Added a new PKID class, and a PKIDGenerator.<br />
** These are not actually used yet, as they will complicate things and make save files larger again, probably.<br />
** This will be really important for multiplayer sync, particularly not in having rolling cascades of incorrect data that requires corrections. But as Chris started to get this implemented, he decided to wait at least one version for getting this all the way in there.<br />
<br />
* Added a PlanetImportanceUIOnly, which is something we can later use to let players do AIWC-style P1-P9 markings.<br />
** It's just the data storage right now.<br />
<br />
=== General Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference in the experimental astro trains code<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare but longstanding but where the message "Potential bug: planet [name] has no metal generators. This is unexpected" was showing up several times a second in some late-game macrophage games.<br />
** Basically this would be triggered at times where the metal harvester points were all too close together for the macrophage to be able to patrol between. Now they just hang out near the cluster of them when there's a planet with that sort of situation going on.<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another instance of "DoShotMovement: Error at debug stage 3200" that could happen if your background threads raced just wrong.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for the reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue that may or may not have come up before, but where fire teams could not be found, even if they existed, if at least one game second of the long range planning thread had not been run already.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of places in the macrophage code where it was making decisions based on what the humans are able to see of threat, not based on what actually exists for it to see of threat. Totally an accidental discovery, we'll see how that affects macrophage behavior when you don't have vision on its part of the map. It should be much smarter in those cases, now.<br />
<br />
* Improve the Major Data Center objective text.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could result in Spores being unable to move off planet when using smart expansion logic in a small section of the galaxy.<br />
** They were basically trying to go to the midway point between the two planets constantly, which doesn't exist if they're adjacent.<br />
*** Thanks to GreatYng on Mantis for the bug report and saves -- and StarKelp for fixing.<br />
<br />
* Fix several null references in Notifications<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AI Spire Research Labs and Citadels could spawn on neutral planets; they are now required to spawn on AI planets.<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the brownout notification hovertext<br />
** Thanks to fwiffoforce for reporting <br />
<br />
* Partially constructed Logistical Command Stations no longer grant vision<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the lobby text for Risk Analyzers to clarify things<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a very old and very annoying bug where any strike or officer fleets you tried to assign to the None hotkey would reassign themselves a second later.<br />
** Thanks to deo, Ecthelon, and Admiral for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Achievement Fixes ====<br />
<br />
* The "Teach a Man to Fish" achievement should now work<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing, fwiffoforce and Thrankos on steam for reporting. Probably others as well.<br />
<br />
* The "This Will Definitely Make Things Better And Not Worse" should now work<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* The So We're the Bad Guys Now? achievement should now work<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* The achievements for beating the Bar Fighter AI Type should now work<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting<br />
<br />
* The achievements for beating the Kite Master hunter fleet should now work<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Major Fireteams Upgrade For Some Factions (Backported From Upcoming DLC2) ===<br />
<br />
'''''Please bear in mind that none of the work that is happening on DLC2 is slowing down multiplayer at all. These are two independent projects by Badger and Chris at the moment.'''''<br />
<br />
* Fireteams have been reworked to allow for factions that opt in to support requirements for "Which faction(s) or units am I required to attack?"<br />
** Currently only used for the Hunter Fleet in the base game.<br />
<br />
* The goal is to allow the AI have very strong responses against secondary factions that won't also kill you<br />
** For example, lets say you've requested a pretty OP secondary faction team of Nanocaust, Scourge and Marauders.<br />
*** The AI can now spawn Extragalactic War Units that are only allowed to go after that minor faction team (which allows the AI to defend itself much more effectively).<br />
*** When these special Extragalactic War Units defeats its enemies, it will warp out of the galaxy.<br />
<br />
* This lets us make more terrifying minor factions without them just ending the game (by attacking you, when you didn't do anything), and is a required item for DLC2 (because that's going to have some terrifying factions) that is backported to the base game.<br />
<br />
* Somewhat related: allow the Nanocaust and Marauders to have an Overall Power Level.<br />
** This plays into the way that the AI is able to respond to things that are "OP", in the way that we've got them reacting to the Fallen Spire in DLC1. But this lets that sort of response be mounted in purely the base game.<br />
<br />
* Also add a mechanism for hunter fleet fireteams to be created to target specific units in the game. <br />
** We can use this mechanism going forward to try to let the AI have a bonus response if you take certain very powerful objectives, which allows us to create stronger capturable structures (since we can invisibly balance them by just giving the AI a bit more oomph that will force you to defend those structures very carefully.<br />
<br />
* Also non-scourge minor factions can now have explicitly Defensive Fleets. Currently not used for any base game factions.<br />
<br />
=== Balance ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug for the last two weeks where all AI units had the hull/shield values for Mark 1 units. This was a significant unintentional nerf to the AI<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, including Starkelp and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Player-allied minor factions no longer kill warp gates by default. Instead the Hunter Fleet gets lots of bonus ships intended to go after your allies.<br />
** Needs lots of balance testing<br />
<br />
* When Marauders attack with their ships, those ships can now attack other planets through wormholes. Previously those ships were required to be defensive, and the Marauders would need to build Raiders to spread through wormholes. <br />
** This is a potentially significant buff to allowing Marauder Empires to get off the ground quickly in unguarded areas of the galaxy.<br />
<br />
* When you take a Major Data Center the hunter fleet will just get a bit stronger with hunter fleet ships that will be focused exclusively on killing your MDCs.<br />
** This removes the anti-MDC exo waves, which were a hacky/kludgey response at best. This is probably a nerf to the AI right now and will need some tuning<br />
=== Savegame File Size Reduction ===<br />
<br />
* Arcen's xml reader now supports directly reading 16bit integers and individual bytes from xml fields, which fits with the new variance in types that we have coming up in the data stored throughout the game.<br />
<br />
* The game now explicitly mentions that Immediate Invasion Nanocaust is very hard<br />
<br />
* Put in a couple of improvements so that the game is now able once again to load a good savegame after failing to load a bad savegame.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the serialization class to let us specify larger buffers, and buffer growth rates, to prevent cases where incremental small additions cause repeat buffer resizes. This was slowing down even loopback network transport at the moment (aka single player), and slowing down game saves.<br />
** This is a performance improvement, not a data filesize improvement, hence it not being in the section below.<br />
<br />
* Removed all of the types of serialization code that we have except for Keith's BuzzsawBinaryArray.<br />
** We were wasting some cycles -- not a lot, but some -- on checking what mode we were in, and if there were delimiters, and if there were type labels, etc. Since we use none of those features, stripping it down to just the highly-performant core is a good idea for performance of network message encoding and decoding in particular.<br />
** This also does help make the code a bit easier for us to follow, since it's all one mode now.<br />
** This is a performance improvement, not a data filesize improvement, hence it not being in the section below.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Deserialization Data Sizes" debug option in personal settings.<br />
** loading a game, write WorldDeserializationDataSizes.txt in the PlayerData folder. When a savegame is really large, turning this on lets us figure out what is taking up so much space so that we can potentially make some optimizations.<br />
<br />
* Added some complicated new classes and write structures to actually pull out data being read by type, and aggregate it as we wish, so that we can write the above sort of information.<br />
<br />
* Improved the way that the "external data patterns" are saved in savegames.<br />
** On a test case 8mb savegame, this saves half a mb.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of extra instrumentation has been added into the game for savegame deserialization and serialization, both, to let us see what is happening and why.<br />
<br />
* Found a trio of places directly in fleets, and two places in "minor faction common external" data internal dictionaries that were serializing ship names by name instead of index.<br />
** Converting this to use indices instead saves another 0.3 of a MB off of the large test savegame case we found.<br />
<br />
* New debug settings option: Write Deserialization Fireteam Data<br />
** When loading a game, write information about all the fireteams you're loading to disk. When a savegame has a ton of fireteams and you don't know why, or who owns them or what they are doing, this helps debug.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the ExtensionMethodsFor_SpecialFactionData class, which was something that required editing a central file in order to get certain faction features. Those factions features are now implemented as virtual methods that can be overridden by other classes with us blind.<br />
** This did require us to add a FireteamBase class in the main ArcenCore code, but that was a solid tradeoff for making fireteams automatically work with any potential mods in the future without them having to use any central methods to do so.<br />
<br />
* Refactored various fireteams code to get less repetition and more centralized code for a few basic things.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a few places with scourge and nanocaust fireteams to clear our disbanded fire teams each long range planning pass if they were somehow missed before.<br />
** All of the other factions did this already, but adding this to these two shrunk the test savegame we had from 7mb to 4mb on one save and load cycle, then to 2.8mb on the next cycle.<br />
** This tells us that, somehow, duplicate copies of fireteams were probably being logged into at least one of the central lists, which would have this effect as well as make processing a lot slower since it would process a few things multiple times. <br />
<br />
* ArcenLinkedList has been split into two.<br />
** There is now ArcenOverLinkedList, which is still used for the three main GameEntity classes.<br />
*** This one has a couple of funky hooks in for when an entity dies, which is appropriate for them but for nothing else. They're connected on purpose for benefits like performance and cleanup when something dies.<br />
** There is also now ArcenLessLinkedList, which is used for all of them, planets, fire teams, frenzy fleets, and more.<br />
*** These basically treat each list as an independent entity, and there's no concept of an entity "dying and being removed from everything." They're independent on purpose.<br />
<br />
* Converting over so many things to use the ArcenLessLinkedList was a huge number of code shifts, so hopefully we didn't break anything with that.<br />
** We did fix some minor inefficiencies as we made these changes, aside from the efficiency boosts of this being a thing in general.<br />
** Now that this is done, however, we immediately get the benefit of on the first save-load cycle it takes the 7mb save down to 2.8mb. In other words, duplicate fire teams are no longer possible to accidentally have, because their lists reject that.<br />
<br />
* The number of fireteams has been cut down dramatically by the fix to deprecated fireteams hanging around in general, but fireteam history items are still very long compared to what they could be in terms of data size.<br />
** In the example savegame that was originally 8mb, which is now down to 2.8mb, we are left with 790 fireteam history strings, which total 219.6729 KB in savegame space. This is an average of 284 bytes per history item.<br />
** We have implemented a new history item style which stores between 2 and 5 integers, with the most common case being 4 integers.<br />
** Normally a 32bit integer requires 4 bytes, but thanks to Keith's buzzsaw binary array, our average storage space required is 1.79 bytes in practice.<br />
** We can't actually measure the effect on this exact savegame, because old history items will be kept in the less-efficient string format. But it will only keep the most recent 2 history events that are string-style, cutting it down some (often they had 3 or so).<br />
** However, if we take a general average of assuming that we had 790 events that were in the new format, and on average have 4 integers with, let's say, 3 bytes required for each (to be even more pessimistic), then we would go from 219.6729 KB in savegame space for those fireteam histories down to 9.2578 KB. That's a 96% compression!<br />
** Bear in mind that since this formmat is new, we might have introduced some bugs in the display of fire team histories, but hopefully not. It also lets us make the formatting of them be more consistent, since it's all centrally defined now. Testing thus far has been promising on the bugs front.<br />
** Interestingly, after letting the savegame in question run for about 14 minutes (gametime), it did increase in size by about 100 KB (huh?). But upon loading the new 14-minutes-later savegame, the fire team data had dropped from 237.6553 KB down to 21.6162 KB total for the fire teams and their histories. That is with 572 fireteams, and it looks like 10 old-style text histories and all the other histories being in the new style.<br />
<br />
* Mostly as a test case for something we want to do later with GameCommand, but also as a way to improve the data storage requirements (trivial) and calculation requirements (less so) for "strength counting data" for each faction, it has been split into several subordinate data structures which are only calculated when actually relevant.<br />
** In a game with 22 factions on 80 planets, this amount of data drops from 129.9697 KB to 94.9980 KB (see? trivial).<br />
** However, this does translate into only 54,651 integers being calculated 10 times per second, down from 75,238 integers 10 times per second. And that is less trivial, as those integers are not all trivial to calculate.<br />
** We may be able to cut this down even further, but on maps of reasonable sizes it doesn't look like this is a real bottleneck, so this remains for now just a useful test case (the test shows that this sort of thing can work quite elegantly, which is great news).<br />
** In savegames from before this game version, loaded into this game version, there may be strange decision-making for 1/10th of one second. But actually, probably not even that because it recalculates this even while you are paused, so by the time you could possibly unpause the data is there again. This game is kind of a technological beast.<br />
<br />
* Also moved the strength counting data code into its own file for easier editing in the future.<br />
** Also also, this provides the template for us to have more specialized strength counting things added in the future for just some factions without it being something that loads down every faction's processing time. Which could be useful or may not be.<br />
<br />
* The way that entity systems are serialized is now far more granular, using some serialization flags that are written at the time of saving a game (or transmitting across the network) to say what kind of data to expect.<br />
** This lets us omit a lot of data in cases where it is a bunch of blanks or otherwise not needed (becuse of the type of system not needing that type of data, etc).<br />
** The cost of this is one extra 32bit integer, in an enum flag format, and the savings is pretty substantial. This is primarily a test case for what we will do with GameEntity itself, although it's also useful inherently on systems -- to some extent we were avoiding adding too much data onto systems, because of risk of bloating save files. Now we have the mechanisms by which we can do it.<br />
** In our existing large-savegame test case, this moves the system data from being 166.4932 KB (not huge, we know) for 29,123 ship systems, down to 118.4746 KB for those same number of ships. That's not exactly a giant compression of data, but it was the test case after all.<br />
<br />
* There were some very old player profiles stored in a different serialziation format which we simply no longer support. It will probably affect almost nobody, since it's been prior to version 2.012 that profiles were in that format, and if it fails to load the old profile they just create a new one and nothing is really lost.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an internal issue where we were calculating the amount of bytes being deserialized slightly wrong; individual pieces of data are stored in a bitstream that can span a couple of bytes, and so typically this meant that we were overestimating how many bytes of data was actually being read.<br />
** This gives us a more accurate view of how large our data actually is, particularly as we drill down more.<br />
** The overall data size was corrected from being 2.5705 MB to 2.5702 MB, so as you can see at a macro scale it is hardly any difference at all.<br />
** Oddly, we discovered that a lot of bools were not properly being logged, although their macro file size was. Not sure what was up with that, but it gives us a more correct picture now. That does change our total reads of data points in the example file from 1,329,568 to 3,420,471, though -- now sub-tracked all properly. 859,317 bools read out at a size of 104.8971 KB, versus the wrong statement of 107,830 bools read out at 105.3027 KB.<br />
** 32bit integers were in the same boat, more or less, with 1.9432 MB being the agreed-upon correct amount for both new and old formats. But in the new format we can see it was actually 2,362,745 ints making that up, not just 1,143,492 of them. That makes a big difference to how we evaluate the cost of things in our saves.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted how we are saving the data for entity systems, based on how we've learned about things from the deserialization log accuracy improving.<br />
** Essentially, a blank value (empty string, 0 on an int or similar) is just one bit. Using a large int32 bitflag array, we don't save enough space to warrant using them. We should instead be using bool gates.<br />
** BUT, because of the tiny size of blank values, we need to be using them ONLY for places where we would be saving at least a couple of real values, or 2+ blanks, in order to break even on space or save space.<br />
** This is harder to do in small data classes, but an easier rule of thumb and actually a lot easier to read in code.<br />
** In this particular case, the data stored is actually NOT smaller, but this is because of some of the data types we're using, not the methodology of actually doing the saving. So we'll be improving those data types, along with a number of other things.<br />
<br />
==== Revised Serialization Format ====<br />
<br />
* As part of our changes to our serialization buffer writing numbers, we now have it do a few quick comparison checks to do far fewer searches in a loop.<br />
** This is a major CPU timesaver during serializing a number for either disk or the network. Literally in an average savegame it may save as many as 40 million loops, 40 million bitshifts, and 40 million bitwise operators.<br />
<br />
* For our serialization process, we've been extremely efficient at serialiizing things via "buzzsaw binary," which has a lot in common with "variable length quantity" encoding, but is even more aggressive in size reduction. This was something that Keith LaMothe originally designed, and he documented the vast savings at the time that we had in terms of file size compared to other formats (straight out binary, or character strings), and the processing power compared to these other formats if they are then compressed for transport (as they would have to be) is really notable.<br />
** However, we're now taking this further, by quite a bit, and have implemented a new version of the serializer and deserializer that supports smaller data types, tighter packing of certain data types, fewer loops in all cases (as noted above), and a few other features.<br />
** The savings that you get out of the new type is something that you have to look at a savegame in aggregate in order to tell how much space you're saving.<br />
** We've verified that we can now accurately store in the new format:<br />
** strings (more compact) and chars (could not directly do before)<br />
*** We may later add in an Latin-letters-centric version that has heavily stripped-down data. Right now this takes 16 bits per character, and is 15% of the savegame filesize that we're experiencing in our test save.<br />
** bools (literally 1 bit, same as before)<br />
** bytes (now stored in native size, whereas before each byte took an average of 2 bytes to store -- but we also were not using this format).<br />
** 16 bit ints, signed and unsigned.<br />
*** For numbers, we also have the ability for either 0 to take 1 bit, or -1 to be the sole negative number and take 1 bit as the "null case."<br />
**** Previously, a -1 in these circumstances would take a whopping 10 bits, so any code that had -1 as the default instead of 0 was a bloat if it was used commonly.<br />
*** In these cases, because of some "inferred bit" logic that we've also now added (shaving another bit off most numbers), we can't tell the difference between a 0 and 1 in an unsigned zero-not-default format. So there's some extra minor code in there that actually turns 0s into just two bits of storage, while -1s are 1 bit in those formats. Kind of a double bonus, in the main!<br />
** 32 bit ints, signed and unsigned once again, and with the alternative defaults and so on.<br />
*** Not counting the new defaults keeping things so much smaller as described above (and that will make the biggest difference), we're saving something like 3 bits per integer compared to the old version.<br />
*** By the time you get to 32bit or 64bit integers, Keith had squeezed pretty much all out of it that could be squeezed, a few edge cases in our style of data aside. It was mostly in smaller number formats (supporting them directly at and below 16 bits, and using smaller bitlength number formats for 32bit and down).<br />
** 64 bit ints, which are used as the foundation for floats and FInts to be passed around.<br />
<br />
* So, after all that conversion to a new data type work, and drastic code changes, and some 30+ hours of work, we get an improvement in data sizes of...about 10%.<br />
** That's disheartening in the extreme (though we already got huge gains elsewhere on savegames), but one thing that is positive is that the new serialization does far less work to actually do the saving of the data, and that's a notable win for multiplayer.<br />
** We do also have other things we can do to get the data sizes even lower, but mostly those are strategies we could have used without having gone through all of this giant effort to get the data formats themselves 10% more efficient.<br />
** On the other other hand, had we not gone through all this work to get the 10% gains, we would have always wondered if it would have been more gains than that, and by going through the process of getting the 10% gains we gained a better understanding of some aspects of the codebase and fixed a number of other small bugs.<br />
** In the end it wasn't a wasted venture, but the payoff is disappointingly low in terms of performance/savegame gains compared to what we'd hoped it would be.<br />
<br />
* A variety of places in the new ArcenSerializationBuffer were throwing exceptions when data that was out of range was passed in, but now those just show an error message and write to you log, while correcting the data as best it can so that it can save.<br />
** This isn't for overflows or underflows, but is for when a negative number was passed or less than -1 was passed in other cases.<br />
<br />
===== Data Cleanup And Fixes We Found On The Way =====<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the FPoint class, as it's not something we ever use, and we're going to be adjusting how we handle a number of our internal classes.<br />
** We're preparing to implement a number of new custom data types, some of which are targeted at making multiplayer performance possible without worrying about cascading desyncs or other issues of that sort.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the old solar system planet info, which has been completely unused since who knows when.<br />
* The data it was storing should not have been serialized anyhow, but was.<br />
<br />
* Fixing something that has been bothering me for years, the PlanetTypeData stuff has been moved out into its own file.<br />
** We've always kept these type definitions in their own files, separate from the actual object definition, and why this one was an exception is unknown.<br />
<br />
* Basically all the enums in the game now specify their underlying data type directly, instead of just defaulting to int32.<br />
<br />
* A ton of data types have become more specific, as in hundreds of fields, and this will make everything serialize more compactly as well as initialize new objects slightly faster.<br />
** This is going to require basically every mod to be recompiled at bare minimum, along with the new requirements on how data is deserialized.<br />
<br />
* The old serialization gates have been removed, as we only had one in the first place, and have been using something that is xml-driven for the last few years.<br />
** It's apparently spring cleaning time in the code, since we're converting so many things over.<br />
<br />
* The science and hacking points gathered on a planet are no longer stored by faction index, but instead are stored globally for all humans.<br />
** This is how we made the code work anyway, so now the data storage matches. It's a major QOL improvement for players in multiplayer to not have to each gather science on each other's planets, and something we discussed publicly a while ago with a lot of people being happy.<br />
<br />
* There was a whole bunch of code that was using the mark level by RowIndex, instead of by Ordinal.<br />
** This may or may not have been a problem, it's hard to say, but if there were later modded-in mark levels it definitely would have been.<br />
** As it stands, it's possible that this fix might break something else, so if you see any odd mark levels, please let us know.<br />
** Honestly, as the code reads, it's kind of surprising that there weren't problems from this already.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of our "ContainsValueType" list extensions, as that seemed more potentially problematic than anything else. It was also very rarely used.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the "RelatedEnumValue" field on GameCommands, as we only used that for one thing with AI scrapping units for budget refunds.<br />
** That scrap code for refunds was no longer in use, so has also been removed.<br />
<br />
* Preliminary adjustments made to our network library to handle the better data formatting that we are able to send now.<br />
** There's a bunch more to test with that later, but we now get a very nice binary-to-binary style of transfer, super slim, with no conversions to char arrays in the middle, or compression of parts, etc.<br />
<br />
* Renamed a whole lot of variables that were too vague, so that now we know if an "index" means that of a planet or faction or whatever.<br />
** Just general code sanitation.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with effective full membership strengths in fleets being able to be a negative number in some cases if there was not an explicit squad cap set.<br />
** These now correct themselves to 0, but it doesn't seem to have been breaking anything.<br />
<br />
* Turns out there was all sorts of funky data in some older savegames, and we now have optional overrides on the deserializers that let us pass in a field name so that we can easily see what the field that is out of range was.<br />
** This is not something that you need to generally do, if you're a modder. It's just there for if you're having problems.<br />
<br />
* Also added in a new SetIfNextIntErrorsThenCorrect method on deserializers, which lets us correct old data rather than complain about it, for cases where we find it.<br />
** This is something that we should only be using where it actually comes up that there is bad data in some saves, but it's a tool to make those saves load in properly and have correct data, versus failing to load or continuing to have bad data.<br />
<br />
* In general there is more error-checking and self-checking now as we read in and out data, but in a way that doesn't slow the actual read and write process down.<br />
<br />
* Fireteams were variously setting their invalid state to be -1 through -5. By convention we use just -1 normally, and we can read/write that as two bits instead of 10 bits, so we've converted all of it to be -1 now.<br />
** As part of that, places we were serializing the fireteam IDs now auto-correct old data that was less than -1 to be -1.<br />
<br />
* Apparently it was sometimes possible to have negative hull points lost, aka more health than baseline. This is now self-correcting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a transient exception that could happen in PrivateExoNotifier if you were loading a lot of savegames back to back.<br />
<br />
* More detailed serialization logging is now in place for when savegame logging is enabled, which lets us get a lot more info on things that are different between the versions if they are.<br />
<br />
* Fix to loading and then resaving certain very old savegames from around the time extra hacking event data was added (August 2019 saves were where we saw the problem in our testing). This is unrelated to any of our recent changes, but just something we caught during regression testing.<br />
<br />
==== Benchmark Results ====<br />
<br />
* Test case improvements in savegame filesize:<br />
** SPIRER322.save: 8.3507 MB (3,858,950 data points) to 2.4009 MB (3,453,855 data points). '''28.7% size'''<br />
** Last_Hope_16.save: 1.4435 MB (1,699,258 data points) to 1.0071 MB (1,570,970 data points). '''69.7% size'''<br />
** decloakingTest.save: 1.4546 MB (1,752,227 data points) to 1.0690 MB (1,630,603 data points). '''73.4% size'''<br />
** tech history.save: 594.1520 KB (696,137 data points) to 483.9174 KB (629,171 data points). '''81.4% size'''<br />
** golem insane.save: 588.5422 KB (696,573 data points) to 483.7046 KB (628,923 data points). '''82.1% size'''<br />
** fail to deser.save: 541.8727 KB (653,298 data points) to 441.2745 KB (588,517 data points). '''81.4% size'''<br />
** performance_concern.save: 2.2050 MB (2,170,709 data points) to 1.3692 MB (2,127,092 data points). '''62.1% size'''<br />
** LateGameZeusSpire.save: 3.5690 MB (3,073,064 data points) to 1.9468 MB (2,904,438 data points). '''54.5% size'''<br />
** FreshSpireCity.save: 614.7300 KB (678,371 data points) to 500.2831 KB (642,760 data points). '''81.3% size'''<br />
** assist menu.save: 412.8888 KB (545,698 data points) to 385.0891 KB (503,506 data points). '''93.2% size'''<br />
** manychanges.save: 415.7845 KB (487,742 data points) to 356.0349 KB (430,439 data points). '''85.6% size'''<br />
** extragalactic slow.save: 1.1419 MB (787,800 data points) to 615.9395 KB (730,003 data points) '''52.6% size'''<br />
** TurretTest Dec7 2019.save: 388.5265 KB (500,837 data points) to 365.4358 KB (445,445 data points) '''94.0% size'''<br />
** Releasing Nanocost Aug 29 2019.save: 1.7157 MB (2,142,369 data points) to 1.1955 MB (1,992,190 data points) '''69.6% size'''<br />
** Aug 5 2019.save: 1.5154 MB (1,615,230 data points) to 1.0923 MB (1,599,636 data points) '''72.1% size'''<br />
** 000 bug Nov 8 2019.save: 598.0068 KB (789,163 data points) to 447.1401 KB (613,200 data points) '''74.8% size'''<br />
** spire save scourge 3.save: 851.2179 KB (962,252 data points) to 643.9442 KB (881,762 data points) '''75.6% size'''<br />
** Please note that all of these savegames (among others) were used as regression tests, and we verified that the data went in and came out identically. A number of these failed regression tests at various points, which we fixed before moving on. They all pass now.<br />
<br />
* Here are some specific subsets of data sizes based on data type, in real-world average case savegames:<br />
** Bools take exactly 1 bit to store. '''100% size'''<br />
** Bytes (normally 8 bits) take 4.74 bits to store on average, depending on the save. '''59.2% size'''<br />
** 16-bit integers that are not allowed to be null take an average of 1.78 bits instead of 16. '''11.1% size'''<br />
*** Largely this is probably because a very small minority of them have data, or they have very low numbers in them that can be represented in a small size.<br />
** 16-bit integers that cannot be less than -1 take an average of 11.38 bits instead of 16. '''71.1% size'''<br />
*** Largely this is because a ton more of them have data, but not all of them. And we have a special case for the -1 value where it only costs two bits. 0 costs 1 bit.<br />
*** These are used heavily to identify fireteams, planets, and factions by index.<br />
** 16-bit signed integers are barely used in the game, to the point we don't have enough data to give any sort of average.<br />
** 32-bit integers that are signed are used almost exclusively for coordinates, and take an average of 12.71 bits (instead of 32) '''39.7% size'''<br />
** 32-bit integers that are not allowed to be null take an average of 5.27 bits instead of 32. '''16.4% size'''<br />
*** Largely this is probably because a very small minority of them have data, or they have very low numbers in them that can be represented in a small size.<br />
** 32-bit integers that cannot be less than -1 take an average of 2.71 bits instead of 32. '''8.46% size'''<br />
*** Largely this is because a ton more of them have data, but not all of them. And we have a special case for the -1 value where it only costs two bits. 0 costs 1 bit.<br />
*** These are used heavily to identify ships/squads, shots, and wormholes by ID.<br />
** 64bit signed integers are not used enough for us to have valid averages for them. But the worst case is pretty much used for the single instance of one, and it winds up using 70.00 bits instead of 64 bits. '''109.0% size'''<br />
** Strings are highly variable in size, but they require one Int16 non-negative for the length, and then the equivalent of one signed Int16 for each character. '''100.0% size'''<br />
*** We can cut this down in a future update, but rarely do strings use more than 14% of our total savegame size on a late-game savegame.<br />
*** There IS at the moment a floor of about 100KB of data that is being used by strings in the saves, and cutting that in half (ish) with future improvements would be nice.<br />
** Floats are not used for any sim-related since they are not reliably deterministic between machines.<br />
*** But we do store some of them for purposes of some purely visual aspects, and internally we convert them to an FInt first. Under the hood, THAT is an Int64, and at any rate they wind up taking 26.54 bits instead of 64bits in our case. '''41.4% size'''<br />
*** Basically none of them are zero, but they are small enough numbers that we save a lot of space. Yes, smaller numbers take fewer bits in this crazy format.<br />
** FInts, or fixed-int numbers, which have three significant digits of precision at the moment (we are thinking of changing the format up soon, but must investigate first) take an average of 5.48 bits instead of 64. These are Int64s internally. '''8.56% size'''<br />
<br />
== Version 2.048 Bugfixes ==<br />
(Released May 22nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The text of forcefield frigates no longer mentions (erroneously) that ships under them deal half damage.<br />
** Additionally, they now benefit from the Heavy hull type, letting them get above mark 4 if you invest in enough upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to Nyteblade for reporting both.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo in the hack for claiming the new Fleet Research Station ships that was not charging you their AIP properly.<br />
** Thanks to kasnavada and Spook for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new cheat code:<br />
** <code>heal me</code><br />
*** The issuing human player gets all of their deployed ships on the planet they are currently view completely healed in terms of shields, hull, and cloaking points.<br />
*** This is incredibly useful for testing, if you're trying to accomplish something but your test ships are getting shot to bits.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "LocalMultiplierWhenNoDeltaTime" on planets, which factors in two things:<br />
** Firstly, if game speed is running faster. Secondly, if there is coarse background processing going on.<br />
** For things that normally just happen "every sim step" at a flat rate, which are few and far between, they should now be multiplied by this.<br />
** The lack of this is why it was taking 16 realtime seconds to decloak ships when at 4x sim speed when normally it would take 4 seconds in 1x sim speed.<br />
** Thanks to wm46, DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY, and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some code that makes decloaking far more efficient, and far more clear.<br />
** Essentially, as it tries to find tachyon targets it only looks at ships that can possibly be cloaked.<br />
** But secondarily, it then only issues orders to decloak ships that are currently cloaked.<br />
** This makes it so that you can tell something is busy decloaking because it haas a beam out to decloak an enemy, NOT because it has a beam out to all the things it has decloaked or could decloak on a planet (that got intense).<br />
** The end result is functionally the same but visually more clear and computationally vastly more efficient.<br />
<br />
* Found an incredibly old style of profiling logging data that we have not used for years, but which was in there slowing things down on random occasions, writing to disk in things we did not even need.<br />
** We've implemented several new kinds of profiling since this, and this was supposed to be toggle-on in the first place, but somehow it was getting toggled on some of the time. It has now be stripped out to be sure it is never accidentally on and wasting your CPU and disk cycles.<br />
<br />
* For reasons we can't at all trace, it was possible to sometimes get extra flagships of both the correct and incorrect types in a fallen spire city.<br />
** It now detects and removes these extras, and logs a "soft warning" invisibly to your local log. If you see these sorts of soft warnings, it won't hurt anything, but it does let you know it fixed the error.<br />
** This was reasonably rare, and we're taking care to make sure and add in missing flagships if there ever are any, too.<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for the sole two repo cases and reports we had of this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a very annoying issue where if you had ships selected directly (as in not by fleet), then when they went through a wormhole they would become unselected. This was basically working as-coded, but why we had it that way is a big question mark. When we reworked the selection code, we had thought we'd removed all things of that sort. And with the ability to give cross-planet commands (move to a point on a planet you are not on, or attack a unit on a planet you are not on), the desire to keep selections consistent regardless of where you go is definitely longstanding.<br />
** Thanks to FDru and Benkyo for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.047 Perks By Another Mother ==<br />
(Released May 21st, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the tips to no longer mention EXP, and to mention the direct science upgrades.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where if you were C-clicking a fleet's upgrade without having enough science to do the upgrade, it wouldn't show the popup with info about what the upgrade would be like.<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a divide by 0 in the scourge code<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tweak the rules for when nanocaust spawners are allowed to spawn<br />
** Thanks to Histidine for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make sure AI Reserves are friendly to All AIs and hostile to all Players<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting some oddities<br />
<br />
* Added a new cheat code:<br />
** <code>my potluck</code> OR use the short form <code>mp</code><br />
*** The issuing human player gets a random grab bag of ships spawned on the center of the planet they are viewing in a new fleet named "Potluck [Something]." Many of the ships will not be ships that a player could normally get.<br />
*** This is incredibly useful for testing hacks, for instance.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Agile Transports now have half the health and shields of other transports, to match their description.<br />
** Thanks to Waladil for noticing the inconsistency.<br />
<br />
* Raiders, Daggers, and so on now have basically double the hull health that they did before, except vicious raiders have a bit more than double the prior.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* All of the player and AI mobile forcefield generators, which already no longer shrink when taking damage, also no longer cause a firing penalty for ships firing from under them (aka they are now great-forcefields). This is consistent with AIWC, and makes them a lot more useful.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! and StarKelp for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The AI guard post with a shield, and shield generator in general, also no longer have firing penalties for out from under them (though they do shrink). This is also now consistent with AIWC, and is basically because they are more "finely tuned."<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== Fireteam Changes ====<br />
<br />
* When a bunch of fireteams are deciding on a new target, the code correctly now figures out when a target is being significantly overkilled, and stop assigning fireteams to that target.<br />
** The practical upshot of this is that fireteam-based factions (Scourge, Hunter Fleet, etc) are now much better at dividing their attention and striking at multiple points simultaneously<br />
** This code has been in for some time, but there was a bug that was preventing it from working right<br />
** A faction can choose to keep the previous behaviour by setting NoDeathballing = false on all its fireteams.<br />
** For right now, the Nanocaust is going to keep its old deathball behaviour, pending discussion/polling at https://steamcommunity.com/app/573410/discussions/0/2246679252927977012/<br />
<br />
* Reduce a fireteam's speed bonus when attacking a planet. They were going a bit too quick, and this nerf should help compensate for the intelligence buff<br />
<br />
=== Fleet Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Previously, you could only have 5 ship lines per fleet. This led to a lot of juggling of ship lines, and other unpleasant things. This limit has been increased to 40 ship lines.<br />
** One reason among many that this was a restriction was because of how the EXP system was set up previously. At this point there is no good reason to have things be so limited... with the possible exception of some units that give fleet-wide bonuses, like Raiders. It may be that we need to rethink Raiders having this advantage, as it may simply be too powerful.<br />
** At any rate, fleets can basically be whatever size organizational unit you need them to be, now, which lets them function a bit more like control groups once did.<br />
** Thanks to SplitterWind and others for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Any ships in fleet lines that you swap between fleets no longer are destroyed if the member is on the same planet as its new flagship.<br />
** Aka, if 20 of your ships from that line are on a different planet, they would still be destroyed, but if 40 from that same line were with their new flagship, they would be preserved.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== New Hackable: Fleet Research Stations ====<br />
<br />
* Technical details: ARSes and similar can now be modded via xml to give different numbers of options of strikecraft and frigates with these options:<br />
** grants_stuff_to_be_added_to_player_fleets_strikecraft_options and grants_stuff_to_be_added_to_player_fleets_frigate_options.<br />
** The defaults remain 4 and 1, respectively.<br />
<br />
* Technical details: Added a new "Fleet Research Station," or FRS, which is a lot more rare than the Advanced Research Station (ARS). These are also only on the other side of the galaxy, mainly.<br />
** These are the first of a new group of structures to use a "grants_stuff_to_be_added_to_player_fleets_required_tag" xml attribute, which lets us limit what sort of specific ships they can grant. Modders can make us of this to do more things, if they desire.<br />
** This is paired with a new fleet design "OtherHackables," which can keep these new ship types out of the main rotations but still able to be gotten by special buildings.<br />
** Since it has to match by tag, this is really great for mods to be able to do all sorts of specific ship-granting sub buildings. And we can do that in the game if we so wish, as well.<br />
<br />
* Technical details: There is a new "aip_when_granted_by_hack", which is on the new FRS ship types. These are things that cost you more than mere hacking points.<br />
** Here again, mods can do some very intersting things!<br />
<br />
* The idea behind the FRSes is that they grant you costly, but very powerful and rare ship types that you can't get any other way, which give you fleet-wide bonuses.<br />
** The actual ships from the FRS are barely the point -- yeah, they can be cool, but the main point is the sort of bonus that they give to the entire fleet as a whole.<br />
** These are basically a new way of handling the Perks system, letting you get Perks from FRSes instead of what we had thought about via EXP gains in the past.<br />
** AND these perks are transferable between fleets, since the perks are in the form of a specialized ship.<br />
** It's worth noting that your fleet gets the perk even if none of the ships of the line are actually built at the moment (or at all).<br />
<br />
==== 6 New FRS Ships To Capture (Fleet-Wide Perks) ====<br />
<br />
* The ability that Raiders had that supercharges the speed of the rest of the fleet was indeed too powerful to just have as a random one-off ability on a variety of ships. That has been removed.<br />
<br />
* Added three new supercharge abilities, which caused a LOT of code changes.<br />
** These let a ship buff the hulls, shields, or attack power of their entire fleet.<br />
** This is ONLY meant to be used for player factions.<br />
** The strength of fleets and the ships within them get recalculated properly to account for these changes, which is a bigger deal than you might think.<br />
** We can also build upon this framework in a lot of various ways in order to allow for ambient effects at a planet to affect player ship stats, as another example.<br />
*** Trying to use this for ambient effects on any form of NPC ships would absolutely not work, and also this would assume that an entire fleet is on one planet, so there are some pitfalls even there.<br />
** Trying to keep these things computationally-brief is tough if we're not careful, but we've been careful.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Turbo Raider ship, which you can only get via hacking an FRS, and which costs you 40 AIP to get, but which gives you 90 raider-like ships (wow powerful), and also makes the entire rest of the fleet (except flagship) super fast.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Tutelar Pulsar Tank that you can get from an FRS for 40 AIP, giving you 50 pulsar-tank-like ships (holy smokes) that ALSO buff the health of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.5x.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Inciting Parasite that you can get from an FRS for 60 AIP, giving you 90 parasite-like ships (holy smokes) that ALSO buff the attack power of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.5x.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Encircling Spider that you can get from an FRS for 50 AIP, giving you 120 spider-like ships (wow) that ALSO buff the shields power of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.5x (including bubble shields, if there are any, which is why some of the cost here in AIP).<br />
<br />
* There is a new Ireful MLRS Corvette that you can get from an FRS for 30 AIP, giving you 70 mlrs-like ships (wow) that ALSO buff the attack power of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.25x.<br />
<br />
* There is a new Ultima Fusion Bomber that you can get from an FRS for 80 AIP, giving you 80 heavy-bomber-like ships (holy smokes) that ALSO buff the attack power AND hulls of all non-flagship members of the fleet by 1.5x.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.046 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released May 20th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where any savegame that you loaded that had drones in a fleet with a dead centerpiece would cause an exception in PerFrame_CalculateEffectiveFleetData, debugStage 784600.<br />
** Thanks to choam, DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY!, and Lord Of Nothing for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where C-clicking a fleet's direct science upgrade button was not properly showing the past science upgrades to a fleet in terms of the comparison of mark levels.<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 Scientific Emergence ==<br />
(Released May 20th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where if you started a new game and opened the factions menu and clicked back and forth between the AI and then the human faction, you'd get an exception.<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The fallen spire (expansion 1) code that allows for neural nets to grant new types of frigates and destroyers has been made a lot more general-purpose so that people can mod in their own neutral nets with specific frigates and destroyers (or whatever else, frankly) and have that function properly. Previously it was not possible to add custom neutral nets, but now you can do it just via xml alone.<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for the request.<br />
<br />
* Starting from this version, the game now also tracks direct science upgrades to fleets, and not just the central tech upgrades. Any past upgrades you spent science on prior to this version will not be reflected, but future ones are.<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* In the fleet management screen where you can directly upgrade either flagships (plus any drones they have) or the entire fleet, it now notes in its tooltip that you can C-click to see what all will be upgraded.<br />
** Once in the C-click screen, it shows you all the benefits in great detail, just like it does on the tech upgrade screen for non-direct techs. This way you have so much more information about what the benefit of an actual tech is. This is pretty important now that there's so much more that we can upgrade by science!<br />
** Thanks to Mitsuha for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully add support to some new voice lines related to the Dyson Sphere<br />
** Not very well tested.<br />
<br />
* Drones of all sorts, be they AI-based or part of a combat factory, or off a hive golem, now all inherit the mark level of their spawner. If their spawner dies (in the case of AI stuff, mainly), then they will stick at the mark level they were.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo, Poppy, Mitsuha, and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* There's an experimental change where any drones that happen to have had techs that benefit them as a type applied, making them centrally higher than mark 1, now get those added marks on top of whatever their parent spawner's level is. This isn't used in the main game, but should help some mods.<br />
** Thanks to -NR-SirLimbo for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Easier To Mod Direct Science Costs ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed up several places where the game would let you get infinite upgrades after the 6th for a given fleet, or things like that. These would not do anything, but seemed very strange.<br />
<br />
* The direct science upgrade costs (and number of upgrades possible) are now handled via data in the usual tech format, and assigned using a new tech_upgrade_that_is_used_for_my_direct_science field on ships.<br />
** This makes it so that people can mod in their own direct science costs for things, or differentiate further between specific ship types, as needed.<br />
** It also lets us adjust the data so that we can differentiate things for certain units ourselves, as well.<br />
** Please note that for anything where the flagship/centerpiece can change, like command stations, you really don't want to differentiate since this data is on the fleet itself. So the direct upgrade cost will always be the same for all command stations in general, is the main case of this right now. All other fleets tend not to have flagships that change (fallen spire aside).<br />
** Big thanks to -NR-SirLimbo for suggesting this refactor. It makes things way more flexible, without really changing anything you see on the interface.<br />
<br />
* A form of self-checking has been added for anything that it thinks should be directly-upgradeable by science.<br />
** This winds up catching some non-player ships, and potentially some ships from mods or expansions doing unusual things. If you want to suppress the exception in your mod, just add tech_upgrade_that_is_used_for_my_direct_science="Direct_ActuallyUnused"<br />
<br />
* Basic battlestations no longer benefit from the help of the central Citadel tech. They are only upgradeable by direct science, now.<br />
** They were far too similar to citadels in terms of their ability to tech up, otherwise, which kind of devalued citadels. It doesn't seem like they warrant their own full separate tech, though.<br />
** The direct science upgrades are now a bit cheaper than last build for battlestations, and a bit more expensive for citadels. Nothing giant in either case, but it skews them both a bit more, which is good.<br />
** Thanks to -NR-SirLimbo for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The regenerator golem now costs 1.5x as much as the other golems to upgrade via science, except for the top two marks which are not that steep.<br />
** Same with the botnet golem, except it is 2x as much, top two marks aside.<br />
** And same with the hive golem, which is about halfway between those two, on average.<br />
** Thanks to -NR-SirLimbo and StarKelp for suggesting these values.<br />
<br />
=== Exotic Transports ===<br />
<br />
* Cloaked transports can now be found throughout the galaxy, not just as part of the cloaked starter fleet. They are not super common, but they are not as rare as the regenrator golem.<br />
** They also now have their own tech line, separate from the regular transports, and their techs are 3x as expensive as normal. Except for the last mark, which is toned down because that would be crazy.<br />
<br />
* Agile transports can now be found throughout the galaxy, not just as part of the one of the starter fleets. They are the same rarity as the cloaker transports.<br />
** They also now have their own tech line, and their techs are 2x as expensive as normal. Except for the last mark, which is toned down because that would be crazy.<br />
** Thanks to Endovior, Fluffiest, Strategic Sage, and others for suggesting that these two above be something you can find, as well as noting that the agile ones have no downsides. If these seem too hard or easy to find in practice, please let us know.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 Scientific Equality ==<br />
(Released May 19th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Experimental: Add a new Debug Setting, 'Enable Astro Train Power Increase'<br />
** When enabled, the Astro Trains will start spawning stronger trains once the player has killed enough trains. For testing/feedback purposes.<br />
<br />
* In order to make entering commands more rapid, particularly if you're doing many at once -- or have a small typo you need to fix -- it now remembers the last 50 commands you've entered in the chat window.<br />
** To cycle through past commands you've entered, hit the up arrow on your keyboard. If you passed what you wanted, hit the down arrow.<br />
** This only works with commands, not with actual general text chat, which it excludes on purpose.<br />
** So if you want to spawn some ships (or do whatever else), you can now enter the command for that once, then just hit up arrow and enter repeatedly to keep repeating what you just said.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for inspiring this addition.<br />
<br />
* There is now an alias for "player potluck" which is just "pp"<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a one-line error in the code in the last beta version, which led to any clicks to choose your home planet making it give you an error and then seed you on an enemy planet.<br />
** Thanks to Endovior for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that could happen in shot visualizer if ships were being fired on at just the wrong millisecond as the ship was visually destroyed.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Direct Science Upgrade Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_upgradeable_by_direct_science xml tag, which lets certain centerpieces allow for upgrades like golems or arks do.<br />
** This is assigned to combat factories and transports.<br />
<br />
* Also added is_spire_lone_wolf, which does the same thing, but uses its own cost schedule that is separate from those of arks, golems, and "other."<br />
** This is applied to the lone spire frigates.<br />
<br />
* Added a new this_centerpiece_grants_its_direct_science_upgrades_to_rest_of_fleet, which now must be true in order for anything beyond the centerpiece in a fleet to get upgrades from the centerpiece's science upgrades.<br />
** This was basically true for all the command stations, previously, which were all that used direct science upgrades. And it needs to be used for fallen spire cities, which use science upgrade data under the hood (though not in the interface). But for things like golem fleets, they REALLY need to not apply to their ships.<br />
<br />
* Added a new this_unit_gets_direct_science_upgrades_from_central_fleet, which now must ALSO be true on specific ship lines in order for the this_centerpiece_grants_its_direct_science_upgrades_to_rest_of_fleet to pass to themm.<br />
** This simply defaults to true. In cases where for some reason we want to turn it off, this exists. This is probably overkill and can be ignored, but is useful to have just in case.<br />
<br />
* Various parts of the interface have been improved to further explain the mechanics as needed, and clarify if something upgrades just the golem/ark itself, or if it upgrades the rest of the fleet along with it.<br />
<br />
* TLDR of most of the above:<br />
** Combat Factories and Transports can now be upgraded by spending direct science. But it is configured to not benefit their fleets.<br />
** Unlike the last two beta versions, upgrading a golem or ark now won't upgrade its fleet as well. That was crazy OP, and different from how things worked when EXP was a thing.<br />
** Lost Spire Frigates now work like the golems.<br />
** Fallen Spire cities should continue to work like they always have.<br />
** Arks, Golems, Lost Spire Frigates, Battlestations, Command Stations, and "anything else" all now can have their own upgrade costs that are separate from one another.<br />
** Thanks to Pireciter and Poppy for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Related Science Cost Adjustments ====<br />
<br />
* After a lot of discussion from people looking at the beta and going "wow, golems are just not attractive anymore without EXP because of their absurd science costs," we thought about it some and decided that the simplest thing would be to adjust some science costs a bit more for now.<br />
** Command stations (which also benefit their entire fleet) were: 1000, 3000, 6000, 9000, 18000, and 36000.<br />
*** This is just patently absurd past a point, and very few people even give one upgrade to them. Granted, we didn't want them to be used to over-upgrade them, but the later costs might as well be "infinity" for how costly they are.<br />
*** We're shifting this to 500, 1500, 3000, 4000, 5000, and 7000.<br />
** Battlestations were the same as command stations, cost wise, and they do also involve upgrading all the ships in their fleet, but that's still too little benefit for it to be commonly worth it. They don't give economic upgrades, for instance.<br />
*** We're shifting them to 300, 900, 2000, 3000, 4000, and 6000.<br />
** Golems and arks in the last few beta versions were 500/600, 900/1000, and then 2000, 3000, 4000, 6000.<br />
*** They WERE upgrading their entire fleets, which was a Bad Idea (tm), and that doesn't happen anymore. But even for just the golems, this was too expensive.<br />
*** For the golems, arks, and lone spire frigates, we're switching them all for now to be 100, 300, 500, 2000, 3000, 5000<br />
*** Investing a little bit into these is SO cheap and tempting now, and the payoff is great. Investing a lot into one really costs a lot, but not so much that it is infeasible.<br />
** "Other" stuff, meaning transports and combat factories, upgrade only themselves (and their drones), and in the recent beta versions could not be upgraded at all.<br />
*** Now they cost 50, 150, 300, 1000, 1500, 3000.<br />
*** This may be TOO cheap, but probably not. The idea is that these are definitely tempting and cheap for just a couple of marks at least. Upgrading them all the way is kind on the expensive side and doesn't seem worth it.<br />
<br />
* While we're at it, regular tech costs:<br />
** Light, medium, and heavy all previously cost 10k and then 10k for their two upgrades. Now it's 7k and then 10k.<br />
** Turrets previously cost 7.5k and then 7.5k for their two upgrades. Now it's 3.5k and then 7.5k.<br />
*** Turrets should be a lot more viable in various interesting ways with the battlestation and citadel changes, and the changes here and to the command station costs. Being able to have fixed defenses that are able to keep the peace without getting your fleets involved as much is good.<br />
** Sentries and minefields are both a bit cheaper now.<br />
** Citadels are very slightly cheaper now.<br />
<br />
=== Major New "Hooks" Framework For Modding ===<br />
<br />
* Added a major new framework to the game to support modders in particular being able to subscribe to various events that might happen.<br />
** Each hook is defined in GameData\Configuration\ExternalCodeHook, or optionally in equivalent folders for expansions or mods themselves.<br />
*** As we did with the expansion external data, however, we might wind up keeping the expansion ones with the base game for simplicity. That may keep mods in particular as compatible as possible.<br />
** Each hook has a name, which is what event handlers reference.<br />
** Each hook has a description which explains what the heck it is for, in terms that a modder or another developer will hopefully understand. These are not ever seen by players.<br />
** Each hook has a mainobject_is, which defines for the modder what type the "MainObject" parameter will be (so they can cast to that from type object).<br />
** Each hook has a secondaryobject_is, which defines for the modder what type the "SecondaryObject" parameter will be (so they can cast to that from type object).<br />
** Each hook has a additionalobjects_are, which defines for the modder what the heck is in the "AdditionObjects" array parameter (this can be an array of unlike type objects, or a list of multiple of the same type of objects, or more commonly just a null array).<br />
** Each hook has a context_is, which defines for the modder if there is anything unusual to know about the ArcenSimContextBase that is being passed in.<br />
*** Generally speaking there is nothing to say, but sometimes it will always be null, for instance. It will also generally be something you want to cast to ArcenSimContext from ArcenSimContextBase, but we define it as ArcenSimContextBase so that we can call this even from the ArcenUniversal dll.<br />
<br />
* Event handlers are defined in GameData\Configuration\ExternalCodeHookHandler, or the equivalent folder for expansions or mods.<br />
** These would typically be what people are actually modding in, rather than adding actual hooks (unless their mod is that huge).<br />
** These just define the dll and class names of the handler, and then the hook that they are attached to, and a name that needs to be unique but doesn't get used for anything.<br />
** It's worth noting that every time a hook handler object is defined, it instantiates a new copy of it that object. So if four different handler entries in xml all reference the same class, there would be four objects of the type of that class. You CAN store permanent data on those, but it's not recommended in most cases. You also can do something like define a static Instance variable to try to have a singleton pattern, but if more than one xml entry calls the same class, you'd have three classes not properly referenced, and then the static Instance pointing to the last-instantiated version. So a static List<> or similar would be better.<br />
<br />
* Full documentation now provided for hooks in general: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Code_Hooks<br />
<br />
* Four hooks have been added to start:<br />
** OnJournalFirstQueued<br />
*** Executed the first time a specific final journal entry is queued. Will only ever execute once, even if the journal can occur multiple times.<br />
** OnJournalQueued<br />
*** Executed whenever a journal entry is queued. Can occur multiple times per campaign, but only if the journal can occur multiple times.<br />
** OnJournalOpened<br />
*** Executed whenever the journal is opened to be read by the player, just before the text is displayed.<br />
** OnJournalClosed<br />
*** Executed whenever the journal entry is closed.<br />
** Al of these are related to journals, as you may notice, but overall the functionality of hooks is unrelated to journals. It can be used for many different things in the future, but this is just what it happens to be first used for.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for suggesting these four events and thus inspiring the whole new hooks system.<br />
<br />
* There is documentation for the journal hooks here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Journal_Entries#Code_Hooks_For_Journals<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 The Missing Human King ==<br />
(Released May 18th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Map planet size ranges changed for the following:<br />
** Concentric from 40-250 to 40-160.<br />
** X, Grid, Maze, Clusters, Wheel, Honeycomb, Encapsulated, Octopus, and Simple from 40-200 to 40-160.<br />
** Realistic from 40-100 to 40-160.<br />
** Linked Rings, Swirl, and Bubbles from 10-300 to 40-160.<br />
** Below about 40 planets, it's rare to be able to fully generate a map properly.<br />
<br />
* Fixed several bugs that could happen if you had no planet or were not viewing a planet at the moment.<br />
** Those states should not have been happening in the first place, but if they do we want to not flood the error log with that sort of downstream error.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of funky bugs that could lead to the player or an AI not seeding properly on their homeworlds on excessively small maps.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and Ymir for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 Journals, Cheats, And EXP Retirement ==<br />
(Released May 13th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''To play this on Steam, please go under betas and choose current_beta from the drop-down list. We would really appreciate some testers on this so that we can get back out of beta status as quickly as possible! There is not currently a way to get the beta versions on GOG, but we won't be in that status for more than a few days, knock on wood. We want to make sure we didn't break anything with all the substantial changes in here, but also with the EXP stuff we want to make sure that good alternatives exist to something that was a bit... hacky.... before.'''<br />
<br />
* Added a new (optional to override) method DoOnFactionDismantle_ThisIsAGameBeingExited( Faction ) that provides a hook for cleaning up whatever faction data someone has amassed prior to the game exiting. This lets you clean up prior to a new game being started or loaded, and most factions don't need to do this. But some mods definitely could make use of this, we've been informed.<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for requesting this feature.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo that said "prompty" instead of "prompt" in one screen.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* A variety of citybuilding structures in The Fallen Spire (The Spire Rises Expansion) stated that they required local shard reactors and engineering centers, but none of them really did. We were going to add that sort of extra requirement a while back, but in the end the city level limitations and socket limitations (plus energy costs in general) were the right mix of limiting and flexible.<br />
** We've fixed it so that it no longer refers to some requirements that were never really enforced.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the CPA notification hovertext<br />
** Thanks to Joey on steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that have a tech assigned to them (usually from inheritance) to be able to be upgraded, but which are markless and thus non-upgradeable, should no longer appear in the "things that benefit from this" lists on the tech window. This would most notably at the moment include the Zenith Forcefield Generator.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The list of ships that benefit from a tech was sometimes cut off at the bottom a bit if the list was too long, but now should never be.<br />
** Thanks to info on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully make sure that the AI Reserves can no longer be allied to the player<br />
** Thanks to info on steam for reporting<br />
<br />
* Minor code cleanup for Exo generation code. No functional change<br />
<br />
* Slight performance enhancement for scourge code<br />
<br />
* The game should no longer allow you to center your view on enemy units that are not visible to you because they are cloaked or otherwise invisible to you.<br />
** Thanks to rkfg and Stormking2010 for reporting. This has not been tested, but should work.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mis-transcription of one of the "funny" dialogue lines from the AI, and one not-funny one.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of obscure bugs where if the game had multiple factions of the same type, then looking for the "first entity on a planet belonging to a faction of that type" would only check the first faction of that type.<br />
** So far as we know, this has not actually caused any issues ever, but we found it in a code review while adding some new bits.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where if you clicked a sidbar tab while the chat window was open, it would instead open to the tab you last had open.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen when an exception popup appeared with the chat log window open, where it would try to start a coroutine on an inactive game object.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an error that would happen if you tried to click "Change Music" in the debug tools when music was disabled. Now it just gives you a popup saying that it's not playing any music right now.<br />
<br />
=== No More Fleet EXP ===<br />
<br />
* All of the stuff relating to ships granting EXP, and fleets gaining EXP, and the (planned for sometime in the future) fleet perks from EXP has all been removed.<br />
** There was just absolutely no way to do this that did not encourage grinding. Plain and simple. This one aspect of the game had to be scaled back over and over again to the point where it was barely present since back in the 0.800ish days of the game. But even where it was still present, its been something people find annoying at best.<br />
** Additionally, when it comes to too many fleets on a planet having a penalty for being there in terms of EXP gains, that was sending a rather punitive message that people didn't appreciate. Overall this whole thing wasn't working well, and the addition of exciting perks would have just made it worse, not better.<br />
<br />
=== Direct Science Upgrades For Golems And Arks! ===<br />
<br />
* There are now explicit flags for units that say is_ark and is_golem, for letting them behave certain ways.<br />
** Arks and Golems are now able to be directly upgraded by science like command stations are.<br />
** Golems are more expensive than Arks, but both are a lot cheaper than command stations. It needs to be tempting enough to use science on something that is single-fleet only but not holding your position.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for suggesting that we move to science here.<br />
<br />
* Any fleets in old savegames that were upgraded by EXP now have those levels transitioned over to be science upgrades instead.<br />
** For some things like combat factories, you will thus see "fleet levels from science (unexpected)" on them.<br />
<br />
=== Journals, Chat, And Cheats ===<br />
<br />
* void QueueLogMessageCommand( string Message, JournalEntryImportance Importance ) has been removed, since the old-style "journal entries are just retained chat messages" is going away.<br />
** Essentially chat messages can still be logged, of course, but they won't stay any longer than any other chat message does.<br />
** The new way to log a chat message is void QueueChatMessageOrCommand( string Message ), which also allows for scheduling cheat codes.<br />
** Additionally, there is now void QueueLogJournalEntryToSidebar( string UniqueID_ToUseIfGroupIDNotPresent, string OptionalGroupID ), which allows for writing the new-type journal entries.<br />
<br />
* Rather than having a journal entry importance (which has gone away), voice groups now have the potential to be linked to journal entries if you want to have them appear that way.<br />
<br />
* The old "InGameStatistics" object is no longer saved into savegames, as it was a waste of space and not really used like we thought it was going to be.<br />
<br />
* Holy cow! There was a huge and wasteful "Local Message Log" buried in the savegames, which was really old code that was saving every last message that ever appeared on the right-hand side of your campaign.<br />
** This was not ever showing those messages again, and had a lot of bloated metadata on the subject, and was in general just an awful thing to have hanging around because it made savegames way larger than need be.<br />
** We were being very cautious with how we saved chat messages, not saving too many, but all along we were saving a SECOND copy of EVERYTHING, which partly unravels the mystery of why some savegames were so large despite having relatively few raw ships.<br />
** This also was something that would cause processing slowdown to at least a minor degree, as the GUI for the right-hand sidebar had to iterate over every last message ever shown to decide if it should still be showing it or if it had expired.<br />
** Now it has a non-serialized version of this that it keeps for just the messages that should be showing RIGHT NOW. When it's time to no longer display them, they are removed.<br />
** Update: in the end it was not as inefficient as we had hoped. In an 8mb savegame, this only was half of a mb. Where the heck is that other 7.5mb of data?? We will be investigating that this week.<br />
<br />
==== Journals ====<br />
<br />
* The journal sidebar is now fully functional, based off of the specifications you can read here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Journal_Entries<br />
** There is even some text replacement capability in there, and a lot of other goodies.<br />
** Right now it is only possible to programmatically create and log journal entries, but we will soon be adding some triggers from when you encounter ships for the first time, destroy them for the first time, etc. Basically things that a modder or other designer could include via xml only, without having to touch code.<br />
<br />
==== Chat Logging From Voice Lines ====<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch of data relating to the text and "is funny" status of voice commands, as well as how frequently they play individually or as a group, has been moved over to our core xml and is no longer part of the embedded resource packs.<br />
** This lets us make tweaks and changes far more easily, as well as allowing for modding of them.<br />
<br />
* As a part of this, a number of things the watch commander says which are important to not miss are now written out as well as having the voice clip play.<br />
<br />
* Also, even if you have audible voice stuff turned off, the watch commander and AI items vocal items which would normally log text messages will continue to do so.<br />
** These usually accompany something important, and it's nice to see in the chat log so that you don't miss something that is happening. A lot of what the watch commander says is not written to the log on purpose, though.<br />
<br />
==== Cheats / Debugging Commands ====<br />
<br />
* Cheats have been added to the game in a format you can type into your text box (like the first game): https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Cheats<br />
** The following old cheats from the debug menu have been removed:<br />
*** Decrease AIP, Increase AIP.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting!<br />
<br />
* The following debug menu buttons have been removed, as they are now cheat codes / commands you can type with more control:<br />
** give metal.<br />
** give hacking.<br />
** give science.<br />
** give wave and CPA points.<br />
** give energy<br />
** spawn wave<br />
** spawn player ships<br />
** kill enemies on planet<br />
** finish construction on planet<br />
** spawn relic<br />
** clear local achievements<br />
** give metal<br />
** increase or decrease AI difficulty<br />
** test local achievement<br />
** lose instantly<br />
<br />
* The following debug menu buttons have simply been removed with nothing added back:<br />
** grant exp to fleet.<br />
*** EXP for fleets are going away.<br />
<br />
* In the debug menu, there's now a "Wiki: Cheats And Command List" button that links to the wiki for quick access if someone wants to discover cheat codes.<br />
** The buttons for exploring or watching all planets are still in there, as those were not cheats and are things that people use quite a lot as a lifestyle choice.<br />
<br />
* The new "scrub foes" cheat now works properly with stacks of units, which the old button in the debug menu did not.<br />
<br />
* The new cheat command "player potluck" is basically the old "spawn player ships" button from the debug menu, but improved to actually create a new fleet that has the ships in it. It gives the fleet the name "Potluck [Something]," and is a whole lot more useful and interesting this way.<br />
** It also randomly gives you AI golems in small numbers, too, with these.<br />
<br />
* A new cheat/debugging command has been added that logs journal entries with some parameters of your choosing. The cheats page has example usages which all work.<br />
** https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Cheats#Debugging<br />
<br />
* There are a variety of "test case" journal entries included with the game now, which are used for testing individual calls to one journal entry infinitely, calls to a group that has three entries, and calls to a cascade of two individual entries. All of these use cases have been tested via the new journal debugging command, and do work.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.032 Savegame Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* When a savegame fails to deserialize, it now mentions what version it was serialized as, and what it's trying to deserialize into. This takes some guesswork out on our part.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where savegames made in 2.026 could not be loaded in 2.031. A few weeks ago we had some internal confusion over version numbering that led to this. The fix will make all mainline 2.026 savegames function again, and anything saved in 2.025 or prior was already fine.<br />
** It's possible that a very few savegames from the beta branch that were saved in an "alternate timeline" sort of 2.026 will now fail to load, but there should be a handful of those at most, and mostly in the hands of our developers or most-core testers. And for most of them, their saves were already on 2.029, which again would not have been affected previously or now.<br />
** Thanks to Arc-3N-4B, Lystraeus, Aedris, Mada, and Wowzer for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 Faction Color Choice ==<br />
(Released April 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The rule that drones never cost energy is now more strictly enforced.<br />
<br />
* Previously ships that were not yet fully claimed could still produce and consume energy, both of which were wrong.<br />
** This led to things like them not being claimable without having double the energy they consume, and also the potentially that claiming something would cause a brownout.<br />
** They now work consistently with remains, not costing energy until they are fully built/rebuilt.<br />
** This is different from things that are self-constructing, where you need the energy at the time of construction. You can fully control when you place new structures, and it won't ever brown you out because you can't overspend your energy that way. But things that get claimed or auto-rebuilt are just a different category, really.<br />
** Do please note that if you don't have enough energy to finish claiming a unit, like the 50k you need for a hive golem, engineers and such still won't work on repairing it. But in the case of existing saves with an unclaimed golem that belonged to you, you now have 50k more energy compared to the prior build, so that works out just fine.<br />
** Thanks to NR-SirLimbo for reporting, and providing a save where the hive golem was consuming 50k energy too soon and thus causing these problems. That save now works as expected.<br />
<br />
=== Viewing / Editing Factions Once The Game Has Started ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new should_not_be_shown_even_as_separate_line_items_in_game_factions_menu attribute for faction entries, which lets us control which ones should not even show up in the in-game editing of factions (which shows more factions than the lobby, so you can adjust their colors at minimum -- for things like outguard and zombies, etc).<br />
** All of the various faction entries in xml have comments on why they are or are not visible in-game, for purposes of us understanding this. We may make some changes in the future to which ones should be shown.<br />
** These ones now specifically show up in an "other factions" section of the in-game view/edit factions window, where it just lets you adjust their colors.<br />
<br />
* The view/edit factions window in the game now properly shows all the factions, including beacon factions, and gets at the root of their in-game data rather than just their more loose config data.<br />
<br />
* Added show_only_if_faction_with_this_name_is_present, so that the tamed and enraged macrophages will only appear in the factions edit window if there is actually a general macrophage infestation.<br />
<br />
* On the window where you see the colors for all the various other factions, it now shows their description in the tooltips for their colors.<br />
<br />
* A new gamecommand has been added, along with some numerous changes to allow for post-lobby editing of certain pieces of certain factions.<br />
** It will complain if you try to make changes that are not allowed, such as basically any non-color-info about factions that are already in the game (aka not beacons).<br />
<br />
* The game now allows you to change the colors of any faction in the game at any time after you've started. Any player can do this in multiplayer, and it will be multiplayer-safe synced for everyone.<br />
<br />
* For factions that are still in beacon form, you can now change any of their settings in that same window after the game has started (but before you hack the beacon), and the faction will then have those properties when they join the game, if they ever do.<br />
** This is really useful for late-addition factions, where you might want to have a stronger nanocaust or something along those lines but you were not originally thinking of having them in your game.<br />
<br />
* For all the fields that you are not allowed to edit once the game has already started, it just shows those in a textual format, but still with the various tooltips and so on.<br />
<br />
* The discoverable factions are no longer directly shown in the escape (system) menu, but instead are shown only in the view/edit factions window.<br />
<br />
* The formatting of the starting fleet display in the player tab in the lobby is now a lot nicer, using the actual display name rather than the underlying lookup key.<br />
** In the during-game display version of this, it now instead shows which player is controlling that faction, or if there are multiple or no players controlling it.<br />
*** It's entirely possible to have a faction named "Adam" which is controlled by "Dave" and "Adam" if you wanted to do that. That could be because you are in multiplayer sharing control of a faction called "The Davadium Empire," perhaps, or because you've loaded someone else's savegame.<br />
*** It's ALSO possible that in multiplayer, for whatever reason, Dave and Adam decided to switch which factions they were controlling, but not to rename what their factions were. We'll get to odd cases like that later, but for now it shows things properly so you can understand things. This will certainly get more complicated as multiplayer is built out, and we aim to make it a bit more flexible and simple than in the first game.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.029 Journal And Faction Edit Framework ==<br />
(Released April 21st, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rather inexplicable "bug" (really a design choice in code that made no sense in retrospect but has been there since the fleet redesign well over a year ago) where if a unit was put into a different fleet than initially expected, it would wipe out all levels from EXP or science.<br />
** The main practical effect of this was that anytime a command station died, then any levels that you got from science upgrades to its fleet were reset to zero, which was a huge negative of course. This is now fixed.<br />
*** This did lead to some ships or turrets being a higher level (based on the old science upgrade levels) compared to newer ones. Basically items that are a certain level won't level-down, so even though the science was taken away, they wound up still being at the higher level. But new items built would be at the lower level. This isn't something that we can fix in existing savegames (same thing with the lost levels from science in existing saves in general. But for all future upgrades, including in existing savegames if the upgrades happen in this or future versions, they will now be retained.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug from the last few weeks where if you changed your player color in the lobby, it would quickly reset to default. We couldn't duplicate this with any other factions at this time, so if you see any other factions getting set back to defaults please do let us know with steps for reproducing it.<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The mugger frigates have zombification, making them extra powerful. Normally you only get one of them where you would get two of many other frigate types. However, the parasitic starting fleet was giving you FOUR, which is crazy powerful. It now gives you two.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some rather substantial changes to things to now have a DamageSource Damage instead of a bool IsSelfDamage/WasFromSelfDamage.<br />
** This now lets us differentiate the following:<br />
*** SomeSortOfEnemy: used for any sort of external hostile weapon, attrition, or other bad thing someone else does to this unit.<br />
**** All the normal death effects should happen, and things like being able to be regenerated by regenerators to prevent death, etc. This was already working fine.<br />
*** SelfDamageFromMyOwnWeapons: used for any sort of self-inflicted damage, such as attrition to myself over time, or using my own health to regenerate someone else or power an explosion (minefields).<br />
**** Some death effects should happen, but very few. Basically if I die to remains, I should go ahead and still do that (aka minefields). But beyond that, regenerators can't save me, etc.<br />
** BeingScrapped: used for something that needs to die for some reason, and it really just needs to go. Often this is literally a player scrapping something, either directly or by swapping lines between fleets, or the AI scrapping one set of units to move them into a new stack, etc.<br />
**** The absolute minimum case. We're supposed to DIE, so we don't even go to remains if we normally would. This last case was being used for minefields self-damaging themselves in the last few weeks for the game, and is why we had to make this a tri-state thing instead of a boolean self/other damage source. If you scrap a minefield it should not go to remains, but if it damages itself to death it should go to remains.<br />
** Basically minefields were never going to remains recently unless enemies were decloaking them and shooting them in the final shots, or some edge case like that.<br />
** Thanks to Valkyr, Strategic Sage, and Mischief Maker for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If the AI has too few planets they won't spawn Relic Trains anymore<br />
** Thanks to Scout1Treia, who clearly has too much time on their hands, for reporting<br />
<br />
* A new "Journal" sidebar tab has been added, although it is not really functional yet. But the framework is there.<br />
** We'll be filling this in this week before we come back out of beta, but meanwhile we wanted other fixes to get to you.<br />
** The hotkey "J" was amazingly available, and is now used for switching to this tab.<br />
<br />
* We also made both Intel and Journal show up higher than Outguard, with Outguard now being the bottommost tab.<br />
<br />
* In the system menu (hit escape), there is now a "View/Edit Factions" button that currently does nothing, but soon will let you pre-edit beacon factions, as well as see other details about existing factions and change faction colors. It will also let you see "hidden" factions like the zombies, to adjust their colors if you so desire.<br />
<br />
* If some UI element has an exception in its tooltip generation (or mouseover code in general), it now reports that instead of breaking the whole UI.<br />
<br />
* If a text element errors out while trying to init, it now gives you useful info rather than breaking the entire load process of the game, too.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.028 Eat Bad Lobby Saves ==<br />
(Released April 20th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The fleet management sidebar popout now uses the display name for sidebar (which is shorter) instead of the full display name, to keep things from wrapping.<br />
** Thanks to -NR-SirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If a savegame would be loading in and fails for some reason, then it now shows what the savegame name is rather than writing ???.<br />
** In the event that for some reason your game version's name can't be found, it now shows you what game version it was trying to find. Sometimes this can be as simple as an artifact of someone doing custom development.<br />
** Thanks to Badger and mofowe4644 for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Previously if you tried to load a savegame that was broken for some reason, then it would give you a warning about that but then keep on trying to load stuff, cascading errors upon errors. Now it just stops and doesn't keep letting things get worse!<br />
** This also makes it so that loading a broken save doesn't mean you have to restart the entire program or else things are funky and broken until you do, too!<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, previously if you had an exception while trying to load the "last settings" savegame for the lobby when you do a new custom start, it would just be all kinds of broken, making custom starts not possible. Now it instead notices the failure and just does a fresh "reset to defaults" type of start for you.<br />
** In this path, to keep things smooth it doesn't even bother warning you now.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added three new settings to the Performance section of the personal settings:<br />
** Disable Tachyon Beam Visuals<br />
*** If you have absolutely giant battles beyond the norm, and there are too many tachyon emitters in play, it can cause serious performance degradation. For the people who run into that, or are on lower-end hardware, this is a great way to get more performance at basically very litte drawback.<br />
** Disable Tractor Beam Visuals<br />
*** If you have absolutely giant battles beyond the norm, and there are too many tractor beams grabbing ships, it can slow things down. This is a lot less likely to be a problem than tachyon beams, but can be helpful in some cases.<br />
** Disable Beam Weapon Visuals<br />
*** If you have absolutely giant battles that we can't fathom, all with beam weapons, then the load of that is higher than that of other shots. This should basically never happen, but this lets you turn them off if it's ever a problem for you for some problem. This would be missing a lot of info during play, though.<br />
** Thanks to Emeritus Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Bugs From The Beta ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where any scouting was scouting all planets in the prior beta version. This was one of those sorts of things that happens when you make widespread code changes and sometimes mangle a bit of code that doesn't directly translate.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* For some reason, there was a version issue or something along those lines with certain lobby settings in the beta version for some (most?) players. The game now recovers from that either way, but we're not sure what was up with that. Possibly there was an intermediate version that was needed in the xml, and we added that, which will fix things either way. It wasn't hurting quick starts or savegames, just the custom start lobby, so the existing larger fixes above will prevent this beta issue from happening anyhow.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.027 Planetary Mathematics ==<br />
(Released April 16th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''To play this on Steam, please go under betas and choose current_beta from the drop-down list. We would really appreciate some testers on this so that we can get back out of beta status as quickly as possible! There is not currently a way to get the beta versions on GOG, but we won't be in that status for more than a few days, knock on wood.'''<br />
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* Code has been added in (but is untested) to remove destroyed planets from the galaxy map.<br />
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* Fixed an exception that could happen in RemoveIncomingShot when multiple threads were racing.<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
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* Techs that have already been fully unlocked now continue to show up on the tech sidebar, since having those disappear was freaking confusing.<br />
** They now show up with a line item saying "COMPLETE" instead of some sort of science cost.<br />
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* When viewing the tooltip for a unit, it now shows how many upgrades have happened out of how many upgrades for each tech line that benefits the unit.<br />
** This way you can tell WHY it is the mark level it is, aside from things at the fleet itself that are leveling them up.<br />
<br />
=== Dangerous Changes Useful For Future Features For Both Free Multiplayer And Paid DLC ===<br />
<br />
* The game used to allow for a list of galaxies (more than one at once), but we only ever used one at a time. We've now restructured it to just be a CurrentGalaxy object rather than a List<Galaxy>. This is very slightly more efficient for whenever we need to loop over planets, etc, since there's no array lookup that needs to happen to Galaxies[0] and instead we just call a direct object reference. This is a minor improvement, but we do it so very much that it's good to have every little bit of improvement.<br />
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* There is a new DoForPlanets on the World_AIW2 and the Galaxy object that allows you to iterate over all the planets, with a boolean flag to let you skip destroyed planets if you want.<br />
** The existing Planets list on galaxies has been renamed to the long-and-discouraging name AllPlanetsIncludingDeadOnes_GenerallyDoNotReferenceDirectly, so hopefully people really only use that when there is a true need to do so.<br />
** There is also a version of DoForPlanets on World_AIW2 that lets you pass in a faction that must be controlling or influencing the planet. We can add other overloads as need be. In the case of this one we assume that the planet isn't destroyed, since it's hard to own something that doesn't exist.<br />
** It IS worth noting that for anything that is in mapgen, the galaxy object is being passed around and so using the methods on the world are NOT a good thing to be using.<br />
*** With that in mind, AllPlanetsIncludingDeadOnes_GenerallyDoNotReferenceDirectly is still used quite a lot when we're talking about things that are in mapgen. Technically those could use the DoForPlanets on the galaxy they are passing around, but since there are never any dead planets during mapgen that does seem a bit pointless.<br />
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* Also added in some new methods for things like ensuring all the planets are in a galaxy are linked, to specifically AVOID ones that are destroyed, since those should probably not be linked and we don't care.<br />
** In a bunch of semi-related methods, looking at things like neighbor planets and such, there is now a bool saying if you want to include destroyed ones, etc. Hopefully the destroyed ones are unlinked already, but in case not this lets us ignore them here.<br />
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* Added in various other methods, like GetRandomPlanet() on the galaxy object to get a random planet that can be limited down to just the ones that are non-destroyed.<br />
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* Fixed a bug that we found purely by accident in code review where threatToLeaveBehind was being calculated extremely incorrectly -- using the indexer i instead of the indexer pairIndex. This could have led to anything from stuff not staying behind properly to a hard-lock of the AI thread (where the AI stops responding at all). It would have been incredibly rare, and basically only happened when the AI was fighting on a non-king planet and wanted to leave some threat behind but take some away because they were over-running the planet.<br />
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* It's worth noting that there are a TON of changes in here that may cause some other bugs that are unexpected, so we're going to go to the beta branch on this after all (which is funny because just yesterday Chris was talking about not doing that for a while).<br />
** There are also probably some further uses of AllPlanetsIncludingDeadOnes_GenerallyDoNotReferenceDirectly that we have right now that we can clean up, so we may go ahead and do that, too.<br />
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* ''A day passes.''<br />
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* Added a funky new data structure called ArcenTwoDimensionalFlexibleLists<T>, which is basically a generic and flexible replacemenet for things like bool[][].<br />
** This lets us have things like two-dimensional arrays for pathfinding that get larger as the number of planets increase.<br />
** Previously if we added planets to the game late, without a save and load it was going to have some major issues with pathfinding in particular.<br />
** ProjectedMultiPathData has been updated to use this new data structure.<br />
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* After some thinking, AllPlanetsIncludingDeadOnes_GenerallyDoNotReferenceDirectly has been made private to Galaxy, and there are instead nicer wrapper methods for getting at the data in that.<br />
** This reduces the duplication of code that we otherwise have, and most importantly helps to make the intent of how each method is used more clear by their names.<br />
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* Wow this is a lot of changes, all throughout. We're totally doing a beta for a few days at least to see if things break or what happens. So far everything works perfectly, which always makes us suspicious.<br />
** But now we have a lot more flexibility for adding or removing planets during gameplay, which is a pretty neat new thing to be able to do in general, for a variety of reasons.<br />
** Adding extra planets for players who join late in multiplayer is an example of one thing that we want to be able to eventually do, so that if player 2 joins in 2 hours into a campaign they still get a homeworld of their own, but it's a new one. One thing at a time, but that's something for during the later beta stages of multiplayer implementation, probably.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.026 The Faction Duality Problem ==<br />
(Released April 14th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The linux version of the game now has code in place to not even try to launch anything GOG-related, since GOG Galaxy does not exist on linux.<br />
** For most people it was failing silently (as it should), and basically causing no harm. But for at least one person, it was causing a crash on startup. This should work around that. When GOG galaxy support is added on linux at some point, then we'll revisit.<br />
** Thanks to shampoocat for reporting.<br />
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* Fixed a regression where if you were logged into GOG Galaxy and not Steam, it wasn't shown your username properly on the main menu.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of expansion spire hybrids from getting invulnerability from thoraxian hybrids when they should not.<br />
** Thanks to DHR Valkyr and Puffin Emeritus for reporting.<br />
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* Put in some fixes to planet tooltip generation in the event that the player faction is null for some reason.<br />
** Thanks to Valkyr for reporting.<br />
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* Made the exports for data about factions in a game a lot more detailed.<br />
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* Made it so that if you get a "no human king found" error, it also writes a report about what factions are there.<br />
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* Fixed a bug during deserialization of savegames/quickstarts that made it so that you had duplicate copies of the WorldSetup used for the lobby and the long-term storage, and that in turn led to chaos like deleting players or other factions or creating many duplicate factions when starting a new quickstart.<br />
** This bug has been in place since April 1st (go figure), but it wasn't really fully rearing its head until yesterday when some unrelated changes made it suddenly more apparent.<br />
** In fact we even had a second copy of this error from the same day in a second spot for loading quickstarts, so it was really going crazy.<br />
** This is less a case of "how did we break this yesterday" and more of a case of "how has this been working at all prior to yesterday for the two weeks prior?"<br />
** Thanks to AreU4Cereal, esassaman, GalateanGemmate, Strategic Sage, and Mischief Maker for reporting.<br />
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* If you have an old savegame with duplicate factions in them (multiple outguard or something), it will warn you about that when you load it, so that you know it's there, but it can't fix it. If you load that as a template for something else, that should fix it.<br />
** There is a vague possibility that you might be able to create a new game with duplicates again in the new version, simply by having old bad settings in your PlayerData/Save/_Internal/LastLobbySettings.save file.<br />
*** Simply hitting "Reset To Defaults" in the lobby, or loading a quick start or savegame into the lobby would remove that problem. But even with a known-bad save in LastLobbySettings.save, we can't duplciate having a new custom game with the problem now, so maybe it's not possible. If you're able to make it happen we'd be grateful for having your LastLobbySettings.save if it's something that you can make happen over and over again.<br />
** None of this would affect any savegames except for those that were created in 2.025 (yesterday's build), or MAYBE via a LastLobbySettings.save from 2.025.<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.025 The Twenty Million Problem ==<br />
(Released April 13th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential bug with macrophage notifications after the player is dead<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the most recent two versions of the game where the various zombie factions and the outguard faction were not seeding UNLESS you happened to go into the lobby and hit Set to Defaults and then start the game. It's possible that quick starts were working properly, but not definite.<br />
** This won't affect existing savegames regarding outguard being summonable, but will affect any new ones created. For zombies, it will fix any problematic existing saves.<br />
** Thanks to Valkyr, Strategic Sage, Lord Of Nothing, DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY, Scout1Treia, and Poppy for reporting.<br />
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* Fixed a bug where certain savegames could have not all the expansions in use actually noted as in use. This was going to be a problem for multiplayer, but we will probably have some further changes to make to that in the future.<br />
** In the short term, this could also cause some problems with detecting if relic trains were supposed to be enabled if you used certain quick starts or older savegames.<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting.<br />
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* Somehow or other, Ovalcircle managed to get the game to remember his last settings as being those from the test chamber. That shouldn't have been possible, and we can't replicate it, but we've put in extra fixes to hopefully keep it from happening to anyone again.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
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* Put in a fix that makes it so that if there are more factions than planet factions, it won't give an index out of range exception.<br />
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* Put back in some code that will now add AI Reserves (and the zombies and outguard) to existing savegames that don't have them.<br />
** It won't actually seed any outguard beacons if those are missing, but it will make all the various sorts of zombies function properly if they were missing, which is a pretty big deal.<br />
** Previously we had taken this out, and only had it run when loading as a template of some fashion or from the lobby, because it caused a mismatch in factions and planet factions.<br />
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* Put in some code that automatically fixes any missing planet factions for any galaxy-wide factions that are missing in a savegame that is loaded or other things that are created.<br />
** This fixes some serious issues in the test chamber, for one, but also makes it so that the other fixes above don't break the world.<br />
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* Put in some more defensive code for a rare threading race condition exception that could happen in TryUpdatingTargetPoint of ShotVisualizer.<br />
** Thanks to Endovior for reporting.<br />
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* Improved the wording in the quick start menu to say "no scenario selected" and similar, instead of "no save selected," so it's more clear what to do if you are having an error.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting the confusion.<br />
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* Fixed an issue in the quick start window and in the load savegame window where your old settings would be kept, but invisibly, when you exited the screen but went back in. You'd still have a scenario/save selected, but not visible.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
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* Put in a fix that ignores an exception in GenerateCaret() for text mesh pro when we disabled a canvas. This has only been popping up recently for whatever reason, but should now just ignore the problem and keep moving when the canvas is next showed.<br />
** Thanks to Endovior and Badger for reporting.<br />
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* Fixed an issue where, inexplicably, if we had a primary key for ships or shots that was more than 20 million it would start just giving them all the same primarykeyid which would then lead to all manner of problems.<br />
** This is not new, but it's only being encountered now, which is probably due to some particular factions in the specific savegame setup which cause a high ship PKID turnover. It still took 13 hours for this to come about.<br />
** The new cap is now properly a bit over 2 billion, which is 100x as high (and nearing the limit of 32bit integers). In the same sort of extreme scenario, with the same amount of churn, we can then assume it would take 1300 hours in one campaign to hit that new limit, so that's... certainly okay.<br />
** Huge thanks to choam and DarkWing for reporting and providing a save where we could reproduce this.<br />
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* Because of the prior bug, when a savegame is loaded that has an entity with id 20000001, it now reassigns it on load. This will definitely cause some problems in those saves, but definitely fewer problems than them all sharing a primary key ID.<br />
** The PKIDs are supposed to be unique, but in the case of one particular savegame we had 9895 ships with all the ID 20000001, which meant all sorts of problems like ships not being selectable, not able to decollide, not able to get movement orders in general, and not able to get orders from the player or other factions. Instead, they could kind of sit in place and autotarget and that was it.<br />
** Reassigning PKIDs is itself one of those "never do this" things, so probably any save affected by this (very few, if any beyond the single one we have on hand) may find some inexplicable bugs like fire teams missing entries or pointing to the wrong thing, etc. Things seem to load and run fine, but if there are boogeymen in a save of this sort then you know it's probably related to this.<br />
** Huge thanks to choam and DarkWing for reporting and providing a save where we could reproduce this.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.024 UI Focus Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 10th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a complicated bug where the game was not properly able to detect when an input field lost focus by virtue of its whole ui canvas (window) being disabled. This led to large parts of the ui being disabled at times after showing an input field in the prior version of the game.<br />
** Two logic inversions in semi-related code also made that even worse, although one of them made it "better" enough that the ui worked at all. Nonetheless, this was a fix that needed to happen quickly.<br />
** Thanks to Valkyr for reporting.<br />
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* Fixed a rare bug that could happen in fire teams updating and getting an index out of range exception at debug code 3100.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.023 Chat Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 10th, 2020)<br />
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* Allow non-scourge factions that use fireteams to stack when/where appropriate<br />
** Thanks to Swizzlewizzle for the bug report and save.<br />
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* Fixed several nullref bugs relating to regenerator golems.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
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* Added in new targeting logic for melee units that should allow them to better attack moving targets.<br />
** If issues crop up, or you prefer the old style, this can be enabled and disabled under the Units tab in Galaxy Settings.<br />
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=== UI / Chat Improvements ===<br />
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* The hotkey for opening the chat window is now Return/Enter rather than C. This actually lets you do C-clicking still and C-hovering, etc, which has been impossible since adding the chat.<br />
** Thanks to UFO and Strategic Sage for reporting.<br />
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* All of the various modifier keys for doing things like hiding tooltips no longer function while you are entering text into a textbox.<br />
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* Simply having the chat window open no longer causes all other input to be blocked. Now you actually have to have the cursor in the chat textbox for that to be the case.<br />
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* Hitting the escape key while you are in the chat window now properly closes that window, even if you are in text entry at the moment.<br />
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* Hitting the escape key to close whatever window or popup no longer comes with a risk of opening the in-game escape/system menu. That has been annoying for a long time.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of people for reporting over the last few years.<br />
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* When you first go into that chat window, or the modal textbox window, it now focuses the textbox there for immediate typing.<br />
** Additionally, after you send a chat message it immediately re-focuses the chat textbox.<br />
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* The chat log now actually uses gametime timestamps, rather than "how many gametime seconds ago was it" to show things. This is a lot easier to read, since every second every line isn't changing width because of all the lines changing numbers every second.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.021 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 8th, 2020)<br />
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* Fix to a deserialization error with AI Reserves in the prior build which was affecting quick starts but not existing savegames. Sorry about that!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.019 Regenerator Sanity ==<br />
(Released April 7th, 2020)<br />
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* When the AI Reserves decide to attack, they now give you a Notification saying "AI Reserves arriving in X seconds" instead of just appearing instantly. This gives you the chance to scrap units, retreat, snipe the command station, etc...<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting including Iocaine, swizzlewizzle, Lord of Nothing and his Inimitable Puffinness<br />
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* Fix a null reference exception in in the Spire Debris notification; could only be hit if you were hovering the notification when the debris vanished<br />
** Thanks to Endovior for reporting<br />
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* Alarm Posts now also free ships in Guard Posts<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
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* Tidied up some names.<br />
** Extragalactic Thunderbird is now Extragalactic War Thunderchild. <br />
** Extragalactic Chimera is now Extragalactic War Chimera. <br />
** Extragalactic AI Hunter / Seeker is now Extragalactic War Hunter / Seeker.<br />
** Extragalactic AI Hunter / Annihilator is now Extragalactic War Hunter / Annihilator.<br />
** Extragalactic Jackalope is now Extragalactic War Jackalope.<br />
** Extragalactic Mothership is now Extragalactic War Mothership.<br />
** Extragalactic Planet Cracker is now Extragalactic War Planetcracker.<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for noting some of the inconsistencies.<br />
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* For at least a month or so now, ever since we switched in the linked lists for storing entity lists instead of List<> and ArcenMob<>, and possibly slightly before that, if you were to do a swap between ship lines on a planet with a regenerator golem on it, you'd get a crash to desktop and a ton of extra ships in general.<br />
** In general, for some time now it has been allowing for various things to happen when you self-kill units (by scrapping or otherwise) that should not have been happening. This includes things like zombification copies being made, entities spawning on death in terms of things like hydra heads out of hydras, dying to remains, and regenerator golems spawning replacement ships. In this particular instance it could cause an infinite loop, but it was problematic in general.<br />
** There are still various other things that DO need to happen on-death even for scrapped units, like various loss conditions, AIP gains, and so on. And in the past, prior to us making some changes here that have led to this crash, we weren't running those things, which is problematic.<br />
** The game now does a much better job of telling all the sub-factions and so on what is happening and letting it react properly in the event of death from self-damage. So that solves the most recent problems, but keeps the longer-term benefits we've had for a while now.<br />
** Thanks to Bob for reporting.<br />
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* Tweaked a couple of things in the "regenerator golem" code so that they should take the proper amount of damage now, rather than too much or too little. They also shouldn't be able to kill themselves anymore by taking too much damage.<br />
** Additionally, crippled regenerators stop helping at all.<br />
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* Regenerators can't regenerate one another anymore (the AI could have multiple of them regenerating one another).<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
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* The game now has 3 Pathing Modes to let ships figure out which planets to move through. Shortest (always use shortest path), Safest (always take the safest path) and Default (take the safest path unless it's significantly longer than the shortest path, in which case use the shortest path).<br />
** By default all player commands use the Default mode, but the player can hold a modifier key for the Safest or the Shortest path <br />
** Note to modders: FindPath() calls now take an extra argument.<br />
** Resolves pathing problems reported by a number of people, including UFO and Sigma7<br />
<br />
== Version 2.018 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released April 6th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix to a bug that was causing some-but-not-all savegames to fail to load in the previous version of the game. Mainly saves that were games started in 2.016 that were being loaded in 2.017. This was to do with fixing the AI reserves missing. Turns out those should not be added in mid-save. Now that no longer happens, but in the other cases where AI reserves were missing, it adds them properly.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
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* Also added in a helpful method on the World_AIW2 singleton object which lets us just quickly write all the factions (invisible and otherwise) to the log.<br />
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== Version 2.017 GOG Achievements ==<br />
(Released April 7th, 2020)<br />
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* The Scourge now have some power scalings based on the Overall Power Level of enemy factions. It maxes out at a 10% increase in Neophyte spawning rates if the scourge's enemy factions have an overall power level of >= 5. <br />
** Thanks to swizzlewizzle among others for requesting<br />
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* Fixed a rare exception that can happen in the fallen spire code.<br />
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* Fixed an issue that could have AI Reserves not appearing in the prior version of the game sometimes.<br />
<br />
=== Achievement Fixes And Improvements ===<br />
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* The Steam and GOG Galaxy client integrations have been moved out into their own sections of code, and a bunch more of GOG Galaxy integration has been included now.<br />
** As networking is added via Steam, its code will grow enough that it really needs to be on its own.<br />
<br />
* The GOG Galaxy client now logs you in (if you are logged into that program on your system), if you are on Windows or OSX.<br />
** This is a prerequisite for both GOG Achievements, as well as for networking through GOG.<br />
<br />
* GOG Achievements now log in the same manner that has worked for Steam -- it's about time we got this in!<br />
** It took us longer to get into their API than it really should have, but we need this sort of thing for multiplayer anyhow, as well as in general this being great for GOG players in the first place.<br />
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* Steam and GOG now properly only get sent achievements that it doesn't think you've already unlocked.<br />
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* Apparently we were saving the "all time statistics" but never actually loading them. Fixed to just not have them, now, as they contained very little aside from local achievements and that was not working.<br />
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* Added local achievements tracking that actually remembers what the heck you have previously unlocked.<br />
** This also prevents your achievements from popping up every time you restart the game program and enter a savegame with the conditions for the achievements met.<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting.<br />
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* The "resubmit offline achievements to Steam and GOG" code now actually does what you'd expect, since it now logs things offline.<br />
** We tightened this up a bit, anyway, to make it run a little more efficiently on the main menu.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.016 Thunderchild ==<br />
(Released April 2nd, 2020)<br />
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* HRF has received many buffs to their budget, and how they use it<br />
** Maximum budget increased by 500%<br />
** Budget per second increased by 450%<br />
** Minimum budget required to attack increased by 3000%<br />
*** Thanks to the a large portion of the community for their notes on HRF<br />
<br />
* Make the "Enable HRF" hack cost fewer hacking points<br />
** From a discussion on discord<br />
<br />
=== Extragalactic Surprises ===<br />
<br />
* The AI will spawn more extragalactic ships at AI difficulty >= 7<br />
** There's been a good amount of feedback that the spire is too easy.<br />
<br />
* Jackalope and Thunderchild extragalactic war units now make their debut. Expect to run into them when using the Fallen Spire, and potentially with other factions in the future. These are SCARY...<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Fixes And Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* We're now using the ability to load savegames into the lobby to make it so that every time you open the lobby, it now has the selected options that you last used -- factions and otherwise.<br />
** This fixes several bugs with things showing values that were not a match to the underlying data, as well as making it a lot more convenient in general.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth, Histidine, NRSirLimbo, Fluffiest, Ecthelon, and deo for reporting.<br />
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* Added a new Reset To Defaults button in the lobby, which lets you change the lobby back to the default settings and build up fresh again if you want to (now that it instead remembers your settings from last time).<br />
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* The "this is experimental" warning on loading savegames and quickstarts into the lobby is now removed.<br />
** We're using this pipeline for very central things in a lot of places now, and have beat the heck out of it testing permutations.<br />
** If you find any problems with it, please let us know and we'll fix that as soon as we can, rather than treating it like an optional side feature.<br />
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* When you load any old savegame or quickstart or whatever into the lobby, it now uses your profile's player color properly.<br />
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* If you try to load an old savegame into the lobby and it has a fleet that is no longer valid (or was from a mod or something that you don't have), it now loads properly and just randomizes the fleet in question.<br />
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* When loading a quick start in general, or a savegame/quickstart into the lobby, it was previously possible to have the underlying map seed be different from the one on the UI, which was confusing for sure.<br />
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* When you are in the lobby and the map regenerates, it now refreshes all the faction data rather than potentially keeping some stale data in there. This solves several problems with it showing out of data info for starting fleets in particular.<br />
<br />
=== Other Fixes And Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Fix an exception with the Extragalactic War: Ignore Player-Allied Minor Factions option<br />
** Thanks to Greatmar2 for reporting<br />
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* Fix a bug where the player overall power level was being miscalculated<br />
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* Fix a bug where the Hacking Menu looked incorrect at game load time<br />
** Thanks to Arc-3N-4B for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with setting the game mode on background threads where it would crash the game because it was trying to instantiate some planet visual objects on those background threads; that's a main-thread-only thing, and was quite the cascade of things to chase down.<br />
** In general it now protects it against itself, and waits to do it later on the main thread as needed.<br />
** We also tidied up some code into separate methods to make it easier to find things that are crashing in this area if it ever happens again, but it should not.<br />
** Also made it so that it can center on a planet from a background thread if it has to.<br />
<br />
* The game had very old multiplayer sync code that has been partially running in place the entire time (even in single player), and which is very outdated compared to what we want to do in the near future. We've commented out the old in preparation for the new, which will be adaptive and scan some entities/planets at a time; the old method was about detecting wholesale problems as soon as possible and halting the simulation, which is not the approach we're taking with this game.<br />
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* If the game is missing a surrogate table for some reason, it now gives an appropriate visible message rather than just hanging game load.<br />
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* Fixed an exception that could happen when loading certain savegames or quick starts into the lobby for further editing. As part of this, was able to verify that all the custom settings are properly being loaded in properly, too, when loading highly-customized saves.<br />
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* A bunch of added robustness and fixes to some strange edge cases when loading worlds either from disk or across the network, or from savegames or directly.<br />
** Also some things to robustness in the display of galaxies when things go wrong during this load and you get in afterward.<br />
<br />
* Fixed it so that if you are trying to generate a galaxy with a null map type (possibly by loading a quick start or savegame that is using a map type that no longer exists), then it will choose a random map type and use that instead, rather than erroring and dying.<br />
<br />
* Really fixed a ton of different things that would give funky errors that were hard to interpret if the data was messed up enough.<br />
** These were all cases where we never have had data that messed up "in the wild," but as we get into multiplayer's alpha we may run into that from time to time and we want to make sure that we are able to have it recover more gracefully.<br />
<br />
* The way that savegames and quick starts and the lobby are loaded under the hood has been streamlined and simplified a lot, and made much more clear.<br />
** This is good news for them functioning really well with the new ability to load savegames and quickstarts into the lobby, and also very relevant for loading multiplayer savegames and into multiplayer lobbies. This was quite a thing to untangle, but now it makes our lives much easier in the future as we get into multiplayer alpha soon.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a harmless but annoying bug that could randomly pop up when trying to load some savegames and would give the message "ArcenDynamicTable<MercenaryGroupData>.GetRowByName() called with null/empty name"<br />
** Thanks to Malformata for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen when trying to load a faction that was referencing a named color that is not installed on the local machine for whatever reason. Whether that's for an expansion or mod, or the color was removed for some reason. It now assigns a random color instead, rather than failing to generate the game.<br />
** This was interfering with loading the Helping Hands scenarios for some reason in the most recent version of the game if you didn't have the expansion installed.<br />
** Thanks to ArkTheSpark, minnow990, Vola, and Roadrunner for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of issues where the game could not load quick starts that were created with expansions enabled if you didn't have those same expansions and there were beacon-enable-able factions in that quick start.<br />
** The game now is able to deserialize expansion content no matter what by moving the "external data pattern" definitions into the main game, and also by making it so that missing ship entities get a dummy stub created for purposes of deserialization (and then being tossed away).<br />
** Thanks to Thanks to ArkTheSpark, minnow990, Vola, and Roadrunner for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.012 Populous ==<br />
(Released March 26th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where allied nanocaust could be hostile for a second or two after loading a save game<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Marauder Outpost strength wasn't appearing in the galaxy map<br />
** Thanks to Parch for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Spire Debris intended for a recently killed AI faction could cause a null reference<br />
** Reported by Cadbury and Admiral<br />
<br />
* Quiet some dev-only debugging code visible in the Threat window<br />
** Thanks to the crew of the USS Defiant for the report<br />
<br />
* Fix a crash in the BuildingDronesInternally metal flow planning code<br />
** Thanks to LCEnzo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Dyson Spheres antagonized by hacking weren't actually doing anything<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for a nice bug report with a save game<br />
<br />
* AI Mines on a given planet now decloak once the AI command station on that planet is killed<br />
** Should be a nice little QoL improvement. Suggested by a number of people, including corfe83<br />
<br />
* Fixed centerpieces occasionally reporting being under self construction, thus breaking them entirely.<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing and Mayheim for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Exogalactic Attacks are not eligible to come through the Exogalactic Wormhole from Wormhole Invasions until the first other ships have come through the wormhole. It's still very hard, but you can see it coming so there's less RNG.<br />
** This is primarily for the DLC (since there are a lot more Exos there), but applies to the base game as well<br />
** Suggestion from Lord of Nothing, with additional bug reports by Strategic Sage and The Puffinster<br />
<br />
* Risk Analyzers now show their intensity-analogue in the Escape menu<br />
** Suggested by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Remove some deprecated settings<br />
** Thanks to Sombre and ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Exos could sometimes wind up idle after killing their target<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed the issue with loading Quickstarts/saves into the lobby, but not playing at all<br />
** Thanks Fluffiest for reporting, Democracy for testing, and Puffin for helping figure out the issue<br />
<br />
* Fixed a few more achievements that weren't triggering correctly<br />
** Thanks Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Added menu to the debug menu that allows players to select the currently playing music track.<br />
** Thanks DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting, as well as Steam user "Micah" and "NB_FlankStrike" for reporting similar requests.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where usurpers would sometimes leave planets instead of capturing them<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the Montserrat-Thin font, which would get very distorted when shown in small pixel space on the game. Now it has enough data in there to render precisely even when very small.<br />
** This should help in a variety of parts of the interface, but most notably in the chat window when your screen resolution is very small.<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Fixes / Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* The "can edit presets" debug setting has been removed, and the editing of savegames and presets into the lobby is now supported for everyone.<br />
** There may still be problems with this that we need to iron out, but we're getting there and everyone should at least be aware of the option.<br />
<br />
* When loading a savegame or quick start into the lobby, it no longer has any problems with "factions that must be discovered" showing up inappropriately.<br />
** Thanks to a lot of players for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Loading a quick start into the lobby no longer requires you have a campaign name first.<br />
<br />
* The factions that are discoverable in a game, but not yet discovered, are now shown at the bottom of the list of factions as (Discoverable) in the escape menu.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that was allowing you to add more than one Zenith Trader or Devourer Golem or other "must only be one" factions.<br />
** This had then led to a variety of other bugs after that, but we're less concerned about those since the core thing can no longer happen.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and StarKeep for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Forward-Compatible Settings and Profiles ===<br />
<br />
* Made it so that settings files and input bindings files -- from this version onward -- are now forwards-compatible.<br />
** Aka, if you load a version 2.016 settings file in version 2.012, then it would let you do that. In the past, loading a version 2.012 file in 2.011 would cause it to show an error message and toss out all your settings.<br />
<br />
* The player profile is now stored in an xml format rather than the char field format that it was using before, which allows for hand-editing if we ever need to and is more flexible in general.<br />
** The player profile also now is forward-compatible from version 2.012 onwards, like the settings and player inputs.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of players, but including Shnatsel, for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Changes for The Spire Rises DLC ===<br />
<br />
* Shifted the values for Fallen Spire exogalactic-strikes around, resulting in low AIP being stronger, and higher AIP not increasing as much.<br />
** Big thanks to Astilious for reporting and assisting in sorting out the problem.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with the hacking sidebar that was causing numbers not to display properly<br />
** Thanks to Dominus for doing some useful debugging. Thanks to ParadoxSong and Ranakastrasz for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where mark 7 scourge would try to refuse to fight by constantly thinking they could upgrade<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where player or minor faction allied scourge wouldn't realize that the AI Overlord was a legit target<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Fallen Spire beacon was available even if the Fallen Spire faction was enabled in the game lobby<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where relic trains could go to the AI overlord early<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Imperial Spire Fleet was attacking an invulnerable Overlord instead of destroying the guard posts<br />
** Thanks to Oryutzen for reporting<br />
<br />
* Exos that kill a Spire City no longer get stuck afterwards<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* The scourge was getting stuck if the only path to any target was extremely well defended<br />
** This was only happening in very late game scenarios with the fallen spire on for certain map types<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Macrophage Phase 3 - Multi Phage Takeover ===<br />
* The Macrophage are now a credible threat. You can have as many of them as you want, and they are fully capable of eating entire chunks of the galaxy on higher intensities. Be warned.<br />
<br />
==== Base Game Changes ====<br />
<br />
* You can now have multiple Macrophage per game, and they can have seperate allegiences set.<br />
** If Spores from different Macrophage factions meet; and there are enough unique Spores on the planet to spawn a Telium, one of the spores at random gets priority for deciding whom the new Telium belongs to.<br />
*** Tamed still has absolute priority.<br />
** There is still only a single Tamed faction.<br />
*** You are still unable to tame any Macrophage subfactions that are friendly to players.<br />
** There is still only a single Enraged faction.<br />
*** They will still eat everything.<br />
<br />
* Added in two new spawn options for Macrophage: Lone Telium and Clustered Telia.<br />
** Lone Telium spawns a single Telium for the Subfaction.<br />
*** This Lone Telium is always berserk, never produces spores, its harvesters are much more defensive, and its harvesters only enrage when it dies.<br />
** Clustered Telia spawns Telia on half as many planets, but spawns 2 Telia per planet.<br />
*** Added in a new quickstart, the Buggalactic War, which makes use of all the spawning styles.<br />
<br />
* Spawn event costs now scale with the number of harvesters that a Telium owns.<br />
** Base event cost reduced to 125k Metal. (175k for hostile-to-player)<br />
** On Intensity 5, the cost is increased by 35% for each (non enraged) harvester owned.<br />
*** This value scales with intensity, being 20% at Intensity 10, and 47% at Intensity 1.<br />
*** Tamed is considered Intensity 10 for this purpose.<br />
<br />
* Spore event chance now decreases by 2% for every Telia in the galaxy.<br />
* Spore event chance is now clamped between 25% and 75%.<br />
* Higher Mark Macrophage break and snack for longer.<br />
* Enraged Macrophage snack on homeworlds for thrice as long as they do other planets.<br />
* Updated the Macrophage Attacking message to no longer spam the log when you kill a large Telium.<br />
* Tame Telium hack reduced to 25 HaP cost.<br />
* Chance for Enraged Harvesters to attack the ai starts at 50%, and increases as your Tamed Telia start to outnumber Wild, up until they reach 90%.<br />
* Gave a facelift to various descriptions such as hacking and entity appenders.<br />
<br />
==== The Spire Rises DLC Changes ====<br />
<br />
* When a Macrophage faction gets debris, it will upgrade one of its Telia into a powerful Spire Infested Telia.<br />
** A Spire Infested Telia is equipped with a multitude of short ranged Reaper beams, and is capable of (slow) movement. Be wary.<br />
*** If you manage to kill this Telia, the Macrophage that its part of will be unable to build new Spire Infested Harvesters until they acquire new Debris.<br />
*** You can optionally attempt to hack it to steal the debris, gaining double the science you would from a normal debris.<br />
**** Perhaps its not the best idea to enrage the already powerful bugs that are more powerful than normal.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Halved durability of AI Tachyon Sentinels.<br />
<br />
* Black Hole Machines affect units of engine gx 20 and lower, rather than 14. Crippled units can now leave regardless, preventing possible softlocks. Flagship engine gx reduced slightly to be affected.<br />
<br />
* Black Hole Machine, Raid Engine and Magnifier now die with the Command Station.<br />
<br />
* AI Turrets are now at least 75% of the range of player ones.<br />
<br />
* Added numerous AI Ship Groups.<br />
** Some things of note:<br />
** There are 50ish Turret Groups, 37 Strikecraft/Frigate groups, and 14 Dire Guard Post groups all added.<br />
** Swarmer AI has more variety/difference in what it likes to bring.<br />
** Fortress Baron is the only AI type to have Mini Forts, as a unique thing for it.<br />
** Turtle AI has 6x the reinforcement group count as before.<br />
*** These vary as to which AIs they are assigned. More specific AI types don't have all of them, while Full Ensemble has most.<br />
*** Many Turret groups require the first DLC to ever show up, and some groups use both base game and DLC Turrets. If you don't have the DLC, those'll just look like normal mono-Turret groups.<br />
<br />
* Some range nerfs to some Extragalactic units. Range and speed nerf to AI Dragon.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian no longer has Overdrive effect, instead is just a larger Plasma Guardian.<br />
** Nasty interactions with Fallen Spire, particularly the Great Shield.<br />
** Thanks to Lord of Nothing for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Upgraded AI Fortress power. Large upgrade to AI Super Fortress power.<br />
<br />
* Increased Stingray damage and durability by 40%, metal cost by 60%.<br />
<br />
* Tripled Ion Disruptor damage.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboat damage increased 60%, metal cost doubled.<br />
<br />
* Ranger damage increased 60%, metal cost increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Medic Gunboat now has vampirism, metal cost doubled.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod and Aggressor damage increased 30%.<br />
<br />
* Raider and Dagger damage increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette and Molotov reload time 12s -> 9s.<br />
<br />
* Guard Posts and Dire Guard Posts now use the same armour/albedo stats as their relevant Guardian, if they have one.<br />
<br />
* Put a small bit of Dire Guard Post shield into hull, going from a 1:5 ratio to a 1:3.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks (The Spire Rises DLC) ===<br />
<br />
* Both Spy Cradles vision range increased by 1, both have very powerful planet wide tachyon systems.<br />
<br />
* Buttress has same durability as normal structures rather than less, requires MK4 city rather than 5, uses 2 sockets rather than 4, has the same effects as a Black Hole Machine, but the gravity part is planet wide.<br />
** Made the lower tier Extra-Galactic War units susceptible to this.<br />
<br />
* Small tweak to Relic chase force sizes as you progress through Fallen Spire.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.009 Plenty Of Tuning ==<br />
(Released March 9th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fix several bugs related to forcefields not handling norris effect stuff properly<br />
** reported by Fluffiest, Xenorius, ussdefiant and gigastar<br />
<br />
* Centerpieces are now always visible even when crippled on both planets and the galaxy map, though still no longer grant vision of anything else when crippled<br />
** reported most recently by Chthon<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to the Overall Power Level code paths<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting<br />
<br />
* When trying to find a random AI faction for things, try to pick a living faction<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with tooltips for units in Fireteams<br />
** Thanks to a number of people including ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The icons in the bottom right corner, under the selected ships, no longer try to draw text. That was way too small and thus always hard to read and looked blurry. That happens in any text editor, too. Instead, it just relies on the icons, which are now larger and thus also themselves draw more clearly. There are tooltips for anyone forgetting what they do. The hotkeys for these functions are still shown via text, no problem, though.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the Save Presets code<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for the bug report and Dominus for the fix<br />
<br />
==== Dyson ====<br />
<br />
* New Dyson Antagonizer rules<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers must spawn on Explored planets<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers are Always Visible, even if you have out of date information about the planet<br />
*** Requested by a number of people<br />
<br />
* Fix the Dyson Antagonizer not respecting the Dyson Intensity for spawning, and spawning much more often than intended.<br />
<br />
==== Marauders ====<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Marauders weren't spawning turrets for their outposts. <br />
* Hopefully fix a bug where hostile-to-all marauders weren't killing AI command stations <br />
* Fix a bug where marauder outposts were spawning much too quickly.<br />
** Net nerf to the marauders; they require much more time to scale up after capturing a planet. I've heard some complaints that the marauders are really getting out of control quickly, and that should no longer be possible.<br />
** Thanks to the crew of the USS Defiant for reminding me about this <br />
<br />
=== Spire Rises changes ===<br />
<br />
* Further clarify the description text on the AI Spire Research Lab<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Spire Debris is no longer allowed to join fireteams<br />
** Thanks to Smaug for reporting<br />
<br />
* Prevent multiple Spire Cities from being built on the same planet.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* AI-allied scourge at intensity > 5 have a chance of building an additional guard post next to any spawner or armory they create. Should make trying to attack the scourge infrastructure a bit more challenging. This code is readily expandable to spawning other AI structures as well if desired<br />
** From a conversation with a particularly depraved Peltian sympathizer<br />
<br />
* Make doubly sure that spire relics can't spawn on AI homeworlds<br />
** pointed out by XTRMNTR2K on steam<br />
<br />
* Improve player-allied scourge target selection in the mid/late game <br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for a useful save game for debugging<br />
<br />
* If the Imperial Spire Fleet detects your home planet is under attack, they will prioritize defending it<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Add additional debugging code to the Spire Sim code<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for the bug report<br />
<br />
== Version 2.008 Transport Loading Hotfix ==<br />
(Released March 4th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where ships would unload properly from transports, but never load into them again, in the prior version.<br />
** This was a casualty of the many changes we made in order to facilitate the performance improvements, but was quick to fix once people reported it. Apologies for that and anything else that crops up!<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage and Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Imperial Spire vessels are now MK7.<br />
<br />
* There is now extra debugging information shown visibly if the fallen spire actually has an issue.<br />
** Before it would just silently spam the log.<br />
<br />
* When a unit is trying to transform and it is in an invalid state, it now gives a more clear error message.<br />
<br />
* When centerpieces die, they are now blanked out properly; previously it held onto them in a dead format but mostly-removed, and this could cause some funky errors in the fallen spire in particular, but possibly other places eventually.<br />
** This was something that the squad wrappers we used to use automatically filtered for, so that's why it pops up now but not previously. It's a lot more efficient the new way, but we needed this extra check for this strange edge case.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.007 Speed Boost ==<br />
(Released March 4th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* When hovering a tech line in the science sidebar, it now lists the ships lines to be upgraded first by mobile ships, then by turrets, instead of always in alphabetical order<br />
<br />
* If remains cannot be rebuilt for some reason, it now shows the reason in the hovertext for those remains. This fixes a lot of ambiguity!<br />
** It also includes the countdown timers for things that can't be rebuilt for a certain amount of time with/without enemies.<br />
<br />
* Improved the priorities of repairs and other metal expenditures so that it makes more sense. Command stations with next to no health will now be prioritized extra for repairs even if there's a big ship to complain.<br />
** In cases where there was a giant golem to expensively complain, it often would not let you even choose to override that and spend metal on repairing the command station. Now that works properly, and at least some engineers will break off to repair things even with a giant capturable there.<br />
** Thanks to Smaug for a savegame where the command station was just impossible to repair while the unclaimed golem was still present.<br />
<br />
* The 'cancel hack' popup now reminds the player that you still pay the full hacking points value<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Remove a debugging line related to Dyson Spheres that was left enabled by accident<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make it much harder for structures to start to rebuild themselves mid battle.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a very long-standing bug where the Threat Count in the resource bar was sometimes counting Warden or Praetorian units<br />
<br />
* Fixed Fleet Centerpieces vanishing from the galaxy map if they were crippled, then moved to a planet that was only Explored.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan, Daniexpert and Histidine for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where command stations still under construction could still help with claiming other ships.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really longstanding bug where ships that were overkilled that were in a stack were not rolling over their damage properly.<br />
** They actually were winding up over-healing the health of the next ship in the stack, not causing over-damage.<br />
<br />
* It was somehow possible to have ships with zero health that did not die, seemingly only since the other performance improvements below but frankly the code was pretty unrelated to the area we can think of.<br />
** These now automatically re-check for dying within the next sim step, and do so properly. This is a nice safety net in general to have, we suppose.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where it would usually return a spurious "." at the start of type names it could not find.<br />
<br />
* When PerFrame_CalculateEffectiveFleetData on fleets has an exception, it now gives more info on where that happened.<br />
** Fixed an exception that could happen due to centerpieces not fully deserializing into their fleet lines properly. That only seemed to matter for drone producers, but it was a thing.<br />
*** This fix also fixed a common thing that could happen when exiting out of really large savegames to the main menu.<br />
<br />
=== Performance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Improved performance slightly on player planetary fleets without a centerpiece (aka command station), to basically not do all the checking and counts for them. Every planet has a fleet like that for every human player, so doing some checking like that on all of them was a mild expense that was not worth it.<br />
<br />
* Put in some more debugging variables that let us turn off more parts of the simulation to find performance hotspots.<br />
<br />
* Moved some logic for entity removal to be slightly more centralized, which makes it less common and also thus something that doesn't ever accidentally add the same entity to a big list more than once. There is some performance gain from this, but it's not huge in the current scheme of things.<br />
<br />
* SquadCountsByType is now an int array rather than an ArcenSparseLookup, which makes it much much faster.<br />
<br />
* MetalIncomePerPlanet_ForUI and EnergyProducedPerPlanet_ForUIOnly have become simple integers on the actual planet, and are handled in a much more efficient fashion since they are local-player-UI-only.<br />
<br />
* Added a new ArcenLinkedList<> class, which is a new specialist collection that is thread-safe, multiplayer-safe, and extremely high performance to iterate over, add to, and remove from.<br />
** We're replacing all instances of ArcenMob<>, and the rollup uses of List<>, with this new class.<br />
** This sees a massive improvement in speed in a lot of savegames, and the removal of micro-stutters relating to entities being removed from lists in general. This also sees a big improvement in how quickly you can get back out to the main menu.<br />
** It's a lot of code changes, though, so it's always possible we made some sort of mistake in this and are causing a new bug somewhere. Fingers crossed that's not the case, but the places it would be a problem are usually central enough that it should be wildly obvious. So far we're not seeing that.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the savegame that helped us pinpoint the fact that ship/shot removal was being the biggest performance drain at the moment. His savegame went from a choppy 45-55% performance to smooth 100% performance.<br />
<br />
* Revised the Fleets class to no longer use Squad Wrappers, but instead to directly use squads.<br />
** This causes a slight performance boost in general, and will allow us to use performance-boosting collections that don't work on structs like SquadWrapper.<br />
** There's also the possibility for some errant bugs here and there, but we think we caught all of those, as they followed a specific pattern.<br />
<br />
* The list of ships inside each fleet membership are now handled via the new linked lists rather than normal lists, extending the speed benefits to them.<br />
** Most of the "performance trouble" saves that we've collected over the last months now run at full speed, where some used to run at 5%. A couple still only run at about 80%, but those are by far the minority.<br />
*** It is worth noting that just starting a new game at 300 planets will put you immediately at 70-80% sim speed right from the start. Apparently there is something we're doing that is still inescapably planet-bound in terms of calculation cost, even though the number of ships is 1/3 or less of that of much beefier later-game saves that now run at 100% speed. We may need to lower the max number of planets in any map to being more like 140 or so.<br />
<br />
=== DLC changes ===<br />
<br />
* AI extragalactic response no longer counts its own scourge allies when deciding whether to spawn extragalactic war ships<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Make the Scourge Beacon Hack more costly and harder<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Awakened Scourge allies should show up in the escape menu now<br />
** Thanks to vinco for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Imperial Spire wasn't pressing home its attacks<br />
** Thanks to Astillious<br />
<br />
* Fixed the new Arks being unable to rebuild remains.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The Objectives for killing the AI Spire Citadel/Research Lab only appear once you have Explored those planets<br />
<br />
* There is now a Spire Beacon, and hacking it activates the Spire Quest.<br />
** This is only available for new games, it's not retroactive <br />
** Thanks to SCUD on steam for reminding us about this. <br />
<br />
* The Scourge's Overall Power level can now go up to 1.5 if it has a Nemesis<br />
** Only relevant for player or minor faction allied scourge<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks (The Spire Rises DLC) ===<br />
<br />
* Increased durability of Scourge Spawners and Armouries by 50%. Added Forcefields to both.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks (Base Game) ===<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate, Bounty Hunter and Apparition mass 4 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate damage 5,000 -> 3,500.<br />
<br />
* Dyson and Dark Spire units are immune to being captured.<br />
** This solves some nasty faction interactions, such as an AI Wendigo finding a nice tasty group of Dark Spire to eat, or the Nanocaust gaining enormous hordes of units.<br />
** Also fixes some possible player shenanigans using Hacks.<br />
*** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting a Dark Spire and Nanocaust incident, Histidine for reporting a Wendigo problem, and Fluffiest for suggesting (all separately).<br />
<br />
== Version 2.006 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 29th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Viral Shredders now inherit pursuit mode<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Quiet some text in the galaxy view hover-planet view. We don't want planets being suddenly Nomadic or anything...<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for AI Spire Research Labs to clarify that they violate other city placement rules<br />
** As a result of some discussions on discord<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where you couldn't build Spire structures if the Spire Flagship (but not the city) was crippled<br />
** Thanks to WolfWhiteFire for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Spire Debris; Debris can no longer be captured by another faction while you are hacking it. The Spire Debris spawn message now shows the correct time that the debris will last for the first debris.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some additional debugging code to PreFillFactionBasedData.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Outguard hacks were causing the hacking history menu to crash. Add some defensive code there too<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage's thot bug reporting ways<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'ai stops doing anything once it's killed' code to make sure that Anti-MDC exos are no longer spawned after the Overlord is killed<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for the bug report<br />
<br />
* You now know which faction will capture Spire Debris if you don't get to it in time. This lets you make informed decisions about which debris you want to prioritize.<br />
** You also get 3 debris per City instead of 2.<br />
** Suggested by Starkelp<br />
<br />
* Fixed Viral Shredder copies being swappable, allowing for infinite lines in a single Fleet.<br />
** Thanks to Lampshade for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in defensive coding against some rare nullref exceptions that could happen during some combination of scourge and fallen spire, but which we weren't able to directly duplicate.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Removed the maximum Mark restriction set on Battlestations, Citadels, and Home Forcefields.<br />
** They now go to Mark 7 like normal.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.005 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed an invalid cast exception that could happen in GetScourgeGlobalDataExt for unexpected reasons if the scourge had wrong metadata for some reason.<br />
<br />
* Definitely fixed the minor capturables exception in mapgen, so that even if it ever happens in the future (even mods could validly cause this), it will just silently log a note in case developers need it, but keep everything on the interface running smoothly. The actual error in this case was related to an expansion, but a mod could easily cause the same thing, and in neither case is it actually a bug or something to notify the user about.<br />
** Thanks to Jodan008 for letting us know this was still happening.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the most recent hotfix related to dyson antagonizers not being found.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB and Yog-Sothoth for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.004 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed units with ShouldNeverBeCapturedByAnotherFaction set to true, such as Tesla Torpedo Frigates, from being loaded into Transports.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the Scourge Neinzul Fortress text to mention that it produces hostile to all zombies<br />
** Thanks to vinco for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mapgen error that could happen for people without the new expansion installed. Apologies for that!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.002 Turret Icons ==<br />
(Released February 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* All 30 of the new turrets now have updated flair denoting what they are. Definitely important for seeing from a distance and in the sidebar what they are!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.001 Expansion 1: The Spire Rises! ==<br />
(Released February 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The new expansion is out now!<br />
** More info is here on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1196420/AI_War_2_The_Spire_Rises/<br />
** Or on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/ai_war_2_the_spire_rises<br />
** Or on Humble: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/ai-war-2-the-spire-rises<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Grand New AI]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=38971AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-05-21T02:43:47Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Beta 2.045 */ was released publicly as Version 2.045</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.045 ==<br />
<br />
=== Dark Zenith ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the DZ was friendly with the Hunter Fleet/Instigators/etc...<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* The C# to support a DZ that is minor-faction allied is in. I don't intend for this to be available in the base game, but I intend for the modding support to be just a little bit of XML<br />
<br />
* Add DZ Pirates! Some Epistyles are Pirate Epistyles.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles are outcasts. Transports won't give them resources. So Pirate Epistyles build Privateers to go attack Transports and steal the resources.<br />
** Once a Privateer has stolen resources it will return back to the Pirate Epistyle.<br />
** Pirate Epistyles build unique combat ships as well<br />
*** TODO: there should be some chance that an Epistyle "turns pirate", or that the DZ "attacks" a pirate epistyle and turns it back into a regular Epistyle<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.044 ==<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Architrave ===<br />
<br />
* The ZA actually has some unique ships and defensive structures now<br />
** They are themed based on roman gladiators<br />
<br />
* The ZA has a budget for building defenses over time, and it can replace killed defenses, instead of the old rather hacky approach<br />
<br />
=== Zenith Miners ===<br />
* There are now more hacks for the Zenith Miner probe<br />
** You can move the probe to a random adjacent planet, so the miner will attack that planet instead <br />
** You can cause the Miner to modify the planet to permanently speedup or slowdown all ships on that planet. If this option is chosen then the miner will vanish after its time is up. The miner will still attack everything though.<br />
*** Potential use case: the Probe is on a planet adjacent to a heavily defended AI planet that has an Ark you want. You can reprogram the Miner to speedup all units, then try to move the probe and hope it goes to the defended planet. Then the Miner will do your dirty work for you.<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.043 ==<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
== Beta 2.042 ==<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
== Version 2.031 ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.029 ==<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing right now ==<br />
<br />
* Multiple ZAs for the civil war<br />
** Test that they spawn golems<br />
<br />
* How does ZA balance feel? Do they feel impactful?<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners are open for testing! No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens! Please try the various hacks.<br />
<br />
* Nomad planets are open for testing. No restrictions. Turn em on and see what happens!<br />
<br />
* DZ can be turned on and they will invade the galaxy. Please turn these on and watch for exceptions<br />
<br />
== Known Issues/Bug reports ==<br />
<br />
* Architrave can spawn close to each other (in one case, on adjacent planets). While not necessarily a bug, its not very interesting when they fight.<br />
** Should add a minimum hop distance between multiple.<br />
<br />
<br />
=== Links to Faction descriptions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=38915AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-05-18T22:08:15Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Version 2.043 */ was put in beta</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
=== Beta 2.043 ===<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Miners<br />
** Now have notifications<br />
<br />
* Nomads and Zenith Miners<br />
** Planets should now be properly destroyed<br />
<br />
=== Beta 2.042 ===<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
=== Version 2.031 ===<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
=== Version 2.029 ===<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing right now ==<br />
<br />
* Check if the ZA will spawn golems during the civil war<br />
<br />
* Give a vague sense of whether the response to the nomad planets crashing A. works and B. is balanced.<br />
** Note that setting the nomads on 'fast move' will decrease the AI response significantly<br />
<br />
* Check that you can no longer crash your homeworld if it's on a nomad planet<br />
<br />
* The DZ can be turned on to check for exceptions. It doesn't do much otherwise.<br />
** Save/load doesn't work for DZ<br />
<br />
== Known Issues/Bug reports ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Planets can get links to themselves (reproduction scenario needed). This hasnt been seen for a while<br />
<br />
<br />
* Architrave can spawn close to each other (in one case, on adjacent planets). While not necessarily a bug, its not very interesting when they fight.<br />
** Should add a minimum hop distance between multiple.<br />
<br />
<br />
=== Links to Faction descriptions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes&diff=38910AI War 2:Zenith Onslaught Patch Notes2020-05-17T23:46:34Z<p>Ovalcircle1: Version 2.033 got renamed to Beta 2.042</p>
<hr />
<div>This is for alpha testing for the Zenith Onslaught. I'm using this to keep patch notes.<br />
<br />
=== Version 2.043 ===<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Can now actually invade the galaxy. "Open" for stability testing. No attempt at balance or unit creation has been made.<br />
<br />
=== Beta 2.042 ===<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give them a few new defensive structures<br />
** Remove some mentions of the militant dyson from notification tooltips. Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
** Fix a bug where Golems weren't going to spawn<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** Dark Zenith now actually spawn new planets<br />
** First pass at DZ economy done. Can be turned on for testing, though they only do economic stuff right now<br />
<br />
=== Version 2.031 ===<br />
<br />
* Nomad Changes <br />
** Fix a null reference exception in the nomad planet notifier, and minor text tweaks there.<br />
** Don't let an AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
** Faction-specific stuff can't seed at game start time on a Nomad planet. This prevents the Dyson or ZA from being on a Nomad<br />
** Nomad Planets that are also player homeworlds can't be crashed into the AI<br />
** Nomad Planets now spawn exos in a reasonable fashion once the Nomad Planets are en route to crash. Balance levers in XML<br />
<br />
* Zenith Architrave<br />
** Give the ZA some actual units (stolen from the Dyson for now).<br />
** Give the ZA some golems that spawn only during the Civil War.<br />
** Some buffs to the ZA<br />
<br />
* Dark Zenith<br />
** New planets should now spawn when the Invasion Starts. Planet locations need work, and debugging code is still enabled for it<br />
** Planets can now have varying initial amounts of science. Used to make Dark Zenith planets worth extra science.<br />
** Start the XML for dark zenith economy.<br />
<br />
=== Version 2.029 ===<br />
<br />
Factions open for testing: Zenith Architrave, Zenith Miners, Nomad Planets<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting (in the game lobby) to make Nomad Planets move more often<br />
* Fix a null reference from clicking on the nomad planet notification<br />
* Don't let the AI homeworld be placed on a Nomad planet<br />
<br />
<br />
== Things that need testing right now ==<br />
<br />
* Check if the ZA will spawn golems during the civil war<br />
<br />
* Give a vague sense of whether the response to the nomad planets crashing A. works and B. is balanced.<br />
** Note that setting the nomads on 'fast move' will decrease the AI response significantly<br />
<br />
* Check that you can no longer crash your homeworld if it's on a nomad planet<br />
<br />
* The DZ can be turned on to check for exceptions. It doesn't do much otherwise.<br />
** Save/load doesn't work for DZ<br />
<br />
== Known Issues/Bug reports ==<br />
<br />
* Nomad Planets can get links to themselves (reproduction scenario needed). This hasnt been seen for a while<br />
<br />
* Nasty Crashes when a planet is destroyed (either by Zenith Miner or Nomad). Someone needs to test this again now.<br />
<br />
* Units loaded inside of a Architrave structure do not have their strength counted.<br />
** While a Architrave is in the game, all waves will be directed at the Architrave, and none towards the player.<br />
<br />
* Architrave can spawn close to each other (in one case, on adjacent planets). While not necessarily a bug, its not very interesting when they fight.<br />
** Should add a minimum hop distance between multiple.<br />
<br />
* Save/load doesn't work for DZ<br />
<br />
=== Links to Faction descriptions ===<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Architrave]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Zenith Miners]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Nomad Planets]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Dark Zenith]]<br />
<br />
== Bug Reports ==<br />
<br />
This section is to give an easy place for people to mention problems they are having</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Building_Multiplayer&diff=38283AI War 2:Building Multiplayer2020-03-12T03:58:55Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Version 2.011 */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled but coming very soon.''' We first focused on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]), so thanks for your patience!<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
Now that we've got the first expansion under our belt, and the game is feeling large and solid at the equivalent of "first AI War plus four expansions," we're ready to tackle the next big thing: multiplayer! We also are going to be adding interplanetary weapons to the base game as a free update (that's the last of the kickstarter stretch goals). This phase should wrap up all our kickstarter promises (including a laundry list of other smaller items), and we expect to have multiplayer fully functional by June or July. <br />
<br />
Multiplayer should be in a beta form where folks can test on it and run into bugs long before then. While Chris is mostly working on multiplayer and those other little lingering base game features, Badger and Puffin are going to be doing the bulk of the work on the second expansion, Zenith Onslaught. That should hopefully launch around the same time as multiplayer.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.011 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where allied nanocaust could be hostile for a second or two after loading a save game<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Marauder Outpost strength wasn't appearing in the galaxy map<br />
** Thanks to Parch for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Spire Debris intended for a recently killed AI faction could cause a null reference<br />
** Reported by Cadbury and Admiral<br />
<br />
* Quiet some dev-only debugging code visible in the Threat window<br />
** Thanks to the crew of the USS Defiant for the report<br />
<br />
* Fix a crash in the BuildingDronesInternally metal flow planning code<br />
** Thanks to LCEnzo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Dyson Spheres antagonized by hacking weren't actually doing anything<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for a nice bug report with a save game<br />
<br />
* AI Mines on a given planet now decloak once the AI command station on that planet is killed<br />
** Should be a nice little QoL improvement. Suggested by a number of people, including corfe83<br />
<br />
=== Changes for The Spire Rises DLC ===<br />
<br />
* Shifted the values for Fallen Spire exogalactic-strikes around, resulting in low AIP being stronger, and higher AIP not increasing as much.<br />
** Big thanks to Astilious for reporting and assisting in sorting out the problem.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with the hacking sidebar that was causing numbers not to display properly<br />
** Thanks to Dominus for doing some useful debugging. Thanks to ParadoxSong and Ranakastrasz for the bug reports<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where mark 7 scourge would try to refuse to fight by constantly thinking they could upgrade<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where player or minor faction allied scourge wouldn't realize that the AI Overlord was a legit target<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Fallen Spire beacon was available even if the Fallen Spire faction was enabled in the game lobby<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Macrophage Phase 3 - Multi Phage Takeover ===<br />
* The Macrophage are now a credible threat. You can have as many of them as you want, and they are fully capable of eating entire chunks of the galaxy on higher intensities. Be warned.<br />
<br />
==== Base Game Changes ====<br />
<br />
* You can now have multiple Macrophage per game, and they can have seperate allegiences set.<br />
** If Spores from different Macrophage factions meet; and there are enough unique Spores on the planet to spawn a Telium, one of the spores at random gets priority for deciding whom the new Telium belongs to.<br />
*** Tamed still has absolute priority.<br />
** There is still only a single Tamed faction.<br />
*** You are still unable to tame any Macrophage subfactions that are friendly to players.<br />
** There is still only a single Enraged faction.<br />
*** They will still eat everything.<br />
<br />
* Added in two new spawn options for Macrophage: Lone Telium and Clustered Telia.<br />
** Lone Telium spawns a single Telium for the Subfaction.<br />
*** This Lone Telium is always berserk, never produces spores, its harvesters are much more defensive, and its harvesters only enrage when it dies.<br />
** Clustered Telia spawns Telia on half as many planets, but spawns 2 Telia per planet.<br />
*** Added in a new quickstart, the Buggalactic War, which makes use of all the spawning styles.<br />
<br />
* Spawn event costs now scale with the number of harvesters that a Telium owns.<br />
** Base event cost reduced to 125k Metal. (175k for hostile-to-player)<br />
** On Intensity 5, the cost is increased by 35% for each (non enraged) harvester owned.<br />
*** This value scales with intensity, being 20% at Intensity 10, and 47% at Intensity 1.<br />
*** Tamed is considered Intensity 10 for this purpose.<br />
<br />
* Spore event chance now decreases by 2% for every Telia in the galaxy.<br />
* Spore event chance is now clamped between 25% and 75%.<br />
* Higher Mark Macrophage break and snack for longer.<br />
* Enraged Macrophage snack on homeworlds for thrice as long as they do other planets.<br />
* Updated the Macrophage Attacking message to no longer spam the log when you kill a large Telium.<br />
* Tame Telium hack reduced to 25 HaP cost.<br />
* Chance for Enraged Harvesters to attack the ai starts at 50%, and increases as your Tamed Telia start to outnumber Wild, up until they reach 90%.<br />
* Gave a facelift to various descriptions such as hacking and entity appenders.<br />
<br />
==== The Spire Rises DLC Changes ====<br />
<br />
* When a Macrophage faction gets debris, it will upgrade one of its Telia into a powerful Spire Infested Telia.<br />
** A Spire Infested Telia is equipped with a multitude of short ranged Reaper beams, and is capable of (slow) movement. Be wary.<br />
*** If you manage to kill this Telia, the Macrophage that its part of will be unable to build new Spire Infested Harvesters until they acquire new Debris.<br />
*** You can optionally attempt to hack it to steal the debris, gaining double the science you would from a normal debris.<br />
**** Perhaps its not the best idea to enrage the already powerful bugs that are more powerful than normal.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.009 Plenty Of Tuning ==<br />
(Released March 9th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fix several bugs related to forcefields not handling norris effect stuff properly<br />
** reported by Fluffiest, Xenorius, ussdefiant and gigastar<br />
<br />
* Centerpieces are now always visible even when crippled on both planets and the galaxy map, though still no longer grant vision of anything else when crippled<br />
** reported most recently by Chthon<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to the Overall Power Level code paths<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting<br />
<br />
* When trying to find a random AI faction for things, try to pick a living faction<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with tooltips for units in Fireteams<br />
** Thanks to a number of people including ParadoxSong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The icons in the bottom right corner, under the selected ships, no longer try to draw text. That was way too small and thus always hard to read and looked blurry. That happens in any text editor, too. Instead, it just relies on the icons, which are now larger and thus also themselves draw more clearly. There are tooltips for anyone forgetting what they do. The hotkeys for these functions are still shown via text, no problem, though.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the Save Presets code<br />
** Thanks to ParadoxSong for the bug report and Dominus for the fix<br />
<br />
==== Dyson ====<br />
<br />
* New Dyson Antagonizer rules<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers must spawn on Explored planets<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers are Always Visible, even if you have out of date information about the planet<br />
*** Requested by a number of people<br />
<br />
* Fix the Dyson Antagonizer not respecting the Dyson Intensity for spawning, and spawning much more often than intended.<br />
<br />
==== Marauders ====<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Marauders weren't spawning turrets for their outposts. <br />
* Hopefully fix a bug where hostile-to-all marauders weren't killing AI command stations <br />
* Fix a bug where marauder outposts were spawning much too quickly.<br />
** Net nerf to the marauders; they require much more time to scale up after capturing a planet. I've heard some complaints that the marauders are really getting out of control quickly, and that should no longer be possible.<br />
** Thanks to the crew of the USS Defiant for reminding me about this <br />
<br />
=== Spire Rises changes ===<br />
<br />
* Further clarify the description text on the AI Spire Research Lab<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting<br />
<br />
* Spire Debris is no longer allowed to join fireteams<br />
** Thanks to Smaug for reporting<br />
<br />
* Prevent multiple Spire Cities from being built on the same planet.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* AI-allied scourge at intensity > 5 have a chance of building an additional guard post next to any spawner or armory they create. Should make trying to attack the scourge infrastructure a bit more challenging. This code is readily expandable to spawning other AI structures as well if desired<br />
** From a conversation with a particularly depraved Peltian sympathizer<br />
<br />
* Make doubly sure that spire relics can't spawn on AI homeworlds<br />
** pointed out by XTRMNTR2K on steam<br />
<br />
* Improve player-allied scourge target selection in the mid/late game <br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for a useful save game for debugging<br />
<br />
* If the Imperial Spire Fleet detects your home planet is under attack, they will prioritize defending it<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Add additional debugging code to the Spire Sim code<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for the bug report<br />
<br />
== Version 2.008 Transport Loading Hotfix ==<br />
(Released March 4th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where ships would unload properly from transports, but never load into them again, in the prior version.<br />
** This was a casualty of the many changes we made in order to facilitate the performance improvements, but was quick to fix once people reported it. Apologies for that and anything else that crops up!<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage and Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Imperial Spire vessels are now MK7.<br />
<br />
* There is now extra debugging information shown visibly if the fallen spire actually has an issue.<br />
** Before it would just silently spam the log.<br />
<br />
* When a unit is trying to transform and it is in an invalid state, it now gives a more clear error message.<br />
<br />
* When centerpieces die, they are now blanked out properly; previously it held onto them in a dead format but mostly-removed, and this could cause some funky errors in the fallen spire in particular, but possibly other places eventually.<br />
** This was something that the squad wrappers we used to use automatically filtered for, so that's why it pops up now but not previously. It's a lot more efficient the new way, but we needed this extra check for this strange edge case.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.007 Speed Boost ==<br />
(Released March 4th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* When hovering a tech line in the science sidebar, it now lists the ships lines to be upgraded first by mobile ships, then by turrets, instead of always in alphabetical order<br />
<br />
* If remains cannot be rebuilt for some reason, it now shows the reason in the hovertext for those remains. This fixes a lot of ambiguity!<br />
** It also includes the countdown timers for things that can't be rebuilt for a certain amount of time with/without enemies.<br />
<br />
* Improved the priorities of repairs and other metal expenditures so that it makes more sense. Command stations with next to no health will now be prioritized extra for repairs even if there's a big ship to complain.<br />
** In cases where there was a giant golem to expensively complain, it often would not let you even choose to override that and spend metal on repairing the command station. Now that works properly, and at least some engineers will break off to repair things even with a giant capturable there.<br />
** Thanks to Smaug for a savegame where the command station was just impossible to repair while the unclaimed golem was still present.<br />
<br />
* The 'cancel hack' popup now reminds the player that you still pay the full hacking points value<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Remove a debugging line related to Dyson Spheres that was left enabled by accident<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make it much harder for structures to start to rebuild themselves mid battle.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a very long-standing bug where the Threat Count in the resource bar was sometimes counting Warden or Praetorian units<br />
<br />
* Fixed Fleet Centerpieces vanishing from the galaxy map if they were crippled, then moved to a planet that was only Explored.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan, Daniexpert and Histidine for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where command stations still under construction could still help with claiming other ships.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really longstanding bug where ships that were overkilled that were in a stack were not rolling over their damage properly.<br />
** They actually were winding up over-healing the health of the next ship in the stack, not causing over-damage.<br />
<br />
* It was somehow possible to have ships with zero health that did not die, seemingly only since the other performance improvements below but frankly the code was pretty unrelated to the area we can think of.<br />
** These now automatically re-check for dying within the next sim step, and do so properly. This is a nice safety net in general to have, we suppose.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where it would usually return a spurious "." at the start of type names it could not find.<br />
<br />
* When PerFrame_CalculateEffectiveFleetData on fleets has an exception, it now gives more info on where that happened.<br />
** Fixed an exception that could happen due to centerpieces not fully deserializing into their fleet lines properly. That only seemed to matter for drone producers, but it was a thing.<br />
*** This fix also fixed a common thing that could happen when exiting out of really large savegames to the main menu.<br />
<br />
=== Performance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Improved performance slightly on player planetary fleets without a centerpiece (aka command station), to basically not do all the checking and counts for them. Every planet has a fleet like that for every human player, so doing some checking like that on all of them was a mild expense that was not worth it.<br />
<br />
* Put in some more debugging variables that let us turn off more parts of the simulation to find performance hotspots.<br />
<br />
* Moved some logic for entity removal to be slightly more centralized, which makes it less common and also thus something that doesn't ever accidentally add the same entity to a big list more than once. There is some performance gain from this, but it's not huge in the current scheme of things.<br />
<br />
* SquadCountsByType is now an int array rather than an ArcenSparseLookup, which makes it much much faster.<br />
<br />
* MetalIncomePerPlanet_ForUI and EnergyProducedPerPlanet_ForUIOnly have become simple integers on the actual planet, and are handled in a much more efficient fashion since they are local-player-UI-only.<br />
<br />
* Added a new ArcenLinkedList<> class, which is a new specialist collection that is thread-safe, multiplayer-safe, and extremely high performance to iterate over, add to, and remove from.<br />
** We're replacing all instances of ArcenMob<>, and the rollup uses of List<>, with this new class.<br />
** This sees a massive improvement in speed in a lot of savegames, and the removal of micro-stutters relating to entities being removed from lists in general. This also sees a big improvement in how quickly you can get back out to the main menu.<br />
** It's a lot of code changes, though, so it's always possible we made some sort of mistake in this and are causing a new bug somewhere. Fingers crossed that's not the case, but the places it would be a problem are usually central enough that it should be wildly obvious. So far we're not seeing that.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the savegame that helped us pinpoint the fact that ship/shot removal was being the biggest performance drain at the moment. His savegame went from a choppy 45-55% performance to smooth 100% performance.<br />
<br />
* Revised the Fleets class to no longer use Squad Wrappers, but instead to directly use squads.<br />
** This causes a slight performance boost in general, and will allow us to use performance-boosting collections that don't work on structs like SquadWrapper.<br />
** There's also the possibility for some errant bugs here and there, but we think we caught all of those, as they followed a specific pattern.<br />
<br />
* The list of ships inside each fleet membership are now handled via the new linked lists rather than normal lists, extending the speed benefits to them.<br />
** Most of the "performance trouble" saves that we've collected over the last months now run at full speed, where some used to run at 5%. A couple still only run at about 80%, but those are by far the minority.<br />
*** It is worth noting that just starting a new game at 300 planets will put you immediately at 70-80% sim speed right from the start. Apparently there is something we're doing that is still inescapably planet-bound in terms of calculation cost, even though the number of ships is 1/3 or less of that of much beefier later-game saves that now run at 100% speed. We may need to lower the max number of planets in any map to being more like 140 or so.<br />
<br />
=== DLC changes ===<br />
<br />
* AI extragalactic response no longer counts its own scourge allies when deciding whether to spawn extragalactic war ships<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Make the Scourge Beacon Hack more costly and harder<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Awakened Scourge allies should show up in the escape menu now<br />
** Thanks to vinco for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Imperial Spire wasn't pressing home its attacks<br />
** Thanks to Astillious<br />
<br />
* Fixed the new Arks being unable to rebuild remains.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The Objectives for killing the AI Spire Citadel/Research Lab only appear once you have Explored those planets<br />
<br />
* There is now a Spire Beacon, and hacking it activates the Spire Quest.<br />
** This is only available for new games, it's not retroactive <br />
** Thanks to SCUD on steam for reminding us about this. <br />
<br />
* The Scourge's Overall Power level can now go up to 1.5 if it has a Nemesis<br />
** Only relevant for player or minor faction allied scourge<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks (The Spire Rises DLC) ===<br />
<br />
* Increased durability of Scourge Spawners and Armouries by 50%. Added Forcefields to both.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks (Base Game) ===<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate, Bounty Hunter and Apparition mass 4 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate damage 5,000 -> 3,500.<br />
<br />
* Dyson and Dark Spire units are immune to being captured.<br />
** This solves some nasty faction interactions, such as an AI Wendigo finding a nice tasty group of Dark Spire to eat, or the Nanocaust gaining enormous hordes of units.<br />
** Also fixes some possible player shenanigans using Hacks.<br />
*** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting a Dark Spire and Nanocaust incident, Histidine for reporting a Wendigo problem, and Fluffiest for suggesting (all separately).<br />
<br />
== Version 2.006 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 29th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Viral Shredders now inherit pursuit mode<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Quiet some text in the galaxy view hover-planet view. We don't want planets being suddenly Nomadic or anything...<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for AI Spire Research Labs to clarify that they violate other city placement rules<br />
** As a result of some discussions on discord<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where you couldn't build Spire structures if the Spire Flagship (but not the city) was crippled<br />
** Thanks to WolfWhiteFire for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Spire Debris; Debris can no longer be captured by another faction while you are hacking it. The Spire Debris spawn message now shows the correct time that the debris will last for the first debris.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some additional debugging code to PreFillFactionBasedData.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Outguard hacks were causing the hacking history menu to crash. Add some defensive code there too<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage's thot bug reporting ways<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'ai stops doing anything once it's killed' code to make sure that Anti-MDC exos are no longer spawned after the Overlord is killed<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for the bug report<br />
<br />
* You now know which faction will capture Spire Debris if you don't get to it in time. This lets you make informed decisions about which debris you want to prioritize.<br />
** You also get 3 debris per City instead of 2.<br />
** Suggested by Starkelp<br />
<br />
* Fixed Viral Shredder copies being swappable, allowing for infinite lines in a single Fleet.<br />
** Thanks to Lampshade for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in defensive coding against some rare nullref exceptions that could happen during some combination of scourge and fallen spire, but which we weren't able to directly duplicate.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Removed the maximum Mark restriction set on Battlestations, Citadels, and Home Forcefields.<br />
** They now go to Mark 7 like normal.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.005 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed an invalid cast exception that could happen in GetScourgeGlobalDataExt for unexpected reasons if the scourge had wrong metadata for some reason.<br />
<br />
* Definitely fixed the minor capturables exception in mapgen, so that even if it ever happens in the future (even mods could validly cause this), it will just silently log a note in case developers need it, but keep everything on the interface running smoothly. The actual error in this case was related to an expansion, but a mod could easily cause the same thing, and in neither case is it actually a bug or something to notify the user about.<br />
** Thanks to Jodan008 for letting us know this was still happening.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the most recent hotfix related to dyson antagonizers not being found.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB and Yog-Sothoth for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.004 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed units with ShouldNeverBeCapturedByAnotherFaction set to true, such as Tesla Torpedo Frigates, from being loaded into Transports.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the Scourge Neinzul Fortress text to mention that it produces hostile to all zombies<br />
** Thanks to vinco for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mapgen error that could happen for people without the new expansion installed. Apologies for that!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.002 Turret Icons ==<br />
(Released February 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* All 30 of the new turrets now have updated flair denoting what they are. Definitely important for seeing from a distance and in the sidebar what they are!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.001 Expansion 1: The Spire Rises! ==<br />
(Released February 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The new expansion is out now!<br />
** More info is here on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1196420/AI_War_2_The_Spire_Rises/<br />
** Or on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/ai_war_2_the_spire_rises<br />
** Or on Humble: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/ai-war-2-the-spire-rises<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Grand New AI]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Building_Multiplayer&diff=38062AI War 2:Building Multiplayer2020-02-29T03:02:54Z<p>Ovalcircle1: bleeb</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled but coming very soon.''' We first focused on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]), so thanks for your patience!<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
Now that we've got the first expansion under our belt, and the game is feeling large and solid at the equivalent of "first AI War plus four expansions," we're ready to tackle the next big thing: multiplayer! We also are going to be adding interplanetary weapons to the base game as a free update (that's the last of the kickstarter stretch goals). This phase should wrap up all our kickstarter promises (including a laundry list of other smaller items), and we expect to have multiplayer fully functional by June or July. <br />
<br />
Multiplayer should be in a beta form where folks can test on it and run into bugs long before then. While Chris is mostly working on multiplayer and those other little lingering base game features, Badger and Puffin are going to be doing the bulk of the work on the second expansion, Zenith Onslaught. That should hopefully launch around the same time as multiplayer.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.006 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* Viral Shredders now inherit pursuit mode<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Quiet some text in the galaxy view hover-planet view. We don't want planets being suddenly Nomadic or anything...<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for AI Spire Research Labs to clarify that they violate other city placement rules<br />
** As a result of some discussions on discord<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where you couldn't build Spire structures if the Spire Flagship (but not the city) was crippled<br />
** Thanks to WolfWhiteFire for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Spire Debris; Debris can no longer be captured by another faction while you are hacking it. The Spire Debris spawn message now shows the correct time that the debris will last for the first debris.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some additional debugging code to PreFillFactionBasedData.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Outguard hacks were causing the hacking history menu to crash. Add some defensive code there too<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage's thot bug reporting ways<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'ai stops doing anything once it's killed' code to make sure that Anti-MDC exos are no longer spawned after the Overlord is killed<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for the bug report<br />
<br />
== Version 2.005 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed an invalid cast exception that could happen in GetScourgeGlobalDataExt for unexpected reasons if the scourge had wrong metadata for some reason.<br />
<br />
* Definitely fixed the minor capturables exception in mapgen, so that even if it ever happens in the future (even mods could validly cause this), it will just silently log a note in case developers need it, but keep everything on the interface running smoothly. The actual error in this case was related to an expansion, but a mod could easily cause the same thing, and in neither case is it actually a bug or something to notify the user about.<br />
** Thanks to Jodan008 for letting us know this was still happening.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the most recent hotfix related to dyson antagonizers not being found.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB and Yog-Sothoth for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 2.004 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released February 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed units with ShouldNeverBeCapturedByAnotherFaction set to true, such as Tesla Torpedo Frigates, from being loaded into Transports.<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the Scourge Neinzul Fortress text to mention that it produces hostile to all zombies<br />
** Thanks to vinco for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mapgen error that could happen for people without the new expansion installed. Apologies for that!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.002 Turret Icons ==<br />
(Released February 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* All 30 of the new turrets now have updated flair denoting what they are. Definitely important for seeing from a distance and in the sidebar what they are!<br />
<br />
== Version 2.001 Expansion 1: The Spire Rises! ==<br />
(Released February 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The new expansion is out now!<br />
** More info is here on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1196420/AI_War_2_The_Spire_Rises/<br />
** Or on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/ai_war_2_the_spire_rises<br />
** Or on Humble: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/ai-war-2-the-spire-rises<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Grand New AI]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Grand_New_AI&diff=37999AI War 2:The Grand New AI2020-02-14T07:21:49Z<p>Ovalcircle1: Capitalization</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After lots of feedback, we're ready to take it to the next level! Major new functionality and improvements across the board are incoming to make games more interesting than ever, and we're also going to start building toward multiplayer.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.329 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer Golem was being counted as threat <br />
** Thanks to Pireciter for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where my previous change to let Civil-War AIs shoot each other’s raid engines was incomplete<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Increase the AI response to Marauders. Also improve some Marauder tracing to track this, and show the Marauder-specific AIP in the threat tooltip<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with Starkelp<br />
<br />
=== More Visual Updates ===<br />
<br />
* More Nanocaust visual updates, completing the rest of them that we didn't get last time:<br />
** (Bomber) anomaly updated visuals: https://youtu.be/xCzMRmrlzYE Also added LOD1 for it, though that may need in-xml tuning.<br />
** (VWing) mutation updated visuals, no LODs needed.<br />
** (Missile corvette) deviant updated visuals. Wow this was super heavy of a model, it needed LODs BAD. These will likely need in-xml tuning.<br />
** Nanobot center updated visuals. No LODs possible or really needed, but it now draws in one call rather than 4 thanks to material updates. It looks so much better, too!<br />
** Nanobot center hive updated visuals. Shrunk the model itself a bit, and then added another LOD for very very far zoom. Likely will need in-xml tweaking. Also dropped from 4 draw calls to 1.<br />
** That's everything for the Nanocaust!<br />
<br />
* More artwork revised:<br />
** Astro Train Station and depot.<br />
** Metal Harvester<br />
** Outguard Beacon<br />
** AI eyes are all good.<br />
** All of the astro train variants needed heavy updates, all four kinds.<br />
** Engineers are good to go.<br />
** All minefields are good.<br />
** Risk Analyzer is good.<br />
** Transport is good.<br />
** Cryo tubes updated a fair bit to look better.<br />
** Hacker looks good, although not used anymore. Will repurpose for the extragalactic strike forces (upcoming) as it looks freaky as can be.<br />
** Home Human Settlement got the cubemap treatment, it was boring dark.<br />
** Marauder Outpost is good.<br />
** WarSieger updated.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.328 Light and Shadow ==<br />
(Released February 11th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Waves against rogue AIs (ie after you kill the overlord) don't get the Civil War Wave Strength Bonus<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* Only print AIP Change Messages once, instead of once per AI. It could get overwhelming in multi-AI games<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* AIP Floor is now set foreach AI Difficulty. Starts at 20% of total earned AIP for difficulty 1, then is 35% (the current floor value) for medium, and increases to 40%, 45% and 50% at difficulties 8, 9 and 10 respectively.<br />
** This makes the game easier at low difficulty levels and harder at levels >= 8<br />
<br />
* The game now supports loading asset bundles (art, music, ui stuff, sfx, etc) from expansion subfolders or mod subfolders. So in an expansion or mod you can now have your own copy of GlobalBundles (for anything OS-agnostic, mainly music and sfx), AssetBundles_Win, AssetBundles_OSX, and AssetBundles_Linux (please make sure you give bundles for all OSes if you're making a mod that includes art that requires a bundle -- supporting all platforms is awesome!<br />
<br />
=== More Visual Updates ===<br />
<br />
* Updated visuals for the new lighting for the following:<br />
** IGC (advancedfactory in bundle)<br />
** ARS (cubemaps added), TechVault (now has its own golden variant), FCE (green variant)<br />
** GCA (advancedstarship in bundle, cubemaps added)<br />
** AITachyonSentinel (never looked great in textures, now cubemaps added and textures redone)<br />
** Alarm post redone (always had too crazy of lights, and was very dark now)<br />
** AttritionEmitter NOT updated, as we don't use it in game.<br />
** BlackHoleMachine (added rotation, slightly tweaked beyond that)<br />
** Coprocessor (quite a bit of changes)<br />
** Data center (updated a bit, and fortified version split out into new visuals)<br />
** DesignTemplate (updated even though it is not used: Assets/_FinalGameMeshes/AIBuildings/DesignTemplate/DesignTemplate.prefab would be good to use at some point, it's pretty)<br />
** DistributionNode (very slight tweaks)<br />
** InstigatorBase (very very slight tweaks, but ALSO added two new LODs for it. They need checking to make sure they kick in not too early)<br />
** TroopAccelerator (very slight tweaks, but also added one new LOD for it that needs checking to make sure distance is good for kicking in).<br />
** DysonAntagonizer (many texture changes)<br />
** Updated the Experimental_Fabricator (used for battlestations), redone into newer styles. Its LODs are heavy and need checking in-game.<br />
** Magnifier updated like the others.<br />
** Slight overlord updates, phase 1 and 2 visuals.<br />
** Updated ZPG (PlanetaryCloaker in the bundles) to look nicer.<br />
** Raid Engine tweaked slightly.<br />
** Super Terminal tweaked a bit.<br />
** Usurper has been updated to have cubemaps, be more visible, etc.<br />
** This is all of the "AI buildings" folder except for guard posts.<br />
<br />
* All of the frigates have been tweaked in some fashion:<br />
** WarHarvester slight tweaks (ArmorStarship in the code)<br />
** Added LODs for the PrototypeFlagship (assault frigate). Will likely need some in-xml tuning. Thanks to Puffin for noting these were missing!<br />
** WarbirdFrigate updates to be more visible.<br />
** CarrierStarship updated to look more organic and better (it's now the artillery golem)<br />
** Raid Starship was already great, it's like Hot Rod in a very drool-worthy sort of way.<br />
** SentryFrigate (scout starship in the bundle) has been completely redone in terms of its materials, other than emission.<br />
** ForcefieldFrigate had minor changes, including new normal maps.<br />
** Siege Frigate got very small updates.<br />
** Sniper Frigate had a bit more substantial updates.<br />
** Stealth Frigate had some updates to work with the new lighting, which mainly involved adjusting its albedo and majorly downplaying its occlusion mapping.<br />
** That's the whole "starships" folder.<br />
<br />
* Macrophage visual updates:<br />
** The harvesters have been updated to take advantage of the new lighting and look even more crystalline, as well as new organic normal maps. It's night-and-day comparing the old and new, in a good way.<br />
*** For the first time, the harvesters also have LODs, which probably need updates in game xml to be ideal.<br />
** Spores also updated, now much more dynamic also. We also dropped their poly count substantially without adding LODs, and made them more organic-looking in the process.<br />
** Also updated the telium, and added LODs for these for the first time. They may also need some tuning in game xml.<br />
<br />
* The nanocaust have gotten a visual overhaul, as detailed in these two videos (be sure to read the descriptions of the videos for many details!)<br />
** https://youtu.be/W7G-8Hje0Q0<br />
** https://youtu.be/z43_rOx0OSk<br />
<br />
* Starting on the nanocaust visual updates, although not complete except for the below:<br />
** Aberration is the new style, as seen in the videos. But also it now uses both LOD0 and LOD1. Before it was only using LOD1 and looked terrible up close.<br />
** Abomination is also now the new style, and now uses both LODs as well. https://youtu.be/H732W8BPLSU<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The AI no longer puts almost the entirety of its budget into defending the Homeworld if you are near. Instead more of it is allocated into waves, to prevent a scenario where sitting next to the Homeworld essentially stopped you from losing.<br />
** Also helps prevent a situation of them being possibly flat out impossible to defeat, once the AIP got high enough and it reinforced en masse.<br />
<br />
* Shifted a little bit of the wave budget into CPA for most AIs (excluding ones like Special Forces Master for now).<br />
<br />
* Medic Gunboat damage 300 -> 525.<br />
** Engineers generally do their job, and can assist construction as well. A bit of a damage bump to hopefully increase their general usefulness.<br />
<br />
* Increased the initial count of Raptors and Velociraptors in the Starting Fleets from 30 to 40.<br />
** Curious oddity.<br />
<br />
* Large increase to the initial defenses of each Starting Battlestation.<br />
** Turrets in general match their maximum count in a "normal" Battlestation design, as well as Tractor Arrays (Eclectic has 50% more like before). Mines match their maximum count in the "Minelayer" design.<br />
** Intended as a notable boost to early player defensive power, to get away from the feeling of having to defend with just your mobile fleets all the time.<br />
<br />
* Eclectic Starting Battlestation design uses Area Minefields instead of normal, to combo with the Plasma Turrets being ideal against large single targets instead of being a bit overkill.<br />
<br />
* Ambush Turret count doubled everywhere, damage 875 -> 180, shots per salvo 1 -> 3, reload time 2s -> 1s, damage bonus 8x -> 12x.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station Ambush Turret count doubled (after the above).<br />
** So it now has 12 to start with.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.327 Hardened Forcefields ==<br />
(Released February 11th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* When a ship is built, it starts with its weapon on cooldown.<br />
** This prevents a problem where if you had a lot of rebuild capacity for a fleet, you could technically scrap things with long gun cooldowns right after firing and rebuild them faster than the cooldown, increasing your fleet's DPS<br />
** Suggested by the puffin<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where structures might not build even if you had energy for them<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, including Chthon and NRSirLimbo. And thanks to Starkelp for helping me notice what the symptoms looked like.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer wasn't shooting the Zenith Trader<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Potentially make fireteams more willing to press home an attack until all the enemies are dead<br />
<br />
* AIs in Civil War Mode are now more willing to kill each other’s defensive structures like Raid Engines<br />
** Pointed out by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where warping in guard posts had guns<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of bugs that could cause visual strangeness with shot movement, up to and including exceptions thrown. Not sure if we got all cases where this is possible, but it's a large chunk of them. Also improved code readability and performance very slightly in that area.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where PerFrame_CalculateEffectiveFleetData was trying to do pathing using the main thread context and not whatever context was passed in. This was typically going to be called by the background-sim thread, and so if you had ships loading into transports during the simulation and you clicked to send ships across planets in the galaxy map or the planet view, then these could throw an exception since two threads were trying to share one pathfinder (bad juju).<br />
** Thanks to maluraq, donblas, and arsdor for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in several protections for cross-threading removal of entities from entity collections. Should prevent some rare bugs that could pop up mainly when exiting the game to the main menu.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a harmless issue where when you closed the game it would write a single header line to the NetworkTrafficLog.txt file.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where warden fleet bases could join the hunter fleet<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* The AI no longer hunkers against the player for difficulties >= 7. This isn't actually a very good strategy (it made more sense when the game was in alpha and there were different units and structures in the game)<br />
** From a discussion on discord<br />
<br />
* Completely re-plumbed how forcefields block shots to make the whole thing more efficient, and easier code to read. The essential functionality should remain the same (shooting something under a bubble shield, or the bubble shield itself, hits the bubble visually), but now it should always use the bonuses of the ship against the bubble-emitter and not whatever was underneath it that you were targeting.<br />
** This may fix some other shield-related bugs, but also hasn't been tested much yet.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for discovering this.<br />
<br />
* Put in some paranoid checks for an exception that ArnaudB somehow got.<br />
<br />
* The game no longer complains when it tries and fails to delete savegame metadata, etc. Sometimes that just isn't there.<br />
<br />
* When you load a savegame from a folder, it now sets that folder to to be the campaign name so that further saves go in that folder and not whatever the original campaign name was.<br />
<br />
* When you're selecting savegames or quick starts on the load and quick start menus, the current selection is now shown in yellow versus having now visible indicator that something happened.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* After much experimentation and general sadness, reverted the forcefields to be something close to what they were with the blue and the hexes and so forth prior to the new lighting versions. Even this was not enough: https://youtu.be/vsjXRoP8-Dk<br />
** The new forcefield look is a bit more subtle than the older blue one, because that was something that a lot of people found distracting. But it is the same basic thing it used to be, albeit a little less cartoony as well.<br />
<br />
* Finished the new look for the regular spire: https://youtu.be/EncJ18YPTnU<br />
** There are several kind of spire, including dark spire which are more armored-looking, but the basic "vanilla" version of the race has in the past always been white crystal themed.<br />
** I've been experimenting with various styles to try to accomplish something attractive that will work for the spire cities coming up, along with the large spire fleets. Overall I have taken four different approaches and built shaders based around those: one based on refraction (but no transparency), one based on translucency, and one based on two-layer micro dots (car type shaders are a common type of this), and then finally a truly bizzare shader based off the concept of fake parallax interiors (as seen in the recent PS4 spider-man game, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIPRFDreMRM) but taking that parallax concept and just... breaking light into funky nonsensical layers instead.<br />
** What I failed to appreciate from early on in is that not only is this a matter of how I design the shader, but the input textures and cubemaps also have a HUGE impact in making it either seem vibrant or bland. Most of what I developed was done last Thursday and Friday, and today I was feeling grumpy about how the results looked and thought I might need to do a completely new approach with a fresh shader.<br />
** Instead I wound up further tweaking and expanding all three shader lineages, and experimenting with different kinds of textures and cubemaps in different material variants.<br />
** Just when I was about to give up and maybe start looking into wetness or triplanar shaders as alternative routes, I wound up returning to the bizzare parallax shader monstrosity I'd cobbled together last Friday. It was something that gives incredibly strange results that I can't usually predict all that well specifically because I'm using it absolutely "wrong." The core of the shader was the demo parallax shader provided by Amplify Shader Editor, but then I had added spherical uv offsets, HDRI cubemap reflections, and some funky math as well as the ability to overdrive specularity, metallicity, and so forth well beyond what those are "supposed" to have.<br />
** I also wound up making an unlit and a lit version of the shader, and the unlit one was more productive; realistic PBR shadows and lighting interfered heavily with the style that I was going for, which was something that didn't have an actual definite surface to it. On Friday I had been able to recreate my lit version in an unlit shader variant, despite them having massively different light inputs to achieve a similar result; but the takeaway was that as the ship moved around it wasn't getting interference from the sunlight and shadow and getting too dark or overbright.<br />
** Today I made a lot of changes to the shaders, but not actually this unlit one. After a few hours chasing other things, I returned to this shader and wound up just changing around the textures and other material inputs heavily, and this is the result. It's something that looks distinctly two-layer, with an animated liquid-like flowing surface that seems to hover a bit above what appears to be a more solid core that is largely... what is that, some kind of moss or something? It's alien, whatever it is, but the fact that it looks vaguely moss-like should make Puffin happy and amuses me. I'll likely switch out the interior-most layer as needed for other spire ships to give them a different feel, and that will be a great driver of visual diversity.<br />
** What's funny is that even though only one of the four main shader R&D routes is ultimately used in the end, you can see the influence of all four kinds in this. The fake parallax logic part is obvious, since that's what this shader is based around in general. But the subsurface scattering approach (translucency) actually have contributed some subsurface depth maps that I wound up using for the deepest layer here, and which wind up giving some of the sense of depth and motion. The two-tone microdots are not here, but there is a two-layer effect as you can clearly see, and I wound up using some of the crystalline textures and masks I'd been working with for that in this final shader. The only shader style that wasn't used at all is the refractive one, but there is a heavy normal map distortion layer that is animated and which gives some of that same sense of refraction despite there being no such thing here.<br />
** In the end, all four routes wound up being kind of collapsed into one that is versatile and which can finally be used to build up the cities how I want. FINALLY! :)<br />
<br />
* Updated the dark spire for the new lighting: https://youtu.be/MaztswOBoDc<br />
** Badger pointed out that the green color was really coming out a ton in these in the new lighting system, which makes them feel more organic rather than more dark and menacing.<br />
** While I was a fan of how this lets us see more details on the dark spire, he is definitely right. I wound up just changing the albedo texture to something a bit more gray (but various shades of uniform gray), and this makes the final green colors become much more muted but not universally so.<br />
** The result is something of a compromise between the old and the new, and at the start of the video and near the end I pop it back to the old albedo texture and back so that the contrast is really obvious.<br />
** This was definitely a good improvement to make, thanks Badger!<br />
<br />
=== New Ship Mechanics ===<br />
<br />
* Added fires_through_enemy_shields on systems, which lets specific ship weapons just ignore enemy forcefields for purposes of their attacks.<br />
** If such a weapon has knockback, it can actually be used to knock enemies out from under shields!<br />
** All the other things that normally get blocked by forcefields, like special debuffs, death effects, etc, all work with this on, too.<br />
<br />
* Added my_forcefield_does_not_shrink on entities, which basically creates a "hardened" forcefield that does not shrink in radius as its health goes down.<br />
<br />
* Added my_forcefield_has_no_penalty_for_enemies_firing_out_of_it on entities, which removes the damage penalty that ships normally get for firing out from under an allied forcefield. This is for great-shields.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== Forcefields ====<br />
<br />
* Forcefields no longer gain size as their Mark increases.<br />
** Could lead to awkward situations, such as a defensive Forcefield now covering Turrets and needing to be moved just because you upgraded it, or some getting hideously large, or being kind of "meh" at lower Marks but then monstrous at high, or getting so big they can't shoot any targets due to pushing, etc.<br />
<br />
* Every Forcefield should have a standardised radius now. This is in general a buff to what they used to start out at, but is still smaller than their old maximum. Hopefully this is a decent balance between proper protection, and not being comically large/annoying/pushing things all the time.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Forcefields, such as Forcefield Frigates, Guardians, and the Shieldwall Battlestation, but not the Forcefield Generators, no longer shrink as they take damage.<br />
** Makes them far easier to control, requiring less micro to keep their usefulness, and hopefully improves their overall performance due to no longer having units unprotected entirely.<br />
** The shrinking is kept on the structural types, however, as it's a somewhat unique/interesting thing, leading to things like sneaking through a protected wormhole by damaging the forcefield a little, but generally just annoying to micro on mobile units (while structural ones don't really benefit).<br />
<br />
* Most Forcefield units mentioned above have some range and speed changes, to improve their overall positioning in common Pursuit behaviour. The Classic Fleet for example, has the Frigate sit in the correct spot to protect both the V-Wings up close, and the Concussion Corvettes at the back. It also goes slightly faster, to help keep up with things.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.324 Forcefield Beautification ==<br />
(Released February 7th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed Adaptive AI achievements being granted regardless of intensity.<br />
** Thanks Rifi8 for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a missing ui window from the last checkin.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Work ===<br />
<br />
* The shield visuals on Gyrn have been redone, as seen here: https://youtu.be/Ns9Kz_lHR6I<br />
<br />
* The overall forcefields have been completely redone, as seen here: https://youtu.be/nub6EkyF8Og<br />
** On these videos, if you want the full story, be sure to read the description notes on the videos. They explain a lot!<br />
<br />
* The spire have a new look, although it's not final by any stretch. It's something that will need to be adjusted for a lot of the specific models, but we're at a starting point with them at least.<br />
** We actually developed three new looks for the spire, and may use some variants of them for different things; we'll see how those work out. Even out of the three main looks, they are able to have variants in each of them, too.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the various other missing shaders and materials from the prior version. For the warp gates, those now look slightly different, and in particular the dyson warp gate.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate, Bounty Hunter and Apparition damage bonus duration 8s -> 12s.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate and Bounty Hunter resist 75% of ranged damage, up from 50%.<br />
<br />
=== Macrophage ===<br />
<br />
* The Hive Wars Update<br />
<br />
* Many of these features will not be available on old saves. They will continue to use existing Macrophage logic.<br />
<br />
* Telium Taming<br />
** Teliums can now be hacked in order to tame them.<br />
*** Expect an extremely heavy response in this hack that will cause discord throughout the galaxy for a period of time after its finished.<br />
** Tamed Teliums create friendly Harvesters and Spores.<br />
** Anytime a Telium is created, if at least one of the consumed Spores is Tamed, the resulting Telium will also be Tamed.<br />
** Taming as a whole is disabled if Macrophage are set to be allied to the player in the lobby.<br />
<br />
* Harvesters, both normal and Enraged, will now stop to chomp down on ships as they move between planets.<br />
** They will not do so forever, so running from them is a valid tactic.<br />
<br />
* Enraged Harvesters will no longer beeline for home planets, and will instead slowly migrate in the direction of a home planet.<br />
** They will also no longer always attack just humans, they will happily much on any entity that comes near them.<br />
<br />
* Wild Telium will now go Berserk when they are either outnumbered by Tamed Telium, or have less than 3 active Wild Telium.<br />
** While Berserk, the cost for them to build things is reduced by 75%.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.323 Everybody Buff Now ==<br />
(Released February 5th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Communication Nodes stop existing when you start the game in civil war mode<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting. That's thot.<br />
<br />
* Some additional clarification to the CPA mechanic for the CPA tooltip<br />
<br />
* Some defensive code in the astro train notification hovertext<br />
<br />
* When you outnumber the AI sufficiently on a planet, the AI uses "hunker logic" to have its units hide near the strongest guard post on the planet, instead of always the command station. The goal of the AI here is to make you pay as high a price as possible for the planet; perhaps they'll distract you long enough for the Warden Fleet to arrive, or for the Hunter to take advantage of your fleet's placement to strike at a weak spot.<br />
* Drones no longer try to hunker, but will always just go fight<br />
** Thanks to a bug report from StarKelp<br />
<br />
* Improve the ion cannon description<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting<br />
<br />
* To reduce some of the RNG of AIP reduction, the player always gets 1 of the data centers reasonably close to their homeworld. Games with no nearby AIP reduction are much harder.<br />
* Games with an AI at difficulty >= 8 have the remaining data centers seeded further from their homeworld.<br />
<br />
* Game will now check for the last savegame on startup, and if it isn't present, will not display the "Continue Last Game" button.<br />
** It will also do a check when you click the button. If it isn't there, it will now just show a popup saying to verify the file.<br />
*** This should only be an issue if you delete a save while the game is running, since the game will check on startup.<br />
** Thanks CyberKun for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Make some changes to fireteams to make different factions able to have different levels of aggressiveness. Make the Hunter more aggressive.<br />
* Fix a bug where the Warden Fleet could wind up with invalid targets (in this case, ones it would need to path through a player planet to get to), preventing it from actually doing anything.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for some very useful saves.<br />
<br />
=== Graphical Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* All of the fonts used in the game have been re-imported using a few new settings to help with clarity when they are drawn extra large or small.<br />
** First of all, they are using vastly larger atlases now for their data (1024x1024 or 1024x512 as the case may be) instead of 512x512. This lets them have more precision.<br />
** They are also now all using SDFAA_Hinted rather than just SDFAA, which should help with some small corners being rounded when they should not be, etc.<br />
** We're also definitely importing the kerning pairs from all the fonts, in case any of them have any such information that is useful. Most fonts lack that.<br />
** And lastly we are now using a padding of 20 between characters instead of a padding of 5, which makes it so that when fonts are drawn very small they shouldn't accidentally get some extra bits in from neighboring letters anymore.<br />
<br />
* The brightness of the directional "sun light" has been increased from 1.21 to 1.78.<br />
** This helps the light and dark side of models be a bit more diffentiated, and makes things a little more clear to see. There's no performance impact from this.<br />
<br />
* We're now using a new HDRI environment reflection map that has a rich variety of colors, at intensity 0.348, which gives all of the ships a proper metallic sheen rather than a flat look like they had before.<br />
** This was a major oversight in some of our past work; we had been working with studio-style HDRI lights for a while, but a year or more ago turned that off because it was interfering with how our bloom worked at the time.<br />
** The overall visual effect when zoomed in on ships and looking at them is of something a lot more modern, and this is without any extra GPU or CPU power. About 8mb extra of RAM.<br />
<br />
* A three-tone gradient ambient light source is now used. Previously there was a very basic flat white light, and we're still using that for the top of the gradient, but we now shift into some blues and then reds below and to the side, which gives the whole scene a slight bit more sense of life especially when you're panning around or rotating the view.<br />
** Again this comes at practically no cost on the GPU, and zero on ram or the CPU.<br />
<br />
* Updated the Botnet Golem to have a new variant of our shader that also includes a new custom HDRI reflection cubemap, as shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTMgEc2iXY<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem has been updated to use the new cubemap shader as well.<br />
** Ditto the black widow golem and Armored Golem. And Hive.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Cubemap shader variant that allows for HSV shifting of the cubemap, and the regenerator golem uses that. Most real-life HDRI sources don't have crazy bright greens.<br />
<br />
* And then also added a new cubemap shader variant of THAT which also allows for radial uv distortion, and the result is this: https://youtu.be/vGl4O6zoTCE<br />
<br />
* And then used that same shader in a different way for the cursed golem: https://youtu.be/LkGTAPc5y8Y<br />
** And then further edited to this: https://youtu.be/_vkmpR833Po<br />
<br />
* And the zenith trader: https://youtu.be/e2f74kk6ulY<br />
<br />
* Added a new Combined Emissive HSV Refractive shader variant specifically for the devourer golem. But then promptly couldn't get that to work as well as I wanted, so made it look like this instead: https://youtu.be/6KWzouM_qVg<br />
<br />
==== Ability To See And Alter LODs In-Game ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new option in game settings under the debug section, "Show LOD Info In Ship Tooltips."<br />
** When enabled, hovering over a ship will make its tooltip show you info about its number of LODs, its vertex count per LOD, at what distance it transfers between LODs, and what its current distance from the camera is.<br />
** This actually can be a pretty fun thing to look at if you're just curious about the innards of the game, to be honest. A number of ships are so low-poly that they only have an LOD0, or they're so large that multiple LODs couldn't be hidden effectively. Normal maps and shader tricks tend to make up the difference in complexity on the very low-poly ones. Others have LODs and you'd never have noticed it because the swapping between them is so smooth.<br />
** You can see a similar view of the LOD data outside of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko60opBhhKY<br />
<br />
* Added a new lod_distance_overrides field, which allows us to override the LOD distances for a specific ship.<br />
** This actually can be extra useful if we're using one ship model at a variety of scales (for instance for a guardian and a drone). We'll get far better performance for the drone if the LODs switch to higher numbers faster, and we'll get far better visuals if there is an oversized version of the guardian that switches more slowly.<br />
** This lets us balance all that out, particularly as we are changing ship visual sizes.<br />
** In the debug info for meshes, you can now see the original and new values if they are overridden.<br />
** You can set things like this to get a look at LOD2 even when zoomed in very close, for instance: lod_distance_overrides="20,21,22" Those would override the real numbers and let you see a far LOD right in front of your case.<br />
*** Whatever the LAST LOD number is, however, is the "distance at which I stop rendering at all." For really large ships it's something absurd like 100k. For smaller ships it might be more like 16k when they effectively become invisible (and thus literally get removed from bothering to be drawn).<br />
*** So for a ship with only a single LOD, or fewer LODs than specified in your overrides, setting low values would make the ship simply disappear, since that's the role of the "last LOD," whatever that is.<br />
<br />
* Added a new keybind in the utility section, "Reload Select Xml Data," default bound to F8.<br />
** Useful mainly for developers. Reads a few xml bits out of specific fields we might want to change frequently.<br />
** Right now this just re-reads lod_distance_overrides for all entities, but it can be expanded a bit in the future as needed. Whether this will work on sub-nodes and copy-from and partial nodes all properly will need testing if we ever have a reason to do that.<br />
** This has been confirmed and is fully working for its initial use case.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Some buffs to the Dyson Sphere, one of which is it now has some drones solely for defending itself.<br />
<br />
* Difficulty 10 now has some tougher defenses.<br />
<br />
* Auto Bomb, Cluster Bomb and Nanoswarm damage radius 1,200 -> 600, targets hit per "shot" 12 -> 9.<br />
<br />
* Auto Bomb and Nanoswarm speed 2,900 -> 2,200.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted some of the Lone Wolf seed weights and max limits, so you shouldn't see just Hive Golems all the time.<br />
<br />
* Eyebots decloak in 1 shot instead of 2.<br />
<br />
==== Counter Attacks ====<br />
<br />
* Counter Attacks now require at least half their strength in present player forces to stall, instead of a fifth.<br />
<br />
* Lowered the initial thresholds for some difficulties, mostly higher.<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* They now use the same armour, albedo and speed as their normal version (if applicable).<br />
<br />
* They now follow the 2/1 hull/shield ratio often found elsewhere.<br />
<br />
* Those with a damage bonus of 20x now use a 6x bonus.<br />
<br />
* Upgraded the durability of the drones they use, and made the Tethuida drone a bit better at hitting stuff.<br />
<br />
* Added Dire Vampire, Tritium Sniper, Gravity, Stealth, Temperamental, Fragmenting, and MLRS variants.<br />
** Temperamental and Fragmenting should only be usable on defense.<br />
<br />
* Unlocked a bit earlier on Difficulty 10 for the Hunter Fleet.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guardian reload time 12s -> 9s, speed 500 -> 400, targets hit per shot 80 -> 100, no longer has the Fortified defensive bonus.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guardian shots per salvo 12 -> 36.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian targets hit per shot 10 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Forcefield Guardian damage 10,000 -> 40,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Heavy Beam Guardian damage 15,000 -> 7,500, reload time 4s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
* Dire Widow Guardian shots per salvo 20 -> 60, tractor beam count 200 -> 550.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Guardian 10,000 -> 5,000, shots per salvo 1 -> 20, range 6,000 -> 8,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Pike Guardian shots per salvo 20 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian damage 8,000 -> 80,000, shots per salvo 3 -> 1.<br />
<br />
* Dire Grenade Launcher Guardian shots per salvo 1 -> 3.<br />
<br />
==== Golems ====<br />
<br />
* They now have the same damage as a MK5 player one, with 66% of the health.<br />
** This is a large damage bump to them, as they were left behind with the last player Golem/Ark buffs due to lack of data, but now seems a good time for this.<br />
<br />
* The AI has received an interesting box and a suit.<br />
** It also received a strangely shaped green rock.<br />
<br />
* These are unlocked a bit earlier on Difficulty 10 for the Warden Fleet.<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem health 4,000,000 -> 3,000,000, damage 5,000 -> 4,000, AIP cost 15 -> 20.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for taking this thing too far.<br />
<br />
* Increased metal to claim and repair Golems by 150%, energy cost from 30,000 -> 50,000.<br />
** Also thanks to Ryulong for taking some of these too far.<br />
** This might be a little strange, but with the shields being free, and hull being 50% off to repair, the current cost to repair a Golem was only 700k metal - you could go very close to that just building up your initial Fleet. That, and the energy, are both intended to add extra costs onto using these things, particularly due to some advantages they hold (such as never contributing to a counter attack unless it's crippled).<br />
<br />
==== Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Replaced all the old AI Ship Groups with newer, hopefully more interesting ones.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian damage 1,500 -> 3,600, total durability 60,000 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Tritium Sniper Guardian total durability 37,500 -> 40,000.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian shots per salvo 5 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian damage 250 -> 150, shots per salvo 12 -> 30, total durability 40,000 -> 80,000, speed 400 -> 1,400, range 10,100 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Guardian shots per salvo 12 -> 20, reload time 6s -> 4s, total durability 40,000 -> 80,000, speed 400 -> 1,400, range 10,100 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Guardian damage 1,000 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 1 -> 5, reload time 4s -> 8s, total durability 60,000 -> 80,000, tractor system gains slightly more targets per Mark.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Guardian targets hit per shot 20 -> 40, total durability 45,000 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian shots per salvo 1 -> 3, explosion size 600 -> 350, total durability 52,500 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Guardian damage 5,000 -> 15,000, range 10,100 -> 12,000, total durability 30,000 -> 60,000.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Guardian shield radius increased around 35%, shield durability 75,000 -> 160,000.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guardian shots per salvo 5 -> 10, total durability 42,000 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian damage 300 -> 200, shots per salvo 10 -> 30, range 5,000 -> 4,000, reload time 4s -> 6s, Mark 1 slow effect 0.8x -> 0.6x, slow gained per mark 0.1x -> 0.05x, slow range 5,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Heavy Beam Guardian damage 1,300 -> 1,350, targets hit per shot 10 -> 9, reload time 6s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Guardian albedo 0.3 -> 0.7, damage 1,000 -> 1,250, reload time 2s -> 1s, total durability 52,500 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Carrier Guardian range 6,000 -> 12,000, total durability 24,000 -> 40,000.<br />
<br />
* Added the normal Tethuida Guardian and MLRS Guardian.<br />
<br />
==== Raid Frigates (And Variants) ====<br />
<br />
* All decloak in 1 shot rather than 10.<br />
** Way too abusable.<br />
<br />
* Health of all increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Damage of all increased 66%.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigates and Bounty Hunters have the same ranged damage resistance as the Apparition, but only to 50%. Apparition resistance matches the Space Planes.<br />
<br />
* All now have a form of the Pulsar Tank bonus.<br />
<br />
=== Macrophage ===<br />
<br />
* The Territorial Update<br />
<br />
* Harvesters<br />
** Stats when spawned in have been greatly nerfed.<br />
** Now capable of marking up as they deliver metal.<br />
*** Base chance of 50%, reduced by 9% per mark increase.<br />
** Harvesters will only move to planets X/2 hops from their Telium, where X is equal to the number of harvesters their Telium own.<br />
*** Enraged are not considered owned by any Telium, and do not factor into or follow this rule.<br />
** Harvesters harvest metal generators they visit, gaining 2500 Metal per mine.<br />
** Lower Mark Harvesters will attempt to only visit low mark planets.<br />
*** Harvesters will, unless given no other choice, avoid player planets until Mark 2, and the player homeworld until Mark 3.<br />
*** Enraged do not follow the above rule, and will attack as they wish.<br />
<br />
* Telium<br />
** No longer lose all metal whenever an event fires, and instead simply subtract the event's cost.<br />
** Now fully restore a Harvester's shields whenever they complete a full delivery.<br />
** Can now have up to 4 active Harvesters before they get enraged.<br />
** Will have a higher chance to spawn Spores as their Harvester count increases.<br />
*** Base spore chance of 50%, increased by 10% for each additional Harvester beyond the first.<br />
<br />
* New Constants have been added in for a multitude of the above changes.<br />
** In addition, the HarvestersToEnrage Constant has been fixed to properly work again.<br />
<br />
=== Quickstarts ===<br />
<br />
* Players are now able to create a Quickstart from in game. Simply open the development menu, then click Create Preset, and fill in the boxes.<br />
** This will also save your game with the same name as the Preset (What you type in the top box)<br />
** The box for the description can be left blank without issues. The name, for obvious reasons, cannot be<br />
<br />
* Added EditSetup and StartGame buttons to the Quickstart menu. It now requires you to select the game you want to play, type the campaign name in, then click on "Start" in the bottom right corner<br />
** To view the EditSetup button, enable the corresponding setting under the debug category. This is due to the high probability of bugs with the initial rollout, and can be changed once most bugs are taken care of.<br />
** If you do edit the setup, you will also get a popup window reminding you that this is a development feature, and may cause bugs during use.<br />
<br />
* Added the EditSetup and StartGame buttons to the Load Game menu. Same rules apply there.<br />
<br />
* If you double click a save, it will still load it, similar to how it was before this release<br />
** This should help reduce the confusion players have<br />
<br />
* Created new textbox window with a single line on top and a large free text box on bottom.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.321 Enjoy Your Break, Voice Lady ==<br />
(Released January 31st, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Actually fix the bug where dyson antagonizers weren't spawning<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, especially Binary Blitz for finding a save game that let me fix it<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to CalculateRemainingShipLineSlotCount to prevent a null reference in the swap ship lines between fleets code<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* If a player forcefield is bumped out of the way by an astro train (or anything else), it will now go back to where it was after the astro train is gone. <br />
** This was particularly annoying for forcefields protecting wormholes.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, but I don't remember any of their names<br />
<br />
* Adds Damage Amplification, which can be defined in XML<br />
** damage_amplification tag is true/false<br />
** damage_amplification_duration is an integer, and determines how long damage is amplified for in seconds<br />
** damage_amplification_flat is the amount of damage added. It is also an integer, and is a flat increase (if your attack would do 500 damage, and this is marked as 500, your total damage will be 1000)<br />
** Damage is amplified from ALL sources. This includes other ships than the one that caused the effect<br />
** Adds damage_amplification_mult XML tag<br />
*** Functions same as DamageAmplificationFlat tag, except it multiplies damage by the number instead of adding them together<br />
*** May be set to below 1 to reduce all incoming damage as well, if desired<br />
<br />
* Added ability to define amount of damage added per ship of that type on the planet in XML<br />
** Also features an optional max for the damage increase<br />
** Has an EntityRollupType for all entities with that feature<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare bug that could still happen in DetachVisObjectFromSim.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where RelatedString2 and RelatedString3 were not being properly cleared on GameCommands. This was leading to various log messages that should have been silent instead giving outdated voice commands based on whatever was last played. This would get incredibly repetitive and was baffling.<br />
** Huge thanks to StarKelp for figuring out what this was.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.320 Intelligence Intensifies==<br />
(Released January 30th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* "Teach a Man to Fish..." achievement is now properly triggered at Mark VII.<br />
** Thanks Rivet for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed spelling of Megalodon achievement both in game and on Steam.<br />
** Thanks Ovalcircle for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to giant marauder empires; they could get a bit out of control, so fewer raiders overall now. Note that with fireteams the marauders are much smarter, so they don't need as many ships to still be effective<br />
<br />
* Fix a UI annoyance where the Techs That Upgrade This Ship were sometimes listed Weapon First and sometimes Hull First. Now it always lists the weapon first.<br />
** Thanks to Daw11 and Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Nanocausts could go after the player in the early game. You should now be safe from nanocaust incursions for the first 30 minutes<br />
** Thanks to Mayheim on steam for a report<br />
<br />
* Add some colour to the log messages about zenith trader and devourer<br />
<br />
* Exos of sufficient strength can now split that strength across multiple start planets; the smallest unit for a split is 40 strength. This should make defending against them more "Fun"<br />
** Suggested by Starkelp<br />
<br />
* Improve handling of the case where a dyson antagonizer can't find a planet to spawn on<br />
** Thanks to BinaryBlitz for the bug report<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.314 Achieve Those ==<br />
(Released January 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* For both stacks and drones, put in some code to prevent cross-threading race conditions where they could in theory cause incorrect and confusing fluctuations.<br />
** With stacks it seems like this only happened with very low stack count targets.<br />
** With drones it seems this was not actually the problem.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* For all of the non-planetary fleets, it no longer tries to clear excess ships above the cap that you have.<br />
** This was potentially causing some problems with drones in particular where it was killing excess ships as they went back into the drone controller. This may also have affected ships going into transports.<br />
** Essentially it was counting some stuff that was queued for death but not yet dead. And in general with these we frankly don't care if they are over cap, as they wll die soon enough anyhow and it's unlikely that they would be over cap in the first place.<br />
** The big thing with caps needing to clear excess ships is the command station fleets, since you can change command station types which massively adjusts your caps for things, and not handling these would be an exploit.<br />
*** If a command station is ever given drones, then it's likely to be buggy like the hive golem and similar was in the past, and there's no simple solution for that. Don't give command stations drones. ;)<br />
** This is confirmed to fix the hive golem bug and bug with drones in general.<br />
** Thanks to Chthon, Daniexpert, and Ubifan for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Add colour to some log messages:<br />
** The 'starting hack' log message now has colour in it so it looks more interesting<br />
** The messages generated by 'AI sending wave against planet' and 'AIP change by' now have colour. Also, use the Display Name instead of the Internal name for printing the name of the entity killed to change AIP. This just looks a bit better<br />
<br />
* Add some debugging code to allow us to see more easily which faction the AI threat is going after<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bunch of minor faction achievements not triggering. <br />
** They were only looking at Display Name, not Internal name. You can now put either the Display Name or Internal Name in the XML and it will work for either.<br />
** Thanks Hexahedron, ArnaudB, and Ecthelon for reporting<br />
<br />
* AI Tech Level achievements now work as expected<br />
** Thanks Hexahedron for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed SledgeHammer achievement not triggering<br />
** Thanks ArnaudB for reporting!<br />
<br />
* When the game gets enough autosaves that it needs to start deleting older ones, it should no longer will error out.<br />
** This was something that was new in the prior beta build, because of all the changes we made to the save/load/delete pipeline.<br />
** Thanks to StarKeep for reporting.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.313 Listening To Lists ==<br />
(January 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Modify the marauder tooltips to no longer refer to planetary controllers<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a nasty bug where Fireteams (in particular the Hunter) was identifying Command Stations that had died to remains as valid targets.<br />
** From a save game of Ryulong, where 500 strength of Hunter Fleet was Just Chilling for much of the game<br />
<br />
* Increase the overall AI income for difficulty 10 a bit<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in a variety of map types with low planet counts, but particularly octopus.<br />
** This was a pretty rare bug, and it also happened to be in a section of code that did not even do anything anymore. So we simply removed the code and things work as expected now.<br />
** Thanks to Rifi8 for the report that lets us reproduce it.<br />
<br />
* Changing the AI difficulty via the debug menu is now always considered a cheat, even prior to the first 60 seconds passing.<br />
** This basically was something that could cheat mapgen out of giving you the harder structures.<br />
<br />
* Using the debug menu to reveal the entire map is no longer considered a cheat, but rather is a lifestyle choice.<br />
** The first game did allow you to set the entire map to visible right from the start, after all.<br />
** Add a matched "Explore all planet" to go with "Watch all planet", for people who want to see what's happening Right Now but not to have permanenent vision everywhere<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The debug menu is now split into two columns, with the ones that are cheats in their own column and clearly marked as such.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a logic issue in the xml reader that made lists of values such as most_everything_squad_cap_multiplier_list, frigate_squad_cap_multiplier_list, and similar impossible to mod over using copy_from or partial records.<br />
** This also affected some things on achievements, science_cost_per_time_unlocked on techs, tags on ships, tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, build_sidebar_categories_i_am_part_of, fleet_design_templates_i_always_grant, NOT eligible_for_hacks. NOT sounds_on_takes_damage or sounds_on_death, NOT arbitrary_options, engine_stun_multipliers_by_stun_seconds, exp_multipliers_by_player_fleet_count, and exp_multipliers_by_max_fleet_level_difference.<br />
** This is completely untested and hopefully doesn't eat the world. Glad we're in beta.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
* Added a debug menu cheat for finishing all the construction on a planet immediately.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "most_recent_stable_beta" branch on Steam, set to the prior build 1.312 in case this does in fact break the world. ;)<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.312 Stop Threatening Me ==<br />
(Released January 25th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* AI sub-factions (praetorian/hunter/warden) no longer join other AIs when their overlord dies. Instead they stay loyal to their now-rogue AI. The praetorian stops doing anything except fighting on its current planets, but the hunter and warden will remain active and fight you if you attack their AI's planets.<br />
** A number of people have pointed this out, including ArnaudB and Agalyon<br />
<br />
* Instigators can no longer spawn 'anywhere' at high enough AIP. They are always within accessible (if very hard) distance even at high AIP<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where minor factions could trigger AI units to go threat against the player<br />
** Thanks to Agalyon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed SuperTerminal hack achievement.<br />
** Thanks ArnaudB for reporting and Puffin for reminding me to put it in the notes!<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.311 Code Review ==<br />
(Released January 24th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* We exhaustively went through all of our faction (minor and major) code, reviewing things for potential problems -- subtle or otherwise -- that might come up from the increased parallelism of the faction thread.<br />
** We did find a few things that could cause inexplicable wrong behavior if two threads were in just the wrong state at just the right time, but most of the code was clean and those cases were pretty rarely going to occur. We fixed what we found, and having everything else go through a thorough review that verifies it as good is well worth the time.<br />
** Since there were some nontrivial changes in some areas to make things clearer or to fix some of the bugs that were present, most notably around exos, we wanted to go ahead and push another beta branch in the meantime.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.310 A Smarter Warden ==<br />
(Released January 24th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The Warden Fleet now uses Fireteams.<br />
** Needs testing before pushing to the main steam branch.<br />
<br />
* Increase the threshold for "Ships in combat" voice lines. Don't play the "Your home command station is under attack" voice line unless the AI actually has enough ships to be scary.<br />
** I don't want to know if one cloaked AI fleetship is shooting at the shield on my home command station anymore<br />
<br />
== Version 1.309 Instigator Cheekiness ==<br />
(Released January 23rd, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The counterattack notifier hovertext now tells you how many guard posts you have to kill to disable the counterattack<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer wasn't shooting the zenith trader<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* When the game tries to create notifications up at the top part of the screen for the human player, if it runs into an error it now is much more informative about what the error was, although it's still not exact in every case.<br />
** Thanks to DefeatedByTheCat for the report that triggered us to add this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of places where if the AI did not have a "most annoying faction" at a location, it would error instead of simply waiting because it was not annoyed.<br />
** In "send a wave if alerted after X seconds" (raid engine).<br />
** In the human notification checks for raid engines.<br />
** And that's it, from a thorough code review. Everything else actually already checks properly for the most annoying faction index being -1, or the resulting faction object being null, as relevant.<br />
*** Though it is worth noting that if there is mysterious threat showing up because of minor faction aggro against the AI, it's possibly because the AI got a -1 from this at some point.<br />
** Thanks to DefeatedByTheCat for the report that led us to finding this. This isn't actually a new bug at all, just a rare one apparently.<br />
<br />
* Lone Wolf Flagships can no longer have ship lines swapped to them. This is a very longstanding bug.<br />
** Thanks to a bunch of people for reporting, including Chthon, Iocaine and deo<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "Called AI Sentinels_execCont_607 pathfinder from two different contexts! First was executionContext, new one is specialFactionContext_22_AI" error, and probably all related errors.<br />
** The correct pathfinder to use for a faction is now centrally calculated from a method called GetPathfindersOfRelevanceFromContext, and there are now many more pathfinder instances possible to have on a faction instance to avoid the potential case where factions need to pathfind out of cases we were expecting.<br />
*** If pathfinding is done by Faction.FindPath in a generalized sense from certain types of threads (anything other than the main, execution context, or background faction planning threads), then honestly it will probably wind up with an exception and the programmer in question needs to instantiate their own custom pathfinder instance for whatever it is they have in mind.<br />
** As it stands, it's now lazy-instantiating all these new possible pathfinding contexts per thread type per faction, since a lot of factions do next to no pathfinding and all of them only use some of the thread cases.<br />
*** This helps to avoid memory over-usage (even though that would still be minor in the grand scheme), and makes instantiating faction external data slightly faster than it was in the past and would have become in the future.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Also put in a count of pathfinders created in total, and discovered that we were creating and discarding a pathfinder or two every second or so. This was a minor performance drain and is now fixed.<br />
** You will notice that the number of pathfinders goes up over time early in a new game because of the lazy-creation of them as factions need them, and that's normal (even some getting added hours after starting is normal, if a faction enters a new mode for the first time). Exiting one game and creating another will also cause more to get created. But there shouldn't be a runaway growth of them indefinitely.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a cross-threading bug that could cause GetWormholeToOtherPlanetOrNull to have a nullref inside it.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* CPAs no longer allow you to C-click them, and the slight information that was actually useful inside a c-click of one is now just in the direct tooltip, which no longer asks you to c-click them. This is all just a lot more clean and clear.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Change Instigator Base spawning rules to hopefully make them a bit less frustrating<br />
** Previously once you hit 300 AIP the Instigator base could spawn anywhere<br />
** Now between 300 and 600 AIP the instigator base must spawn between 4 and 7 hops from one of your planet, and it's only unlimited after 600 AIP<br />
<br />
== Version 1.308 Mega Performance ==<br />
(Released January 22nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Most Notifications now work as follows. Clicking on them in the Galaxy view will center you on the planet. Clicking on them in the Planet view will take you to that planet.<br />
<br />
* Combat fleets now include their Strength in the tooltip in the Intel menu<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Even on the brief tooltips, the game now shows how many ships and what their strength is for AI reinforcement points. The medium tooltips show the types of ships in there and a bit more info. This is pretty important information at every tooltip level.<br />
<br />
* Add a setting for preventing instigator bases from spawning.<br />
** While canonically the AI gets instigator bases, some people find them frustrating or stressful to play against.<br />
** Requested by Admiral<br />
<br />
* Ghost, Ensnarer and Sniper AI Turrets now say their type, so the Ensnarer Battlestation having them doesn't seem so odd (as it now specifically says "Ensnarer Pike Great-Turret" for instance).<br />
** Mentioned by Ryulong and Venger.<br />
<br />
=== Astro Train Buffs ===<br />
<br />
* Astro trains can now spawn multiple trains at once, based on the intensity of the faction.<br />
* Only for intensity >= 5. Chance for multi-spawn starts at 10% for intensity 5 up to 60% at intensity 10.<br />
** Lets see if this is enough to make them more exciting. From a discussion on Discord with Hyde, zeus and others<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fireteams drop out of 'bonus speed mode' once they are actually attacking the target. A fireteam only gets bonus move speed to make sure all the fireteams attacking arrive in a coordinated fashion<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for pointing this out<br />
<br />
* Fireteam-based Nanocausts now are constrained from attacking the player too early. <br />
* Killing a nanocaust hive now means nanocaust ships won't get any new orders (except 'fight on this planet')<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the bug reports<br />
* Fixed a bug in the last couple of builds where it would always talk about your "best fleet" in the end of the game (win or lose) as "useless cowards" (which is just what it says when it can't find a fleet).<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where factories weren't printing things they were rebuilding<br />
** Thanks to Mongoose on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Macrophages and Enraged Macrophages won't be counted as Threat anymore<br />
** Thanks to WolfWhiteFire for reminding me about this<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Nanocaust invasion could trigger a bunch of threat against the player <br />
** Thanks to vodkasheep on steam for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Norris Effect ships were being blocked from going through wormholes by shields<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in even more of a fix to the fire teams having an INNER exception of thread abort that was being reported erroneously because it could happen during a sort operation.<br />
** This should solve some of the marauder debug code 1200 errors we were seeing that were not really a bug.<br />
<br />
* Units such as Hydra Heads and Mini Cluster Bombs will no longer show in the Double Shipline Cap option screen.<br />
** Thanks to Admiral, Daniexpert and NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception that could happen in rare cases on loading a savegame with a wave incoming, where it might say "Exception in ShipIconImageBase.RenderContents at stage 170"<br />
<br />
* Fixed Royal Tethuida and Shredder Guardians not having Drones.<br />
** Reported by Ryulong.<br />
<br />
* Hacks against the Dark Spire now correctly consume hacking points. Whoops<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Unexplored planets will no longer show their mark level or the number of reinforcement points they had. Previously you could deduce way too much information about planets (including the location of AI Overlords)<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Finally fixed a bunch of spurious errors that could happen when you exited out of the game and it was in the middle of shutting down background threads. They made it seem like things were happening such as clashes between pathfinding calls to the same pathfinder, and other things of that nature, but it was just the threads dying and not being as quiet about it as they should have been.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of nullref exceptions that could happen during DoForEntities and a few related methods if the collection was changing during a cross-thread update clash.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of quasi-invisible bugs where the wrong movement or decollision points could be given to the wrong entity if ships died in between when the command was issued and when they got it.<br />
** This could cause rare random things like a ship of your own suddenly moving without you telling it to, etc. It was likely pretty rare, although it got more common after we stopped pooling ships.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and Badger for helping us accidentally find this.<br />
<br />
* Probably fixed a bug that could happen inside entity order creation for decollision. Whether we really fixed it or not will require more testing, as it was pretty rare in the first case. This was quasi-related to the above fix.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in a lot of extra debugging stage code to help us know what is happening in the faction metal outflows code, so that when we get something like "ERROR In BuildingDronesInternally" we will know where the problem is. As it stands the code looks okay, but someone hit the error, so we'll need them to hit it again in the new code version before we can figure out what it is.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for being our resident nullref exception sponge.<br />
<br />
* Put in a likely fix for a rare exception that could happen in GenerateMercenaryObjectives.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Performance Hunting And Open-Sourcing ===<br />
<br />
* Reduce the number of FindPath calls made by Fireteams<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where empty fireteams in some states were never being disbanded<br />
<br />
* The way that the game tracks commands that are actually queued versus those that are just requested but not actually sent is now much better, giving us insight into what the heck is going on and where we might be able to squeeze out some more performance in giant games in particular.<br />
<br />
* A large amount of code relating to simulation that happens at the planet level has been moved into the open-source dlls.<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch more of the world-step sim logic has been moved into the open-source (moddable) part of the code.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor performance drain where our "combine into stacks" code was pulling thousands more gamecommands from the pool in large savegames, then not using most of them because of whatever invalidities.<br />
<br />
* Put in a variety of fixes to the AI background thread where it could pull a "send wormhole" command prematurely and then realize that it had nothing to send, thus causing it to trigger some locks pointlessly and waste some background CPU cycles.<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code in dark spire, devourer, dyson sphere, instigators, and outguard that could cause it to issue blank wormhole move commands and calculate paths for no ships in potential rare circumstances.<br />
<br />
* Improved some of our utility methods to early-out a lot sooner when they don't have targets to chase, etc.<br />
<br />
* Improved the divide ships among planets code to definitely never send empty wormhole commands anymore.<br />
<br />
* Improved the auto pursuit mode for engineers to not request extra commands and then put them back, again improving performance slightly.<br />
<br />
* If null commands or null types on commands are sent, it now shows those in red in the escape menu.<br />
<br />
* For commands that have a different number of requests and actual queuings in the escape menu, it now shows those in red for easy identification.<br />
<br />
* When the game gets a request to shut down or quit to the main menu or other things of that sort, it is now absolutely brutal with the background threads, killing them all and exiting immediately. It was before trying to be polite and wait for them to tidy up and finish, but that was at the best case slow (now with fire teams in particular), and in the worst case would never exit (in the case of a stalled background thread).<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where if one of the background long term planning fields got stuck or was slow, it could cause others to be very slow to send their commands.<br />
** In general also made it so that long term faction threads now send their commands as they finish their individual work, which is far superior in terms of smooth performance when there are many factions.<br />
<br />
* If the game runs into a background thread that is taking more than 10 seconds (which means it is then blocking all other background threads, too), it now shows a message on the right hand side of the screen saying slow background threads and showing what the slow thread is.<br />
** In this way we can actually tell if something stalls out and then starts blocking the rest of the game, versus before it was pretty invisible.<br />
<br />
* Fixed some excessive requests for SetWaiting and SetBehavior_FromFaction_ThreatTimeToFight that were then never being queued for actual use.<br />
<br />
* Fixed some excessive requests to TransferEntitiesToFaction and ScrapUnits that would then not be queued.<br />
<br />
* Split the singular "SetWormholePath" into 17 distinct variants so we can see what is going on in terms of high volumes of those being sent in some savegames and thus causing a big slowdown.<br />
** The general idea is for us to be able to recognize hotspots at a glance, but all of these function the same so it doesn't matter which one a mod's code uses.<br />
** An interesting side effect of this is that it potentially cuts down on cross-threading contention since the pool has to be locked to take items out and put them back in.<br />
*** The pool being locked and unlocked is one reason not requesting more commands than we need is a really good idea, too.<br />
** There is actually a measurable performance boost from these things alone.<br />
<br />
* Same thing with splitting CreateSpeedGroup into 4 variants.<br />
<br />
* FlushReinforcementPoints can now only be called on a planet once every 5 seconds at most.<br />
** This keeps certain factions from flooding the command queue with hundreds of such requests over the course of a second or two of game time.<br />
<br />
* Refinements to the pathfinding performance, round 1 (existing algorithm changes):<br />
** Starting performance:<br />
*** 3.30017 ms per call on average for marauders, over 25k calls in 84 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread (stopped thread after this).<br />
** After making GetNeighborOfNodeByIndex much more direct and not involving a loop:<br />
*** To start, 2.883 ms per call on average for marauders, over 16k calls in 48 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread.<br />
*** But then 3.212 ms per call on average for marauders, over 30k calls in 98 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread (stopped thread after this)<br />
*** It's worth noting that there's fuzz in all this data, from disk write speeds and application being in the foreground or background more, different routes being considered, etc. So it's only so precise.<br />
** Removed DoForNodesInFlood since it was never used anyway.<br />
** Then changed the pathfinding object itself to not instantiate a ton of stuff on the heap with every call, instead reusing objects and lists and dictionaries except for the final result dictionary.<br />
*** As part of this, made it so that the FindPathInner method now also checks to see if it has simultaneous calls on the same object, to make it complain if it's used in a non-threadsafe manner. A single thread would only call these serially, after all.<br />
*** After this, 2.642 ms per call on average for marauders, over 16k calls in 44 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread (stopped thread after this)<br />
** It's observed that we're doing quite a few calls to these pathfinders on the main thread as well, but nothing at the sort of scale that the long term planning threads do. But some of the substantial performance degradation to the sim is probably this on the main thread also.<br />
** With the logging turned off, the long-running thread for marauders in the super-slow s6 save is now something that takes still north of 136 seconds, so this sort of low-hanging fruit is making very little difference in aggregate and could even simply be the result of instrumentation error (so to speak). The revisions definitely are performance improvements, but are apparently such a tiny portion of the load as to not be noteworthy.<br />
<br />
* Before we get into more extreme changes, the ArcenPathfinder class and its internals have been moved to the external public source code.<br />
** This makes things far quicker for us to change and then test the results with.<br />
<br />
* Added a new abstract Pathfindable class in the Arcen Core area, which is now required for use in the pathfinding code, and which Planet inherits from.<br />
** This lets us make a number of things more efficient, and not just in pathfinding.<br />
** PlanetIndex on the planet object is now just Index on Pathfindable.<br />
** LinkedPlanetIndices is now just LinkedIndices on Pathfindable.<br />
** Added a new LinkedPathfindables on Pathfindable which gets recalculated as needed and which can be manually recalculated via FillLinkedPathfindablesIfNeeded().<br />
*** This actually should speed up calculations for a lot of things with adjacent planet checks, even outside of pathfinding.<br />
** The pathfinding code is now able to directly call a few things on Pathfindable, rather than having to indirectly get things via method calls.<br />
*** This is another incremental improvement, but paves the way for a number of things, and in general makes the load on the call stack lower. Given how many paths are being calculated by fire teams, every little bit matters, even before we get into the larger changes.<br />
<br />
* Made some tweaks to fireteam code to reduce the number of FindPath calls.<br />
** This alone shifts the performance of the s6 savegame case to be able to finish the marauders long-running thread in 98 seconds now instead of it running somewhere north of 150 or 200 seconds.<br />
<br />
* The ArcenSimContext now has a non-sim incrementing loop counter in it that tells us when we need to refresh the pathfinding data and other things.<br />
** This is "non sim" in the sense that it doesn't matter what the loop counter number is, it just matters that it knows when the number is different. This is safe to use for multiplayer and on short and long term planning threads, main thread, etc.<br />
** To check if this is the same execution that it was the last time you were in a thread, you can now check a stored integer against NonsimLoopIndex on the context. If the numbers don't match, sim or not sim, then you should recalculate whatever you're intending to cache on a per-iteration-of-this-thread-whatever-that-is basis.<br />
<br />
* The pathfinding code now requires that an ArcenSimContext so that we can use that new stuff for lazy-load precalculations.<br />
** This lets us be sure that we're not wasting any CPU on precalculations that will never be used, but at the same time since these are per-thread we don't recalculate the same things over and over again. At least that's what will be the case.<br />
<br />
* The pathfinding code now also keeps track of what the first ArcenSimContext was to call into it, and if another context is ever used to call into it, it will complain.<br />
** Thus if we wind up with short term planning code calling long term planning code, we'll know, etc. So far the tests show no instances of this happening, but prior to now that would have been a silent problem if it was happening.<br />
<br />
* More tweaks to fireteam code to even further reduce the number of FindPath calls.<br />
** This shifts the performance of the s6 savegame case to be able to finish the marauders long-running thread in 77 seconds.<br />
<br />
* The background threads are now set to run not in background mode, and with a priority that is above normal. This shouldn't affect the front-end framerate except on extremely limited old-school single-core machines, which don't meet the minimum requirements anyhow.<br />
** This makes better use of your entire processor, and the more cores you have the better the improvement is. This may also be somewhat OS-dependent, as different OSes have different threading models and are better and worse at different things.<br />
** On Windows 10, simply switching from using the unity editor as our test environment to using a standalone build gets us from 40% sim speed to 50-70% sim speed in the s6 savegame, and it drops the background marauder thread from 80 seconds to 55 seconds to execute. On Linux, Badger reports 20 seconds or so for the same background thread, though.<br />
** After these changes to upping the priority, we get a much more solid 70-100% sim speed (those all are running on "background" threads as well, after all), and the background marauder thread drops from 55 seconds to 50.<br />
** We still have a ways to go with the pathfinding efficiency itself, and potentially with culling yet more cases where it's actually calling the pathing threads in a nested fashion, but some of this was based on our internal testing environment (who knew that unity's editor doesn't at all obey thread priorities?), and some of it is improved by giving the background threads in the actual standalone game more freedom to use your available processor space. If your CPU is half idle and the game is running at all slowly, that's just silly.<br />
<br />
* Made a variety of changes to improve pathfinding performance further.<br />
** We're precalculating node passability, which gets rid of the most frequent method call that we were seeing inside the pathfinding code. However, this only drops us from 55 seconds to 51 seconds (a 7.3% increase) for marauder path computations. We need to take it further! (Even though Badger has solved the problem another way that isn't checked in yet, we still want pathfinding to fly.)<br />
<br />
* Made further pathfinding changes to remove all uses of dictionaries and almost all use of lists, and definitely all uses of Contains.<br />
** This has basically linearized the node states into a series of arrays of fixed length 500, and if there are ever more than 500 planets in a galaxy the pathfinding will break unless it is recompiled to support higher numbers of planets. The overall game would burn performance at 500 planets and it would be unpleasant to play, anyway, so this does not seem like a problem to have.<br />
** With the changes to linearize things in this way, performance went down from 51 seconds on the marauder thread to... 7 seconds. So from the recent 55 seconds this is a full 87% improvement to pathfinding speed.<br />
<br />
* Badger figured out a way to also time-slice the fire team logic so that they only scan a certain number of planets (per faction) per check of fire teams.<br />
** This makes some of the fire teams a bit "slower to react" (this is VERY relative) in the super short term in saves with literally hundreds of fire teams on one faction and 200 planets, but it keeps everything running far faster.<br />
** A single fire team might need to evaluate hundreds of planets in order to find out what it needs to do after completing a major objective or just coming into an existence, and this was the case where the game could spike and have really long-running threads (north of 200 seconds prior to this release, now down to 7 seconds as of Chris's prior changes just above).<br />
** While Chris was doing his changes, Badger got in this throttling and managed to make the simulation run at full speed and take an average of 5 seconds instead of 55 even before the pathfinding was 87% more efficient. That was with 1000 planets being scanned at a time, max.<br />
** There is a new galaxy setting which lets you adjust the number of planets to scan, and its new default is now 2500 since between these changes, other fire team improvements, and the pathfinding improvements, what was once taking 200+ seconds now takes a second or two. <br />
** So the fire teams "reacting slower" as noted above means they might delay for a few seconds, maybe 10 at most, in the really huge savegames. But it's not something that will stall the game or performance anymore, and the prior amount of time we had to wait in prior builds for ANYTHING to happen was 200+ seconds. So... it's just plain faster.<br />
** Also, the name of the galaxy option to control this is "Max targets Fireteams can scan in one iteration" in the performance section.<br />
<br />
=== Exo tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where exos were losing their exo target between save/reload<br />
* If a unit had been in an exo but the target died, the ship drops out of the exo and joins the threat<br />
* Units in an exo stuck by a black hole machine should prioritize killing the black hole machine<br />
* This should make exos even more adept at chasing units across planets. Especially big, shard-shaped ones.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Cross Planet Attack (CPA) tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* AI homeworlds can no longer contribute to cross planet attacks (CPAs).<br />
<br />
* When pulling ships for a CPA, the AI now starts with the planets that are at or below its current mark level (whatever that is), minimum 2.<br />
** It then goes to planets 1 mark level above, then two, then random among everything else.<br />
** This makes it most likely, particularly in the early game, that most things will be relatively low-level.<br />
<br />
* To clarify, since many have been confused, while CPAs do have a budget, they do NOT create new ships.<br />
** As with the first AI War, they instead turn guards into threat. Aka, they set guards "free" to come attack you.<br />
** The budget of the CPA determines how many ships they can set free, but doesn't let them purchase anything new.<br />
** Specifically it only pulls from ships that are IN guard posts at the moment.<br />
<br />
* Previously, the mark level of ships in a CPA was downgraded (or upgraded) to whatever the mark level of the AI was in general at the time.<br />
** This was wildly unfair to the AI in a lot of cases, making high-mark ships into low-mark ones.<br />
** Now the AI gets whatever their actual mark of ships are freed, but it tries to free appropriate-or-lower mark ships first before launching harder stuff.<br />
** When it launches things that are lower-mark or higher-mark than its baseline, it pays less or more from its budget based on the strength differential. So the end strength should be the same in general.<br />
<br />
* When ships come out of guard posts for CPAs, previously it would grind some games to a halt because of them coming out unstacked and potentially huge in number.<br />
** Now it tries to stack them up to 99 ships at a time per stack, as it can.<br />
<br />
* Also previously, when the CPA launched you had no idea what you were in for. Now it tells you how many ships, what total strength, and how many of each mark level of ship were freed.<br />
** The idea is definitely to keep you from being surprised by higher-mark ships showing up, or in general by what is happening. Where the ships are and what specifically their composition is remains a mystery, though.<br />
** This also should immediately dispel any confusion about these being new ships versus freed guards, based on the wording of the notification.<br />
<br />
* The in-game Tip now explains these new mechanics<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Some buffs to the Macrophage, who are feeling pretty uninspiring. More buffs to come if they are still underperforming<br />
<br />
* Nanocausts and Marauders that were created before fireteams were an option now default to using fireteams<br />
** This includes Nanocausts and Marauders from quickstarts<br />
<br />
* Altered most of the Fleet Designs again, to fix some problems accidentally introduced previously, regarding Mono-Tech Fleets and the general chances of each Tech line being on paper fine, but in practice notably off.<br />
** Also added 15 new Designs, and removed 2 that were notable culprits.<br />
<br />
* Dark Spire Wraith and Phantoms can now be affected by the Strikecraft Coordinator, as well as have their lines doubled.<br />
** Mentioned by Ryulong.<br />
<br />
* Space Planes, Mirages and Apparitions have their damage resistance range reduced, to account for the recent 0.8x range modifier that does not affect this.<br />
** Also mentioned by Ryulong.<br />
<br />
* Added some more Guardian types to the Instigator Base spawns.<br />
** Requested by ArnaudB and Fluffiest.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Vanguard speed 400 -> 600, shots per salvo 1 -> 8, damage 360 -> 90, reload time 6s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard Hydra speed 600 -> 800, shots per salvo 1 -> 8, damage 180 -> 60, reload time 6s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tank speed 400 -> 500, main weapon range 4,200 -> 5,600, main weapon has the same damage bonus as the secondary.<br />
<br />
* Ablative Gatling speed 600 -> 800.<br />
<br />
* Ablative Troll speed 400 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette and Porcupine speed 500 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette speed 400 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Molotov speed 800 -> 1,000.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Corvette speed 400 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Raptor damage bonus 4x -> 6x.<br />
<br />
* Ranger speed 800 -> 1,000, damage 225 -> 450, reload time 4s -> 8s, range infinite -> 10,100, now has a cloaking device.<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Trader ====<br />
<br />
* Scrubbed Abberation and Abomination now do full Zombification rather than a form of Nanocaustation that would create normal zombies.<br />
** Led to a problem with the changes to Zombification to restrict what could be affected. Those did not affect Nanocaustation, so these units could still give the player zombie versions of Dire Guardians, for instance.<br />
<br />
* Now sells a Trader specific version of the Orbital Mass Driver, as to not interfere with the galaxy wide caps if you hack any.<br />
<br />
* All Zenith Trader goodies have a galaxy wide cap of 2.<br />
** Before you could armour up every planet you owned to a large amount with no other investment. Now you have to choose where these goodies go.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Forcefield is now Markless, but has improved stats over what it used to be.<br />
** Just clarity. It couldn't be upgraded anyhow.<br />
<br />
* All other Trader goodies are Markless.<br />
** Also for clarity, since most weren't affected anyhow, and the one that could (Tamed Macrophage) could have huge power spikes from planetary upgrades.<br />
** This might change in future.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.304 So You Like Combat Engineers? ==<br />
(Released January 14th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The right hand chat/log window in the lobby is now hidden, since it isn't used for now.<br />
** Thanks to Sounds for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the performance section of personal settings: Enable Performance Logging<br />
** Turning this on may hurt performance a bit, but not hugely so in most cases. It lets you then see a lot of information about how the game is spending its CPU time by right-clicking the timer in the bottom left of the main game view. Off by default, as it has no other purpose than that.<br />
** Prior to this build it was always on. It wasn't a performance drain at all that we can tell, but it's worth being careful, and it was a source of some cross-threading issues which would give slight performance issues. But we can't detect even a 1% difference in general performance with this on, presently.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Friendly nanocaust should now honor the 'dont kill command station' setting<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reminding me about this<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo that was causing the outguard to go through withdrawl<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Some text editors put a shadow copy with .xml~ at the end, and that can be a problem for people who have files open to make tweaks (modding or development) while testing the game. It also can cause errors in the game if we accidentally push one out like that. The game now explicitly ignores such files.<br />
<br />
* Put even MORE paranoid-style cross-threading protections in on FramePartTimings, since themouthofsauron reports still seeing a few of those in the very latest 1.303 builds. Our fixes in that build probably cut down on those, but clearly didn't eliminate them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a visual-only bug where factories seemed to be helping build for fleets when the factory was disabled or still self-building or similar. Especially if other factories were actually making progress on the same things the factory was ostensibly helping, it was confusing.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a harmless but annoying exception that could happen as you exit the game or quit to the main menu in the last few versions.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes for a cascade of errors that could happen from a fleet member's type being inexplicably set to null.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of places where the game simply being in the process of exiting could cause the game to log an error that was actually harmless and not something to log.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved performance on the main menu by ensuring that background threads were not able to run (they would be pointless there in general).<br />
<br />
* The way that the performance logging is handled is now a bit more idiot-proof in terms of us being less likely to cause problems with mismatched calls to it.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a kind of face-palmy issue on the main menu that was causing it to lag horribly while everything else was fine. This only happened on Steam, not GOG, and was us basically checking too frequently to see if we needed to update Steam achievements online with things that were achieved locally but not yet logged to Steam.<br />
** Once we got GOG achievements in, this would have hit there as well, so it's good to get that out of the way for both platforms.<br />
** This shifts the framerate on the main menu from a very choppy 20fps to a super fluid 200+ fps.<br />
** This also seems to make the entire game load faster, too.<br />
<br />
* Added a bunch of internal compiler toggles which let us isolate different parts of the code to see where our performance bottlenecks are on the really high planet count late-game high-ship-count peformance problem games.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare cross-threading exception in PlaySFX_ShotHitting, and another one in GameEntity_Shot.ClearVisualObjIfExists.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the prior build where combat engineers and combat sentry frigates could not be built.<br />
** This was due to a rule change in how self-building units work, and these happened to inherit some improper self-building xml.<br />
** Now they properly are able to have their self-building xml overrideen to 0, which makes them work again while still keeping the nice new rules in general.<br />
** Presumably these were the only two ships affected (units that normally are planetary but can be used in battlestations with copy_from variants), but if there are more the fix is a quick xml adjustment.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong, Afferian, Daniexpert, ArnaudB, Vortex, ckellsworth, zerschleisser, Riken Avadur, Maggo 0815, daimyo_willem, XTRMNTR2K, and Distuth for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The Nanocaust can now use fireteams; like marauders, enable "Tactician" mode<br />
<br />
* Tactician is now the default for marauders and nanocaust<br />
<br />
* Some minor buffs to how quickly marauders can consolidate their planets<br />
<br />
* Sabotage hack duration 30 -> 15, Cost 20 -> 15.<br />
<br />
* Slight increase of Super Terminal response intervals.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.303 AI Hunter Fireteams For All ==<br />
(Released January 13th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Build categories on the sidebar now sort their items by the name that they show in the sidebar, not by the actual full name of the entity. Sometimes this is different, and it makes it hard to find things when it is.<br />
<br />
* What factories are up to is now shown even on the brief tooltips, not just medium and up.<br />
** Thanks to several players for suggesting this.<br />
<br />
* Several improvements to what factories show when they have no work to do on various fleets.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes to an exception that could happen in the mercenary code, and also made it more informative if it happens again.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The "GAAAH! We have a command we need to execute during frame" error has finally been retired. Instead it now just executes the command late, which will be a desync in multiplayer that it can fix on its own. Better slightly late than never, in that case. In cases for single player it literally won't affect anything.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for the most recent report.<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements And Related Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Some bugfixing/IQ enhancement for the AI. AI threat against players had a deplorable habit of not realizing it was supposed to be against the player, and getting distracted by any other minor faction in the game. This was A. making the AI threat not press home attacks and B. making the threat not join the threat fleet appropriately. <br />
** From a discussion on discord with a number of people about why the hunter fleet seemed to be absent. This should be a big improvement.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with assassin mode (aka fireteam) hunter fleets where they were using stale/invalid data to decide when to attack. This usually meant they would fling themselves onto your defenses with reckless abandon<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a wide variety of places where RemoveEntity() was not being called properly when removing entities from a speed group.<br />
** This should lead to more correct behavior in group-move for players, and probably it will help with exos and fireteams and whatnot that are also using speed groups.<br />
<br />
* NPC/AI group move now works like it used to (more or less) prior to the player-specific group move enhancements. This keeps things like exos moving at expected speeds, for example.<br />
** Several bugs were fixed in this whole area as well while we were at it, including some things getting left in groups they should not have, and overriding speeds being forgotten when a compound command was given to units that were already in group move, etc.<br />
** Essentially the single group move command now works one way for players and one way for everyone else.<br />
<br />
* The Assassin hunter fleet type has been removed, as that was just for fire teams. Now all of the non-defensive hunter types use fire teams.<br />
** This is a pretty scary update to the hunter, making it so you no longer have to opt in to using their new exciting behaviors!<br />
<br />
* Fireteams in allied factions can now coordinate their assaults. AI-allied fireteams can also coordinate with AI threat forces<br />
<br />
== Version 1.302 Frigate Empowerment ==<br />
(Released January 12th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Added a new amount_added_to_range_per_ship_of_this_type_on_planet for ships, which allows for ships of a certain type to get a bonus of that integer (for instance something like 50 or 500 or whatever we want) for each ship of that same type on the planet beyond the first.<br />
** This currently gives the benefit to all systems of the ship, whether they are weapons or not.<br />
** This allows for the "Networked Targeters" type of mechanic that RocketAssistedPuffin thought up.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting!<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, it now says "Intensity" for factions, like it does in game, rather than saying Strength. Strength means something else in-game, so keeping this separate and consistent is helpful for clarity.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* For external invulnerability to be granted, now the granters have to either have the tag "InvulnerabilityGranter" on them, or be of type guard post.<br />
** This lets things that would become invulnerable do far less checking, thus being far more efficient about it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Infinite-ranged ships now have some new logic that should set them to always attacking ONLY the types of ships that they prefer to shoot (based on your selection) if those sorts of targets are available in their current system.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that are crippled no longer provide vision to the planets they are on. People were able to use crippled flagships as scouts.<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Frigates now automatically have 1/3 as much priority as targets for enemies to shoot. They should feel more beefy now.<br />
<br />
* The deprioritization based on overkill or frigates now only happens if the potential target is "not my special target," meaning not set to specifically be what the player ship shoots at, or the strongest tractor beam grappling the ship.<br />
<br />
* The frigate deprioritization now only affects player frigates. Won't help outguard or other factions or AIs or zombies.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* If a forcefield is sitting on top of a wormhole, it will block enemies from going into the wormhole even if the simulation speed is very high or coarse background processing is on.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of people for reporting, including Waladil, MatterofLight, and KDR_11k.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the targeting was deprioritizing anything that would be overkilled, and not factoring in stacks when doing so. This led to large things being prioritized more in general by ships.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception that could happen when disbanding fireteams if they did not belong to the scourge faction, thus leading to ships no longer moving.<br />
** Thanks to Histidine for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes for an exception that could happen inside GetFleetCap, particularly for mods.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug that could happen in LowerOrRaiseGameSpeedStyle if you tried to raise that kind of alternative game speed increase too many times.<br />
** Please do note that increasing the game speed in this particular way will absolutely hammer even a top-end CPU and probably lead to worse game performance despite not affecting gameplay accuracy. It's kind of meant for computers that don't exist yet, which is why we haven't had anyone run into this before now.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a probably-rare exception that could happen during tooltip generation for factories, most likely related to cross-thread updates.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a RenderShip error that could happen in some rare cases as ships were dying.<br />
** Thanks to NoMoreBlender for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of possible exceptions that could happen during loops through certain entity lists if the list changed during the loop. This is somewhat a side effect of more parallelism, but was already a thing that could happen prior to the most recent updates just because of what we already had in parallel. The game already was guarding against the most common cases where this could happen, but not another few subsets. It now guards against them all.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that could happen inside GetWormholeToOtherPlanet in entity orders.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception in the claiming code for neutral entities that could happen and then spam the log endlessly.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really rare and strange error that could sometimes happen in FramePartTimings. This happened to Chris periodically for the last year, but it had never been seen "in the wild"" until Daniexpert ran into it. We thought it was just related to the dev environment somehow, but it seems to be a cross-threading thing that can rarely happen on startup if things go just wrongly. The game itself will run terribly and spam the world if this happens, so making it gracefully recover is a good thing.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed some typos in the AIP history where it had double "from" and where it would try to say what planet you captured a planet, but always say "null" instead since we don't actually track the linked planets to things.<br />
** Thanks to Histidine for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.3 The Grand New AI ==<br />
( Released January 10th, 2020 )<br />
<br />
* The multipliers in the interface in the bottom left are once again literal (1.5x, 2x, etc, up to 5x).<br />
** Thanks to folks in Discord for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Some updates to the Octopus map generator from Tadrinth<br />
<br />
* Added some more tips, including explanations of Wave, CPA, etc.<br />
<br />
* Some ships are never eligible for repairs because they self-attrition, and now the tooltip says that so that it doesn't seem like a bug when they are not repaired.<br />
<br />
* The "investigating starfields" line on the startup sequence is now randomized with a variety of silly things, because we boot the game so often and get bored of the same text. Enjoy!<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed Forcefields being non-functional in the prior build.<br />
** Thanks to Histidine, ArnaudB and tadrinth for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a visual bug where allied forces were sometimes reported as having negative strength<br />
** Thanks to Histidine, NRSirLimbo and Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the recent internal versions where it was showing lots of the text as brown in the C-click menus because of an un-closed color tag.<br />
** Thanks to Astilious for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the achievements that you had previously completed locally were not properly able to be loaded, and thus would be awarded to you again every time you restarted the game.<br />
<br />
* The "FleetMembership was null on unit" error no longer shows, and instead the game mostly-silently just fixes this in the background.<br />
** However, it also increments CountOfNullFleetMembershipsFixed, which is now shown in the escape menu as "Null Mem Fixes" so we can see if that's skyrocketing for some reason.<br />
** This prevents a bunch of the marauders from being lost and problematic in certain savegames that may have had prior trauma or who knows exactly what the reason was.<br />
** Thanks to eppiox for reporting. This goes back to prior to the current beta versions.<br />
<br />
* Put in a fix for an exception in DoEntityFramePlanningLogic_TargetPrioritizing, such that in particular even if there is an exception it won't cause all targeting to fail forever after that. It will give us a better error message as well as not fouling up the whole system.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting. This goes back to prior to the current beta versions.<br />
<br />
* Suppressing the error "BUG: tried to go past the end of workinShipPool," which was harmless.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in some of the patrol code since more than one faction now uses that. It was particularly likely on multithreaded background factions, but could crop up even in normal play.<br />
<br />
* Warden Fleet Bases are no longer considered reinforcement points, as this caused some weirdness with them, and could result in it being MIA over time as units were stuck inside.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting something about reinforcements, which led into this discovery which was possibly a large root cause.<br />
<br />
* Previously it was possible for map generation algorithms to generate links/wormholes to themselves, which would throw off all manner of logic. Rather than leaving that to individual map authors to fix themselves, the game now checks for those and automatically repairs them, including in existing savegames.<br />
** From testing through the various map types, it looks like this was only happening with linked rings map type and its subtypes, but you never know what might have arisen in the future.<br />
** We're not really sure what negative effects this was having beyond strange visuals, but it probably affected AI decisions in terms of how strong a planet and its "neighbors" were by double-counting the planet itself, and it may have also impacted pathfinding between planets in a negative way.<br />
** Thanks to CaptainTaz, Acuzik, and Rivet for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in general in the code where it could give the wrong mark for a fleet membership if it passed in the wrong ship/structure type line. This probably caused some strangeness in the AI transforming units, it's hard to say.<br />
** This also led to an exploit where you could have a higher-mark command station of one type (military, whatever), then switch to a different command station type and keep the higher mark.<br />
** All of that is now fixed, although it won't retroactively fix any existing savegames.<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'capture flagships' objective hovertext with more colour, to improve readability<br />
<br />
==== No More Ship Pooling ====<br />
<br />
* The "BUG: Could not find a wormhole between" two planets wormhole movement command is no longer silent, but now pops up as an error in your face.<br />
** Additionally, all wormhole commands now should have a reason code for the command (so we can fix cases like this), and this shows the reson code.<br />
*** The sole purpose of the reason code is to help us find the places where wormhole paths are calculated incorrectly.<br />
*** But we can't actually REQUIRE the reason code, because older savegames will pop up with errors if we did so.<br />
<br />
* Found some major bugs in AI_GO_RAID and AI_FLEE_THRT.<br />
** It now logs different errors if trying to send ships from disparate planets along a path from a starting planet that doesn't match.<br />
<br />
* BUT, really, the true bug behind all of this is that we are holding references to GameEntity_Squad objects in various background threads, and those are not reliable in their identity.<br />
** Because of pooling, it's possible for an entity to be an AI ship for a while, then die and get reborn as a player ship. The errors we were seeing were with player ships being ordered around as if they were threatfleet.<br />
** The natural way of solving this that we had developed for the game was to use SquadWrapper, which adds a layer that prevents such mixups from happening.<br />
** The amount of code rework to make SquadWrapper happen all throughout the code is incredibly huge, however, and would be problematic for a wide variety of reasons. Even if we managed to change those thousands of lines of code required, that code would then run more slowly.<br />
** So the only solution, in the end, is... to stop pooling the GameEntity_Squad objects. All other types of objects can continue to be pooled as they are now, because nothing needs to hold onto such long-term references as with these.<br />
** This will cause a lot more weight on the memory garbage collector (GC) during heavy fighting or other circumstances when many ships are being created or killed. In the past, this was unacceptable.<br />
*** However, this is now mitigated by the fact that unity has more recently implemented a time-sliced garbage collector, and so the hits to it are far less severe.<br />
*** And even beyond that, we've implemented stacks of untis, and kill units "off the top," which means that the number of times we have to kill or create GameEntity_Squad units is a whole lot less.<br />
** There is a tradeoff here for sure, but in the end this also means we can then stop using SquadWrapper in other places, which in turn will improve some efficiency (mildly) in other areas of the code.<br />
** This does also mean that if background factions don't ever check for dead entities and prune them, they will wind up causing these entities to never be garbage collected and thus lead to an eventual memory leak. Previously it was that they would have incorrect game function, so this is preferable.<br />
<br />
* No longer using squad wrappers for the factories calculations on the fleets. This has a very tiny benefit to performance, almost nothing.<br />
<br />
=== More Performance! ===<br />
<br />
* VASTLY improved the performance of probably most savegames, but certainly certain ones, by making the following changes.<br />
** (The performance bump in the "performance concern" save from Democracy is from about 10% on Chris's machine to full speed.)<br />
** The following kinds of metal flows never even get checked anymore except for player ships: SelfConstruction, FactoryConstructionForPlayerMobileFleets, ClaimingNeutrals, RebuildingRemains.<br />
*** If any other non-player factions ever need to do these, we can deal with that, but frankly these are all player-centric things. However, tons of NPC and AI faction ships had one or more of these, and would check thorugh them in an expensive way every frame.<br />
** The following kinds of metal flows never even get checked anymore except for non-AI ships (so this means players and other factions do these): RepairingHullsOfFriendlies, RepairingShieldsOfFriendlies, RepairingEnginesOfFriendlies, AssistConstruction.<br />
*** This means that engineers in the hands of the AI are absolutely pointless in every way. And the medic gunboats in the hands of the AI lose their medic capabilities. The AI could field ridiculous numbers of meidc gunboats, which are computationally very expensive, and it also made the battlefield more chaotic.<br />
*** Given the AI doesn't actually pay metal to repair things, just not letting the AI make repairs in the (already super rare) cases where it would try to do so is a big performance gain. But things like outguard and other factions may need to help themselves or player ships, so them still checking it is good.<br />
** And then any faction can still do: BuildingDronesInternally. So no change there.<br />
<br />
* Then we took this even further, changing the efficiency of metal flow checks from millions of calculations and loops per second to mere thousands.<br />
** In other words, as Badger phrased it, O(n^2) == > O(n) ==> happy.<br />
** Essentially something that executed in exponential load as there were more units and more things to repair the units has become something that executes in close to linear time.<br />
** There are a variety of further shortcuts that we put in place that skip processing entirely for planets/factions where there's nothing possible to find, but before it wasted some CPU time checking anyway. We use slightly more RAM to be able to figure all that out, but it's maybe a MB or two.<br />
<br />
==== PFP Goes Mainstream ====<br />
<br />
* In the performance section of your personal settings, we had a setting called "Advanced: Run Massively Parallel Faction Processing"<br />
** That has been removed, and replaced with a new option called "Disable Parallel Faction Processing".<br />
** The default is essentially now that the parallel processing is on, whereas at first it was off by default.<br />
** The purpose of keeping this option at all is for people with very few cores on their machines.<br />
** Description of the new setting:<br />
*** Only matters in single-player, or the host in multiplayer. Parallel Faction Processing (PFP) lets the factions in the game be substantially smarter and faster in how they react to things, and is most notable at higher simulation speeds (5x, etc).<br />
*** On a lot of gaming-style computers, not only does the PFP function make factions and the AI smarter, but it actually can improve performance. We highly recommend you play with this on if your performance in the game is looking suitable.<br />
*** If you are on a computer with very few cores, then we provide the option here to disable PFP so that the processing is time-sliced. This makes the AI and factions notably slower to react, and the higher the simulation speed you choose, the worse it will get.<br />
*** If you play at 5x sim speed and have PFP off, we don't consider that a valid way to beat difficulty 10 AIs -- they're half-braindead, so it's not really a fair fight. With PFP on, or at 1x sim speed, you'll see the true fury of the maximum difficulties.<br />
** Huge thanks to Badger and some others for diagnosing this problem.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord AIP on death 120 -> 37.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord Phase Two AIP on death 20 -> 37, durability increased 25%, Parasite Bolt damage doubled, Fusion Bomb damage increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Both AI Overlord Phases grant 5,000 Science and 30 Hacking on defeat.<br />
<br />
* All Dire Guard Posts increase AIP by 8 on death.<br />
<br />
* Increased the Instigator time interval between each effect triggering.<br />
<br />
* Troop Accelerator effect 2x -> 1.5x.<br />
<br />
* Reduced AIs initial strikecraft a bit.<br />
<br />
* Dire Forcefield Guardian forcefield radius increased 66%.<br />
<br />
* The ai_planet_defense_multiplier values were a bit on the high side, previously.<br />
** Notes: We made mk3 the baseline for balance just because it's in the lower-middle range and something that is very common. It's the start of the real power curve, while mark 1 is incredibly underpowered and mark 2 is just somewhat underpowered. From mk3 up it's meant to be more of a gradient, but with 7s being somewhat overpowered. So really 3-6 are a good gradient is the goal.<br />
** In-game the stuff that is within 1-2 hops of a player homeworld is weakened no matter what mark it is, already, incidentally. And AI homeworlds get a major buff even above mark 7, too.<br />
** Before the marks went 0.6 on budget for mark 1, 0.8 mk2, 1 mk3, then a crazy 1.2 for mk4 (given the higher strength of those units at those planets that could be a jump from 20 to 120 strength), then 1.6 mk5, 2 mk5, 2.5 mk7<br />
** So let's try this instead: keep all of that the same, but make mk4 0.95 (so smaller budget but WAY more powerful stuff), 1.05 mk5, 1.15 mk6, and then 1.8 mk7. These are the fortresses.<br />
<br />
* Neutering of AI planets is now more effective.<br />
** The resulting percentage of "number of reinforcement points divided by max seen here" now squares itself. So 0.8 becomes 0.64, it's an exponential falloff.<br />
** But don't let it go below 0.05, or 5%, as the multiplier.<br />
** Additionally, if there are no reinforcement points left at all, don't let the AI have any reinforcement budget at all.<br />
** And if there is only ONE reinforcement point left (assuming this is the command station, but you never know), then it automatically drops to 0.05, 5%.<br />
** People would fully neuter a planet and then still see the budget just be far too high.<br />
<br />
* If there is more than twice the "enemy" strength on an AI planet ("enemy" here meaning you-the-player, your friends, or mutual enemies of you and the AI), then the AI now loses all its reinforcement budgets at that planet. But only after the first 5 seconds of the game, so this doesn't impact mapgen with things like nanocaust seeding or whatever else.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Improved some of the mapgen logic to have different logic on how it's able to seed things when quarters get tight. There are now several different modes for expansion of the seedable area, which for instance on maze map types and other low-granularity types should make it so that you still get a global command agumenter within 2 hops, even if it's not within 1.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Order of mapgen seeding was fleets, then tv, then ars, then gca, then fce.<br />
** This has been improved to fleets, gca, ars, tv, then fce.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== Planet Mark Level Assignment Rework ====<br />
* The code that determines the mark levels of planets has been significantly overhauled. The practical upshot of this is that the planetary mark levels are now more reasonably distributed. Here's how it works now.<br />
** For each Player homeworld, the game assigns low mark (marks 1-3) planets nearby. Note that if the highest ai difficulty is <= 5 has some extra low-mark planets<br />
** For each AI homeworld, the game assigns high mark (marks 5-7) planets nearby<br />
** For the remaining planets, they are randomly allocated based on percentages. The base values for those are as follows (with minor adjustments for particularly low or high ai difficulties) <br />
*** Mark 2: 5%<br />
*** Mark 3: 25%<br />
*** Mark 4: 35%<br />
*** Mark 5: 30%<br />
*** Mark 6: 5%<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.104 The Speed We Need ==<br />
(Released January 7th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Updated the test chamber so that you can better assign things like allied factions and so on.<br />
<br />
* Game Speed Types of Faster Ships, and all those above, now only have a 1.4x ship movement speed multiplier, instead of going up to 8x at the highest setting.<br />
<br />
=== Performance ===<br />
<br />
* Precalculated a lot more pieces of data that get checked very frequently, giving general minor speed boosts for things that get checked millions of times per second cumulatively.<br />
** It's the sort of thing that is really a minor improvement per check, but the volume of checks makes a big deal in a variety of circumstances.<br />
** Some of this stuff was as minor as avoiding an extra method call on the stack, virtual or otherwise, and others were as major as avoiding internal loops over systems once per frame per unit.<br />
** More such improvements could be made, but all the ones that were likely to be any notable performance hit have been fixed at this point.<br />
<br />
* The game now only goes up to the equivalent of what the old 5x was, but labels that as a new 9x as the top end.<br />
** We were finding that above these higher speeds, accuracy of battles was highly off. You'd essentially be playing against a lobotomized AI on anything above 5x, and above even 3x it really wasn't quite the same in terms of battle results.<br />
** The new scaling actually shows how it improves overall simulation performance (relative to realtime), so if you had a 50% speed of frames and you move up the sim speed it could accurately show you as having actually 250% clock speed if you max out the multiplier. You can typically get just under 500% of clock speed if your CPU is keeping up and you go up to the new 9x.<br />
** There are still things that don't work as accurately when you overdrive things to this degree, but it's not absolutely on easy mode in quite the same way anymore.<br />
*** As an example, it would typically take the Warden Fleet was taking 90-120 seconds to notice that you'd attacked a planet at the old 10x speed. So you could go capture a planet adjacent to a major warden fleet force before they would even think about joining the battle.<br />
<br />
* On tier 3 planets, guardians that patrol don't bother patrolling. It eats up CPU time (and later bandwidth) for no purpose at all, since it's invisible and doesn't impact your units either.<br />
<br />
* Renamed a bunch of methods to be a lot more clear what is sim and what is not. Turns out lots of stuff in the factions code that we thought might not be okay actually is, and it is now marked as such.<br />
** Other bits of the code we marked as "definitely breaks in multiplayer" or "not sure if breaks in multiplayer" to come back to. Multiplayer can recover from it, but it would be highly wasteful of network traffic.<br />
<br />
* Noticed a huge number of commands being sent for SetBehavior, so split that out some so that we can use the escape menu to try and figure out why that's the case.<br />
** Split all of the "set behavior" commands out into different variants so that in the escape menu we can see what is causing a bunch of them if there are a bunch being sent.<br />
** Then used that to fix a general performance regression in the betas that was sending a ton of SetBehavior_FromFaction_ITractoredShips for ships that were not relevant for that. This was the biggest part of the performance regression seen by Democracy, but it was also in all campaigns.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a number of leaks of gamecommands out of their pools. This isn't strictly a memory leak, but it acts vaguely similarly and doesn't help with garbage collection at any rate.<br />
** Essentially if "you" (the programmer or modder) queue a gamecommand, it will automatically go back in the pool after you use it. However, if you decide not to queue it even after pulling it out of the pool (it turns out there are no relevant entities, etc), then you have to call ReturnToPool() on it. In a few cases these were just being set to null instead, which doesn't help much.<br />
** In some other cases here, we didn't really reduce the turnover of the gamecommands, but we did make improvements to places where it might send a largely-pointless gamecommand saying "send all these ships through this wormhole path" and the list of ships turned out to be empty, etc. This sort of thing helps with performance even in single player far more than one might expect.<br />
** There wasn't anything truly egregious, but it was enough to be a drain. There are probably more such things, of lower incidence. Watching the escape menu numbers while unpaused gives clues as to where problems might be.<br />
<br />
* The way that metal flows are calculated are now literally an order of magnitude more efficient in terms of how many things they allocate and why. They now lazy-allocate things when they really have to, and otherwise just skip creating flow objects if there's nothing to do.<br />
** This was another major component of Democracy's slowdown, and this is extremely longstanding in the game in general (as old as the game itself), but it's not something that fully fixes the particular performance hole we were chasing. At least not fully.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* V-Wing range 4,200 -> 3,200.<br />
<br />
* Fusion Bomber range 4,000 -> 4,200.<br />
<br />
* Parasite range 3,200 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboat tachyon range 1,700 -> 3,200.<br />
<br />
* Ranger tachyon range 3,200 -> 5,000.<br />
** Thanks to tadrinth for some notes on the above units.<br />
<br />
* Consolidated all the Auto Bomb variants into a lower cap style of ship, with health and damage increased to compensate.<br />
** They should be more or less very similar, just with less performance strain from units constantly dying then being rebuilt.<br />
** Cluster Bombs only spawn 3 Mini Bombs now instead of 5, but their damage is increased to compensate, beyond what was already done above.<br />
<br />
* Consolidated the Railpod into the same style.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard Hydras now spawn 3 heads on death instead of 5, stats bumped to compensate.<br />
<br />
* Stingray Hydras now spawn 2 heads on death instead of 3.<br />
<br />
* Automated Construction Bots now spawn only 3 Mini versions, stats bumped up to compensate.<br />
<br />
* Slight reduction to most Frigate metal and energy costs.<br />
** Going slow with this, as increasing energy cost later if it's overdone can cause brownouts in existing saves.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.103 Tooltip Sweet Brevity ==<br />
(Released January 6th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Wave tooltips now correctly show 'adaptive' or 'random' where appropriate, instead of always telling you the real AI type<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* The 'remove unlock variance' option now applies to fleets you can capture<br />
** Thanks to CyberKun for reporting<br />
<br />
* The hack options for ARS grant ship line now correctly report how many ships would be granted, as does C-Clicking on the ARS<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting<br />
<br />
* Maps now default to having 7 FCEs instead of 11 (there were just too many before)<br />
<br />
=== Tooltips Three Modes of Verbosity ===<br />
<br />
* TLDR of the below: There are now three levels of detail on the planet and ship tooltips: brief, medium, and full.<br />
** The default is now brief, which is new for both planets and ships, and is WAY smaller. Just the real basics, easier to understand.<br />
*** It's probably worth keeping this as the default even if you like more detail, just because these specific bits are the really core facts about a given ship. We may pare a few bits down even more. BUT if you prefer the old style of tooltips...<br />
** Medium is what the old "brief" used to be, and it has very slightly less detail than before. In the main it's better while not being much less detailed than before. A lot of the contrast of this with the other view is something that highlights the second tier of details better than ever, which is kind of cool.<br />
*** If you want this to be your new default, just turn on a setting and it will be. You can't shift "down" to brief if you do that, though.<br />
** Full is what it always has been, tons of information. You now have to hold ctrl and alt to see it, while ctrl OR alt will give you the medium view.<br />
*** You can also see full as your default, as you always could, if you prefer. However you can no longer go "down" to medium or the new brief from the full view if it's your default.<br />
<br />
* Old hotkey being removed: Toggle Ship And Planet Tooltip Detail Mode<br />
** Description: By default, the amount of information about ships and planets is abbreviated. Hold this key to see the full thing.<br />
** In the tooltips section of the settings menu, you can switch it so that the default is showing the full text, in which case holding this causes the abbreviation.<br />
<br />
* New hotkeys added: Increase Ship And Planet Tooltip Detail (Key 1) and (Key 2)<br />
** Description of both: By default, the amount of information about ships and planets is heavily abbreviated. Hold this key alone to see the medium detail view. Hold this AND the other 'increase detail' key to see the max detail.<br />
** In the tooltips section of the settings menu, you can adjust the default up to show medium or high detail. In those cases, there's no way to see the abbreviated versions.<br />
<br />
* Old game setting: Show Ship And Planet Detail Mode By Default<br />
** Renamed to Show Ship And Planet Complete Detail By Default<br />
** New description: Normally ships and planets show a very condensed amount of information about themselves in their tooltips. However, you can hold a key (shown at the bottom of those tooltips) to make them show a little more info or a whole lot more info. If you prefer to see the complete info by default, then you can enable this option.<br />
<br />
* New game setting: Show Ship And Planet Medium Detail By Default<br />
** Normally ships and planets show a very condensed amount of information about themselves in their tooltips. However, you can hold a key (shown at the bottom of those tooltips) to make them show a little more info or a whole lot more info. If you prefer to see the medium level of info by default, then you can enable this option.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Spider reload time 4s -> 3s, shots per salvo 1 -> 3, engine stun per shot 12 -> 6, damage 96 -> 45.<br />
** Tarantula is same.<br />
<br />
* Terrier reload time 4s -> 3s, shots per salvo 1 -> 3, engine stun per shot 16 -> 8, damage 51 -> 30, speed 1,000 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
* Paralyser reload time 9s -> 4s, damage 135 -> 68, shots per salvo 1 -> 2, paralysis per shot 4 -> 2.<br />
<br />
* Railpods use the same self damage mechanism as Minefields, now self destruct in 2 shots regardless of other factors. Reload time 4s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.102 Fireteam Refinements ==<br />
(Released January 3rd, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Add a "Select all non-flagship military on planet" selection option<br />
** Suggested by Iocaine<br />
<br />
* Some minor improvements to fireteam based factions<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.101 Ship Cap Reversions ==<br />
(Released January 2nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Fifteen new achievements have been added, to account for the new adaptive AI types. That brings us up to 154 achievements in total!<br />
* Added "Remove Unlock Variance in Capturables" option. This option removes the random ranges ships and turrets can be found with, fixing it at a constant average. Suggested by Flypaste, Fluffiest, CyberKun and many others on Discord. Thanks donblas.<br />
<br />
=== Fireteam and Minor Faction changes ===<br />
<br />
* Consolidate the Hunter Fleet and Marauder fireteam logic. This should make it quite easy to add fireteam logic to new minor factions, and allow for improved intelligence of fireteams going forward<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where marauder fireteams weren't always detecting that they had won a battle<br />
<br />
* Allied Marauders are back to killing command stations by default, but with a setting to disable it. This is a no-longer-basically-cheating version of "minor factions don't cause AIP increases". Allied Marauders always kill warp gates though. If this works then I'm going to deprecate "minor factions don't cause AIP increase" since that's too cheaty for my tastes<br />
<br />
=== Balance ===<br />
<br />
* In the prior release there was a thing with "growth versus stagnant" multipliers. Those are gone now, reverted to how they were before.<br />
<br />
* Also in the prior release, there were a lot of things that didn't get cap increases anymore, but now they work like strikecraft (and thus like they always did, although with some extra clarity because the cap scaling is still iterative as noted last release).<br />
** Frigates are unaffected by all this, as their scaling was essentially just evened out and they were still "growth style" units.<br />
<br />
* uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant has been removed, as the mechanic it was working with is now gone.<br />
<br />
* AI Great Turret health 3x instead of 5x. Tesla isn't mostly in hull anymore.<br />
<br />
* Tesla Turret bit more expensive for the AI too.<br />
<br />
* Put in some changes to how strikecraft reinforcements are placed, which makes them evenly fill all the available guard posts as much as they can. Previously the logic was really strange and also really slow, so now mapgen is a bit faster yet again (other changes in the prior build also made it faster).<br />
** So there should no longer be empty guard posts at the start of the game where you run into them and that's strange.<br />
<br />
* Also put in a change that allows more than 800 ships of a category (strikecraft, turrets, etc) to be reinforced at a planet at a time if need be, since that is a thing that can happen with strikecraft. It now allows for up to 8000.<br />
<br />
* Magnifiers and Troop Accelerators are now set to appear on the galaxy map on planets they are at, like most other "devious devices" the AI has.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes And Similar ===<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to mod out or deprecate ship lines in starting fleets or otherwise by setting their max cap to 0, which then takes them out completely.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for requesting this ability.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where display_name was being incorrectly blanked out on partial records when reading xml.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The Adaptive AI types now actually show their names as being easier, harder, moderate, brutal, full, etc, rather than just all showing "adaptive" in the interface. Now you can see what you're getting into!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mysterious bug where sometimes guard posts would not be able to seed during a reconquest seeding. This may have been exclusively related to the adaptive AI type, it's hard to be sure. But at any rate, when it runs into a lack of data on what kinds of guard posts to use, it now chooses what to use properly so that it has something. <br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the actual Random AI type was being shown, instead of just "random"<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where draw_in_galaxy_view being true was not enough to make structures or ships properly show up in the galaxy map view.<br />
** This makes it so that things like black hole machines and so on are visible on the galaxy map for the first time. And ion cannons and mass drivers, etc.<br />
<br />
* If a quick start includes a faction that is not present in the installation of a player later trying to load the quickstart (mods, expansions, etc), it now blanks out the offending faction and continues as normal with all the other factions. Anyone who DOES have that faction will see it work as expected, while anyone else will just see it missing but all else well, which is really the best of both worlds.<br />
** This was affecting a lot of our quick starts in the prior beta build.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.1 So Much Stuff We Can't Even, But More Is Still Coming ==<br />
(Released January 1st, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Add the "Extreme" category of Quickstarts, with 2 default, 1 nearly default, and 2 bonus scenarios.<br />
** Thanks to CyberKun for suggesting the category.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers will now be automatically targeted by units again, but are set to a low priority.<br />
** They still seem to like shooting these first however, if they happen to be in the way.<br />
** This lets factions destroy these again rather than being shot to bits, ignoring them.<br />
** Feedback is appreciated - this is a fairly opinion heavy thing.<br />
*** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Updated the "Various Weapons" fleet name styling with DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY's latest changes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Random Any ai type could pick 'random easier'<br />
<br />
* The Tech History menu (viewable by clicking the Science icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen) now shows the total science you've spent.<br />
<br />
* The "Show Entity Strength When Hovering" tooltip has been removed, as we are now going to do this by default. It was strange not showing it.<br />
** Ships now say if they are showing their own strength or the strength of themselves as a stack when you hover over them.<br />
<br />
* Targeting behavior of ships that are freely moving around (pursuit mode, whether of the player or other factions) are now vastly smarter in how they deal with non-combatants in general (things without guns but that need to die).<br />
** They'll still shoot at them just as frequently as ever IN PASSING, if there's nothing else to shoot at or that thing is the most important priority to shoot at based on the various metrics. But they no longer will specifically pursue those sorts of things with an excess weight just because they happen to be close.<br />
** If there are non-combatants with a high priority, then ships should still beeline for those just as well as ever, it's worth noting. And if they're not in pursuit mode, then nothing is different at all.<br />
** The net effect of this is that ships will generally approach and destroy dangerous things like great-turrets before they start messing about with an unarmed guard post or a gravity generator or whatever else. Survivability goes way up.<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust construction centers and Marauder Outposts now warp in over time (a short time interval, like 30 seconds to a minute) rather than warping in instantly. This gives their enemies a bigger window to counter attack in.<br />
<br />
* The Tech Menu now tells you a very approximate strength increase for both defenses and ships after upgrading.<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to hack Global Command Augmenters to re-roll provided turrets. (Thanks donblas)<br />
<br />
=== Optional Advanced: Massively Parallel Faction Processing ===<br />
<br />
* New setting in the personal settings: "Advanced: Run Massively Parallel Faction Processing"<br />
** Only matters on the host in multiplayer. This lets the factions in the game be substantially smarter and faster in how they react to things, and is most notable at higher simulation speeds (10x, etc).<br />
** But all this may come at a cost that your CPU can't handle; we're still testing that and would love feedback on the difference you see in simulation speed (the percent under the game speed multiplier) if you turn this on and off.<br />
** You will have a much fiercer foe at 10x speed with this on, versus an almost braindead one without it. At regular speed it won't matter much between one or the other.<br />
** We're hoping to build toward this being the default for everyone, but for now we don't want to inflict slower framerates on everyone just so that 10x speed runs smarter. One step at a time.<br />
** Right now this is off by default, and needs a lot of testing, but amazingly with the current design it did not slow down at all in a relatively-small-number-of-factions game on Chris's i7-6700 HQ. Much more data is needed.<br />
<br />
* You may experience some strange and awful bugs by enabling this, at least at first, as the factions have never been parallel in quite this way before. This may tank performance or cause lots of strange errors, and in most cases we can find and fix them if you send us the errors or the savegame with the bad performance. In most cases it would be two threads from different factions trying to use the same list or other collection. To report: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/<br />
** Thank you!<br />
<br />
=== Fireteams ===<br />
<br />
* Fireteams are a concept developed by Badger to allow non-player factions to flexibly coordinate a variety of simultaneous actions. It's the smartest strategic AI mechanism in either AIWC or AIW2 (in theory at least). Fireteams were developed to power the Scourge, a feature for the first DLC, but we can use the same basic logic for other minor factions to give those factions a nice intelligence boost. We are backporting R&D done for an expansion-only feature to the base game because the base game isn't hard enough yet. Mwahahaha. <br />
* Allied ships using fireteams (just marauder raiders for now) will show you what that fireteam is planning on doing in the verbose hovertext, to make coordinating between you and your allies more possible.<br />
** The simplest description for how Fireteams work is like this. All units for a given minor faction are assigned to small fireteams of 1-4 strength, so there will be lots of fireteams. Each fireteam determines its own objectives independently. If multiple fireteams have the same objective then they will coordinate their attacks.<br />
** This is currently available for the Hunter Fleet (via the 'Assassin' type in the Game Lobby) or the Marauders (via choosing "Intelligence: Tactician" in the game lobby).<br />
*** The Fireteam implementation for Marauders and Hunter Fleets is brand new, so I expect some teething pains and would love feedback (with save games)<br />
<br />
=== All-New "Adaptive" AI Type ===<br />
<br />
* Add in a new Adaptive AI type, which alternates between available types every so often. They work similarly to Random, in that there is "Adaptive Easier", "Adaptive Brutal", "Adaptive Any", and so on.<br />
** Change interval is in XML, and is once per hour. It won't change any existing units, but reinforcements/wave composition and so on will change. <br />
** There are currently no Achievements for these AI types<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Orbital Mass Driver reload time 9s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Hack Ion Cannon and Mass Driver now takes 2 seconds, rather than 15.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers that the player either hacked or bought now die to remains.<br />
<br />
* Replaced Military Command Stations engine stun with paralysis.<br />
** Engine Stun on this thing could be fairly exploitable, allowing it to hold off incredible amounts of enemy strength.<br />
** However, that was only possible if the enemy could be slowed at all. If they couldn't, it tended to fall relatively easily.<br />
** Swapping it to paralysis should let it not be as strong in the old ideal case, but also improves it in the worst possible case.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian damage 4,000 -> 8,000, shots per salvo 6 -> 3.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of Tesla weapons very slightly (10% ish?) and bumped up the splash size by 15% ish.<br />
** What this means is they effectively act more or less the same, except will not waste their initial shots on the first singular ship to come into range, and will tend to hit more beyond.<br />
** This was split between both the range and splash size to avoid making the visual effect too much larger. Shouldn't have much impact on gameplay, however.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post now has the fortified effect on it.<br />
<br />
* Hydra heads and the like cost no energy.<br />
** This was the cause of mysterious brownouts.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Reworked the way that wave compositions are filled to be more efficient and ensure that absolutely as much of the budget is spent of a wave as possible.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for discovering that this was not happening.<br />
<br />
* In the normal non-stealth-planet themes, the stealth guard posts are now 1/50th as likely to appear as before. There were vastly too many of these showing up in the galaxy prior to now.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guardian damage 2,500 -> 5,000, now has the same durability as the other Dires.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range slightly of MLRS, Concussion and Nucleophilic Guard Posts.<br />
** The main contributors to the "small world problem".<br />
<br />
* Increased the cost of normal Guardians by 50%.<br />
** This is in preparation of the next update, in which these'll be getting buffs. It's done in two stages to avoid current saves suddenly getting much harder.<br />
** With this, old games will be similar, and new ones will have the correct Guardian count for when the buffs hit. So for a time, Guardians'll be a bit easier.<br />
** This is part of making Guardians scarier individually, as right now they can feel a bit flimsy and kind of just too close to Strikecraft overall.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so this is a kind of funny story... cough.<br />
** Essentially, various ships and turrets and whatever have modifiers to kill other specific types of ships or structures with certain characteristics, right?<br />
** So something is really good at killing structures in general, or high-energy-usage stuff, or items with thin hulls or whatever else. Easy enough.<br />
** The problem was, we had these ships getting BETTER at killing those same things at higher marks, while also getting a general damage buff.<br />
** Puffin's example, as he was the one to realize this:<br />
*** MK1 Pike Corvette does 45 damage, 3x to high armour, 2x to high hull remaining, for...270 damage.<br />
*** MK6 is 189 damage, 5.5x to high armour, 3.5x to high hull remaining, for...3,638.<br />
** As he put it, "I feel like I know where the "late game is easier than early" problem is."<br />
** We may need to rebalance some of these units to generally have higher specialized damage or higher damage in general, BUT, we've now removed the increase in damage multipliers from the following categories of stuff:<br />
*** Strikecraft (yours and enemy of course), Turrets (ditto), Frigates (mostly yours), Guardians (mostly enemy), and Guard Posts (mostly enemy).<br />
** We've LEFT this monstrosity of multiplication on a few specific things:<br />
*** The Rorqual Hegira Ark (yours), AI Fortresses (enemies), and any battlestations (yours) with weapons.<br />
*** This may be something we want to give to a few other special units of the AI or you, we'll see, but it would be specifically for Very Special Units.<br />
<br />
* Metabolizing Gangsaw armour 60 -> 90, reduced count found in ARS and Fleets.<br />
<br />
* Consumer Starting Fleet now uses normal Gangsaws instead of the Vicious variant.<br />
<br />
* All normal Turrets (i.e not Plasma or Beam) have armour of 80mm.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now uses Vanguard Hydras instead of the normal one. Also has 25 instead of 20. <br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian speed 600 -> 1,000.<br />
<br />
* The "singular freaky surprises" of AIs now will only appear on planets between marks 2 and up, rather than every planet owned by the AI. No surprises TOO early in the game, then, with golemite and similar.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* GCAs now have a higher chance of having an extra "OtherDefense" item at the end.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for a suggestion in this area.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cost a bit of Weaken Turret and Weaken Guard Post hacks.<br />
<br />
==== Ship Cap Calculation Refinements ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the caps for ships are calculated is now vastly different, and a bit more expensive on the CPU (but worth it).<br />
** Essentially before it was using a floating point number to get a result, and then rounding up. So very often this would lead to things not actually increasing in a manner that you'd expect, or frigate counts not increasing at all for several marks before finally increasing.<br />
** Now it applies each multiplier sequentially to the original number, and then rounds up each time in between, so you always get the expected result.<br />
** This means that, for example, the mark 3 frigates of things with cap 1 now have a cap 3 instead of 2. The end result is usually pretty much the same at mark 6 and 7, or close, but the intervening marks are now more accurate and we shouldn't have people with lots of confusion on their caps not increasing like they would expect.<br />
<br />
* There are now three different ship cap growth styles, rather than one:<br />
** Stikecraft (works about the same as it always has, although will give you slightly more now, working as expected because of iterative math).<br />
*** This was already pretty much working fine.<br />
** Frigates (much lower growth rate than before, but ends up in a similar place numbers-wise, however gives you what you'd expect rather than something surprising now).<br />
*** Numerically this was balanced fine, but people couldn't understand why it jumped around strangely because of rounding with fractions.<br />
** Everything else (does... not gain cap by leveling up).<br />
*** Wait, wut? Hold on a moment, though: one of the most annoying things ever is having to go back and put out more mines or turrets later on on all your planets because you just increased your caps. That still will happen from GCAs, but it's at least less common because general techs won't cause this to happen.<br />
*** Besides which, performance can be a real pain with turrets if there are just excessive numbers of those. How about we increase the strength without that? Same result, but game runs better and also less micro for you. For more about that, see below.<br />
<br />
* On the mark levels, rather than just having a multiplier for hull/shield points and attack, it now has a "growth" one and a "stagnant" one.<br />
** "Growth" are the same numbers as before, and apply to frigates and strikecraft. Aka nothing changes as these have both a power/hull increase AND a ship cap increase as they go up.<br />
** "Stagnant" are used for ships that used to get a mark level bonus to ship cap, but no longer do. So to keep them equal in power while smaller in number, it includes their hull or attack power multiplier multiplied by what their old ship cap multiplier would have been.<br />
*** The end power on these is absolutely identical to what it used to be, but it's for turrets and similar where they are now not something you need to go in and place extra every time you upgrade a tech that improves turrets. See the above notes.<br />
*** This obviously does also apply to things like tractor beam arrays and minefields and so forth, and given that AIs don't use the human-style caps for those that does mean that those are just plain stronger now on AI planets when they are (rarely) used.<br />
**** If we want to change that, we can make AI versions with the uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant flag from below, but that doesn't seem super important for anything but turrets.<br />
<br />
* Added a new uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant flag which, when set to true, causes something that would normally grow attack bonuses and hull bonuses per mark level as if unit cap was stagnant (thus larger bonuses) and change it to grow as if it had an increasing cap (thus smaller bonuses).<br />
** This is used for the Great-Turrets so that they don't get crazy stronger at higher mark levels, since the AI doesn't use normal human-style caps anyway.<br />
<br />
* Any fleet leaders (golems, arks, battlestations, citadels, etc) now act as though uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant is true. Thus they'll scale as they always have. Same with guardians, guard posts, command stations, king units, and drones. Also LargeShips and SmallShips that are used by third party facions.<br />
<br />
* All of the AI structures now explicitly have uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant on them to avoid them getting accidental crazy buffs of any sorts. This mainly benefits AI Fortresses and the like, which could have been very scary otherwise.<br />
<br />
* Fleet Capacity Extenders now only work for strikecraft, as their increasing a frigate could be absolutely crazy in terms of the impact to both your power (in a good way) and your economy (in a bad way).<br />
<br />
* Stationary planet-bound forcefields, tractor beam sources, gravity sources, and tachyon sources now upgrade in the same way that frigates do (aka they behave more or less like they always have, but with slightly more clarity -- they get more unit cap as they go, and the lower "growth" style stats increases instead of the higher "stagnant" ones).<br />
** People do love having more forcefields, that's for sure, and the ability to field more tractors and so forth are similarly not something we want to condense down like we would turrets.<br />
<br />
* Minefields now have their own special_entity_type and also a rollup for easy iteration over them. Some clever AI routines may need that sometime in the future.<br />
** Additionally, minefields now continue to get a larger ship cap at the strikecraft-style rate of addition, and regular growth stats. Got to have enough for coverage, of course!<br />
<br />
==== AI Great-Turrets ====<br />
<br />
* All of the AI turrets were already different from the player turrets in that they generally have half the range of the player counterparts. Now we're taking it even further.<br />
** Mainly because turrets can't stack, and thus will grind the game to a halt if the AI builds full caps of them at the sort of strength and costs that we had them at previously, we've condensed them to being essentially like stacks-in-one right from the start.<br />
** All of the AI turrets are called Great-Turrets instead of just turrets, and they have 5x the cost and firepower and health that the player versions do (while still having half the range).<br />
** This makes them truly terrifying even in small numbers, but it's something that is actually slightly in your favor compared to what it was when they were separate since they had more shots and thus were less likely to overkill your ships (just your framerate).<br />
** This shouldn't really affect existing games too much, because the AIs barely used turrets before -- mostly -- at least compared to what they do now.<br />
<br />
* For any games older than 1.026, it will now remove 4/5ths of the turrets from AI planets, since AI turrets are now a lot stronger and more condensed being great-turrets.<br />
<br />
==== Attack Ranges And The Small World Problem ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new galaxy option to the balance section: "All Ship Attack Ranges"<br />
** Lets you adjust the effective range of all of the ships in the galaxy -- yours and enemies. Does not affect 'infinite' sniper ranges, naturally. Also does impact tractor beams. The default is 0.8x in order to avoid the 'small world' problem where all the enemies are fighting you at once on a planet.<br />
** This does make it so that you need to be slightly more strategic with placements of your own turrets, of course. Your turrets naturally have 2x the range of their AI great-turret counterparts, though.<br />
** If you want to crank this as low as 0.1x (bad idea) you can, or you can crank it all the way up to 1.3x (also probably not the best thing).<br />
** Chris notes: This is a softer nerf than we originally thought of, just to play it safe for now. But if people are interested in trying smaller values, you now can.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Lance weapon of all variants (plus Laser Pulse weapon) 12,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Triple Lance variant damage 4,000 -> 1,800, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Other variants Lance damage 6,000 -> 2,650, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse damage 4,500 -> 3,500.<br />
<br />
==== AI Reinforcement Budget Caps And So Much More ====<br />
<br />
* The five "balance_initial_ai_defenses" xml entries in our central constants have been completely removed, and equivalents are now on the actual AI types instead.<br />
** This lets us completely balance the AI defenses around AI types if we ever want to tune that.<br />
** These are also per-reinforcement-point now, rather than per-planet, and they are also directly in AI cost units rather than "caps" which have to be converted to those units by a mysterious multiplier.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that we calculate what the defensive budget cap at a planet is has been rewritten from scratch. It was giving absurdly high numbers previously, such as 443 strength for the AI home planet's cap at the START of a game. That was just way too much for the start to be sitting at, cap-wise.<br />
** Now things are balanced completely around the number of reinforcement points, like the original game was, so if you go in and neuter a planet it will absolutely cripple their ability to reinforce. More power to you, the player! Yay!<br />
** The overall caps are also far lower than they ever were in the past, this is worth stressing before you read the next two bits.<br />
** But there remains a very tiny (laughably small, really) percentage bonus that the AI gets as the AIP rises. Eh.<br />
** There's also a NEW fairly small percentage bonus based on time spent in the campaign. The way it works out is a 48% increase in budget after TEN HOURS of playing at difficulty TEN. After 10 hours at difficulty 7, it's a much more modest 12% increase. This gives you some time pressure, but it's really nothing major and is still less than the AI could theoretically start out with prior to now. And with your new ability to absolutely cripple the AI by neutering guard posts at no AIP cost... we may need to make some of these multipliers higher, who knows. But probably now, we mainly have other plans.<br />
<br />
* Special Forces Ninja hideouts no longer count as reinforcement points. That was old AIWC-style thinking. Now it's just guard posts and the command station itself.<br />
<br />
* We've been experimentally tuning the numbers a bunch on these, too.<br />
<br />
* planet_dire_guardian_count has been changed to planet_dire_guardian_percentage.<br />
** This lets us be a little more flexible with the marks of planets getting percentages of dire guardians rather than explicit numbers,<br />
** The AI homeworlds are always full-dire, still.<br />
<br />
* The way that guardians are spawned on initial planet creation, and/or on reconquest, is now completely different and respects the budgets and budget caps.<br />
** Previously it was adding guardians kinda-sorta twice, and thus often making the really high-mark planets absurdly overpowered in general but in particular on AI types like Royal.<br />
** Not only was this logic doing the above, but it also was interpreting the budget caps entirely incorrectly, thus more or less ignoring them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section: Write AI Budget Info In Planet Tooltips<br />
** If something seems off with the planet strengths and reinforcements, then this is a way to see what is going on under the hood.<br />
<br />
* Improved the performance of how the game calculates tachyon, tractor, and gravity sources in the rollups. It's now substantially more precalculated than before, no longer having to iterate over any systems.<br />
** There's a small benefit to the strength counting code in this, too.<br />
** And actually, map generation in general seems notably faster with these changes in, despite the below change.<br />
<br />
* The GetAIToPurchaseCostPresentForBudgetType() method is now far slower, but much more accurate (not lumping strikecraft and guardians together, for instance) and always up to the instant accurrate (not having to wait for the strength counting code to run).<br />
** This should solve several issues with the budgets on reinforcements being ignored or improperly overly strict, as the case may be.<br />
<br />
* Found a place where it was seeding extra guardians per guard post, and took that out.<br />
<br />
* During reconquest seeding, the AI no longer gets a bunch of guardians to go with every guard post.<br />
** Guard posts in general are not expected to be tied to guardians, and guardians will eventually be vastly more powerful than they are now.<br />
** This was causing some planets, like AI homeworlds, to get VASTLY more guardians than they should, blowing way past their budget for guardians.<br />
<br />
* The way that AI reinforcement budgets are calculated is no longer based around the number of reinforcement points, but instead just a flat amount for the planet, which gets reduced (severely) by any lost reinforcement points.<br />
** Thus no matter how many reinforcement points there are, you don't have to suddenly worry about super high budgets on the AI planet, or strange spikes in budgets just because there are more guard posts.<br />
** Actually what this means, though, is two things: firstly, each reinforcement point is weaker on a planet with many of them (due to same number of units spread around more); but secondly, destroying a reinforcement point on a planet with fewer of them will do more (due to it reducing the cap of the planet by a larger percentage).<br />
<br />
* There is a new ignore_guardian_restrictions_in_waves that we use on the royal AI type, which lets it use its full capacity in sending waves of guardians at you.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for turrets and non-turret defenses, those will no longer increase based on the mark level of the planet or the fact that the planet is an AI homeworld.<br />
** This keeps them from having way too many of these things on high levels and next to nothing on lower ones.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for guardians, it's no longer doubled for the AI homeworlds.<br />
** This keeps THOSE from becoming so absurdly high.<br />
<br />
* There is a new multiplier_for_starting_guardian_budget_on_reconquest on AI types which makes it so that there CAN be some guardians added back onto planets, per-AI-type, during a reconquest of that planet.<br />
** For most AIs this will just be 0.015, which is an eighth of an eighth (the significance of that will be relevant in a bit).<br />
** This lets the AIs MAYBE get some of their guardians back right as they capture a planet, partialiarly moreso later in the campaign, but often it will be too paltry for them to get anything.<br />
** For the Royal AI, it is set to 0.001 since it has such a higher budget of guardians in general. This may mean they practically get nothing, ever, in those circumstances; but better than too much and we can always tune later.<br />
<br />
* There are then other new multipliers on AI types: multiplier_for_game_starting_guardians_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_turrets_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_non_turret_defenses_from_total_budget, and multiplier_for_game_starting_strikecraft_from_total_budget.<br />
** These all affect how much of the AI's budget for each planet they start with when the game is at the very zeroth second still in mapgen.<br />
** In the past, we always gave -- for some reason -- fully HALF of the budget cap to each planet, which did not give much room for them to expand and get really huge if you ignore them for too long. ;) Most any planet could do would be to double in power, aside from things like the Hunter or other third parties coming in and making it temporarily stronger.<br />
** Now we've got this set to 0.125, which is an eighth of the full budget or a quarter of what the old starting strength was. This lets us multiply the final budget by 4x to still have the same starting strength (and we have done that), but now the starting strength can get 8x stronger if you leave them alone for THAT long. And that's before you get into the (very small, as noted in prior notes) increases based on time elapsed and AIP. <br />
** So the AI has more growth potential, BUT this is measured against the fact that your neutering of them is incredibly powerful.<br />
*** If they had 4 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/5th of whatever its max would have been.<br />
*** If they had 10 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/11th of whatever its max would have been. Wowzers.<br />
*** In both cases this keeps you from neutering things to be TOO absolutely weak, but also gives an incentive for popping guard posts when you can that are not related to your main objectives but might threaten you in the future. Aka a lot like the first game.<br />
<br />
* Added the fields always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point and always_is_ai_non_turret_defense_spawn_point, both bools, to game entities (ships only).<br />
** This lets us override the logic that says "only primary keys of modulus 6 get turrets around them" and things of that nature.<br />
** This is now used for the AI overlord, to always let it be surrounded by both types of things (phase 1 only).<br />
** Note that these fields only work for ships that are already a spawn point (mainly guard posts and command stations).<br />
<br />
* The Turtle AI type now has 4x the turret budget of other AI types.<br />
** Fortress Baron has 3x the turret budget.<br />
** Peacemaker has 2x the turret budget.<br />
** These heavier-turret variants are certainly interesting to run into and give the game a very different feel. These are the more defensive-oriented AIs, after all.<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_reinforcement_location bool field. This lets us make things other than command stations and guard posts into reinforcement points.<br />
** Now that reinforcement points don't actually cause the AI to get more budget, but rather just have it spread out more, it's far more interesting to have this.<br />
** Plus it makes it so you can do even harder neutering to certain planets, since the total number of reinforcement points will be higher by definition, which is good for you as a player.<br />
** But it also makes it so that isolated units with this flag on it will now be more protected than before, possibly with turrets around them, which is in itself quite interesting.<br />
** BUT that still means that forces are being spread more thin around the planet, potentially, so there are pros and cons to you strategically in general with this.<br />
** AI structures that thus now act as reinforcement points:<br />
*** Warden Fleet Base (again -- back to the same as the prior version that was last public anyway).<br />
*** Data Center<br />
*** Fortified Data Center<br />
*** Major Data Center<br />
*** Plasma Eye<br />
*** Ion Eye<br />
*** Troop Accelerator<br />
*** AI Fortress<br />
*** Raid Engine<br />
*** Alarm Post<br />
*** Magnifier<br />
*** Instigator Base<br />
*** Astro Train Depot<br />
*** Risk Analyzer<br />
*** All of those new ones above also now have always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point="true" on them. Yet more texture in the planets, as well as giving them more inherent defenses.<br />
<br />
* Guardians, as well as anything marked as a reinforcement location, can no longer be transported or put inside a guard post.<br />
** Older savegames may have some of them in there.<br />
** This causes FAR more guardians to be out and patrolling around now than were before. Some of them were just sitting inside guard posts in a very boring fashion before, rather than doing their patrol thing from what we can tell.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for planets on the galaxy map now show you how many reinforcement points the AI has there out of how many total there have ever been there if it's an AI planet.<br />
<br />
* Added modulus_for_turrets_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 6) and modulus_for_non_turret_defenses_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 3) as fields to the AI type. Previously these values were hardcoded in, but now they can be changed for various AI types. This will make turrets appear around more structures for those AI types, or non-turret-defenses do the same.<br />
** Turtle now uses 1 and 2 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Fortress Baron now uses 2 and 3 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Peace Maker now uses 2 and 3 instead of 3 and 3.<br />
** This makes it so that their turrets are more spread out on their planets rather than being clumped in super-crazy places on just some locations.<br />
<br />
* Added a variety of new levers that determine now how budgets are distributed intra faction or inter faction, nor what the caps or starting amounts are... but instead affect how bonuses (or penalties) work to various AI types. These can be regular floating point numbers with three decimal points of precision (0.001)<br />
** multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement, multiplier_for_budget_wave, multiplier_for_budget_cpa, multiplier_for_budget_warden_fleet, multiplier_for_budget_reconquest, multiplier_for_budget_hunter_fleet.<br />
** These don't have any effect on other parts of these AIs -- there are other mechanisms for choosing how much budget goes where, but this lets us set general scales on a per-AI basis on certain types of budget. This is pretty importance for us to be able to balance things reasonably so that there are things like appropriate growth rates of AI budget without you feeling like it starts out with too much, or has too low of a final cap, etc.<br />
** Most of these are just set to 1 for now, but multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 2 for almost all AIs. multiplier_for_budget_wave is 2.2 for the Vicious Raider, and multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 4 on the Turtle.<br />
** We'll undoubtably balance things more using this in the future, but for now this is a nice new lever for us to be able to use to give AIs their own unique characters as well as simply making them not have anemic defenses 30 minutes in even if their defenses 1 second in are smaller now.<br />
<br />
* The way that the AI tries to spend its funds on reinforcements DURING gameplay is absolutely reworked from scratch. <br />
** It was doing a strange thing where it would kind of roll a die and depending on the results try to reinforce certain things with more or less priority, and this often led to some funky results. Potentially it resulted in under-spending at times, and sometimes it may have meant a larger portion of the budget went to non-turret defenses than was at all warranted. And sometimes there were no turrets being put in at all. The reasoning was sound, really, but it was old and didn't fit with the modern economy of the AIs in the game.<br />
** Now it instead goes through a complicated set of calculations of percentages of what goes where, within random tolerances, dividing out budgets in a certain priority between strikecraft, turrets, non-turret defenses (NTDs), and guardians. If something will get lower amounts of funding, then other things naturally will pick up the slack in a pretty sensible order of priority. It then tries to spend its money more wisely once it has sub-budgets allocated, and rolls any excesses into guardians first (to give more of a chance of buying one), and then into strikecraft (to try to fully deplete the budget if at all possible.<br />
<br />
* Changed multiplier_for_starting_guardian_budget_on_reconquest to be 0.125 instead of 0.015.<br />
** This will substantially hurt. The AI is kind of taking a beating on some of the econ changes lately, so this seems warranted.<br />
<br />
* Changed all the various multiplier_for_game_starting_whatever_from_total_budget to be twice what they were before, or therefore a quarter of the max starting budget in most cases rather than an eighth.<br />
** This should eliminate the sense that you're able to just bumrush planets in the early game before they can reinforce. We could have upped the actual caps of the AIs, but then the late game would have swung too much in their favor if the game runs really long.<br />
** We'll see what happens; if the starts are still too easy, then we'll be upping the starting caps instead of the percentage again. More than a quarter of the cap at the start seems like planets will just be far too cramped.<br />
<br />
* The "defensive budget multiplier" that comes from the AI difficulty is now split into ongoing and initial. This lets us make the lower-difficulty starting amounts not SO anemic that they are pathetic, and then as we get into difficulties higher than 7 not have them be so ludicrously overpowered right at the start. Difficulty 7 is also toned down to 90% of its ongoing defensive budget when it comes to initial seeding, now.<br />
<br />
==== Completely Revised Way Of Seeding Guard Posts and Command Stations ====<br />
<br />
* There's a new AIGuardPostAndCommandPlacer set of xml data that lets us define a lot of different ways that guard posts and command stations can be arranged on planets beyond what has been the basic prior to now (one one each metal generation point).<br />
** These can be varied by mark level ranges of planets, and have different sets for the homeworlds of AIs. They can easily be modded in or added to like map types or whatnot.<br />
<br />
* The way that human homeworlds have their home command station seeded is now a bit more randomized than before, but also does a better job of keeping itself away from wormholes.<br />
** This should make your starts slightly less predictable.<br />
<br />
* The AI Homeworld was set to always put its command station dead center. That's no longer the case. This will make some games easier, others harder, and is fine with Chris.<br />
<br />
* Over the years, the concept of what a "guard post" is has changed quite a lot. Originally in the first AI War, they were literally just a gathering point for other ships. Then in 4.0+ of that game we started making them scary weapons in their own right.<br />
** This sequel has always had the armed variant, but that causes some problems in balance with them sometimes overshadowing the actual ships that are at their location, and in many cases making it impossible for you to fight just a single guard post or two at a time with the way that their weapon ranges were so large that they could pick you off.<br />
** Thus we've hybridized the old and new concepts, making a new "Unarmed Guard Post" type (and Ghost and Swarmer variants), and then adding in a chance per post for it to be armed versus not armed now.<br />
** We've split it out so that normal and home AI planets each have their own chance, per AI type: chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_normal_planet and chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_home_planet.<br />
** Bear in mind that, prior to this build, it was always 100 for each one, essentially.<br />
** Old numbers: Now for most AIs it is 15 and 60, turtle is 60 and 90, Fortress Baron 50 and 80, Peace Maker 30 and 60.<br />
** Please note that these are not the pure percentages of guard posts on a planet that will be armed: rather, at each guard post it essentially rolls a 100-sided die and if the number is lower than what is stated there, it will be armed.<br />
*** So you'll see all sorts of funky distributions, ranging from completely unarmed guard post planets to completely armed ones.<br />
** This DOES make things easier for the player, but mainly it gives other units a chance to shine and makes the armed guard posts more interesting in that they are more rare.<br />
*** Ideally we'll be able to make guardians scarier in their stead, but one thing at a time right now. This release has a lot of changes already!<br />
<br />
* The way that unarmed guard posts were seeding has been changed yet again. There's now a 100% chance of armed guard posts on mark 7 worlds and homeworlds, and then a per-AI setting for what the percentage chance is for every mark level below that. The percentages are generally much higher than they were before, making for far fewer unarmed guard posts as the game progresses and in general fewer overall.<br />
<br />
* The "initial reinforcements" that get seeded into/around reinforcement points now happens as the absolutely last thing, which means that things that should have turrets or whatever around them from the very start, or which are not guard posts but act kind of like them and are added normally during the "special entity seeding" period of mapgen will now get their initial followers properly.<br />
<br />
* Usurpers now have to be on the target planet for 10 seconds before they can reclaim it, otherwise you never even see the usurper if you don't have a defending force.<br />
<br />
* When a reconquest of a planet happens by the AI, it now uses only armed guard posts regardless of the ratio of armed and unarmed it would have previously used.<br />
<br />
* Previously there was mostly just the AI seeding guard posts one metal deposit spots, which is boooring. Now that we have the ability to do more, we have a variety of new types:<br />
** Guarding Wormholes Generally: this can start at mark 1 and go all the way to mark 7 (not homeworlds, though).<br />
*** These are highly aggressive stances that make it hard to get into the planets, and on very high marks they wind up putting 2-3 guard posts PER wormhole. Talk about ow. If there are too few spots for their posts at just wormholes, the rest are spread out very ambiently.<br />
** Guarding Wormholes Harshly: this can start at mark 3 and go all the way to mark 7 (not homeworlds, though). They should be VERY infrequent based on their weight. These are deathtrap worlds.<br />
*** These start out with 2 guard posts per wormhole, and only go up from there -- by mark 7, it's freaking 5 guard posts per wormhole. Just entering the planet is leaping into death, more or less. But that's part of the fun of having a rare extra difficult guard post design, and bear in mind that it doesn't make for more reinforcements and so the total firepower of the planet doesn't get a boost per se (well, guard post firepower itself aside -- which can be huge on higher marks, admittedly, but... well, have fun with those!).<br />
** One Single Mass: this is another super rare one, and can start at mark 2 and up, but not homeworlds.<br />
*** This puts all of the guard posts pretty much in one big clump somewhere on the planet. Depending on randomness, the clump can be kind of strung out, or more circular, or very tight. In many ways this makes them into one super-guard-post, which is potentially like trying to crack an old-school fortress in AIWC. These have randomized ranges of guard posts per mark level of planet, with 2 on mark 2 to, from 3-4 on mark 3 up to 9-12 on mark 7. This is another intense one.<br />
** Spread Out Guard Posts<br />
** This is a variety of ones that are much more lightweight and which get seeded much more commonly: basically just randomly putting guard posts around the whole planet, but pretty far away from one another to make them easier to approach. The numbers vary a lot, and most planets will use one of these.<br />
** Guarding Metal Deposits: moderately low chance of coming in on any mark 3 and up, but not homeworlds.<br />
*** Places one guard post on every metal deposit, and then no more. This is similar to old behavior, except that it doesn't try to add more if there are fewer metal spots than an "ideal" for the mark level. Consequently the difficulty of these will vary a lot, but stealth guard posts remain easy to find because they're just on the metal spots (that was a big giveaway in the past, cough).<br />
** Spread Out Guard Posts And Two By Command<br />
*** These ones start kicking in on mark 4 worlds and up, and one of the two homeworld variants has this, too.<br />
*** This basically puts two VERY close to the command station, guarding it in a ferocious fashion, but then the rest spread very far around.<br />
** We can always code more of these as we think of them, and these are easy to add in as part of mods or expansions or whatever as well.<br />
*** Extra logic could be added to seed specific extra structures at certain guard posts if we really wanted to, although that's not my favorite and it's not by default possible in the moment. But the possibilities for future additions are pretty endless if we have sufficiently interesting ideas. A lot of the other things are better off being a bit random is the current feeling, though, as it plays into these nicely.<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to have certain guard post layouts only be for certain AI difficulty ranges (based on the max AI difficulty, not the difficulty of the AI at that planet).<br />
** Additionally, based on the max AI difficulty, the ability to have a certain added weight to guard post layouts per difficulty above some cap. For now we're using that in the following ways:<br />
*** (Standard weight for something appearing neutrally frequently is 100, please note.)<br />
*** GuardingMetalDeposits (bit hard) base weight was 20, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=25,7=30,10=50 etc).<br />
*** GuardingWormholesGenerally (quite hard) base weight was 10, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=15,7=25,10=45 etc).<br />
*** GuardingWormholesHarshly (super hard) base weight was 2, but it now gets +3 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=5,7=8,10=17 etc).<br />
*** OneSingleMasss (super hard) base weight was 2, but it now gets +3 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=5,7=8,10=17 etc).<br />
*** ThreeSpreadOutGuardPosts (super easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=90,7=70,10=40 etc).<br />
*** FourSpreadOutGuardPosts (super easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=90,7=70,10=40 etc).<br />
*** SixSpreadOutGuardPosts (easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=90,7=80,10=50 etc).<br />
*** SixSpreadOutGuardPosts_AndTwoByCommand (moderate) base weight was 50, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=55,7=60,10=80 etc).<br />
*** EightSpreadOutGuardPosts (moderate) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 7 and above. (7=90,10=60 etc).<br />
*** EightSpreadOutGuardPosts_AndTwoByCommand (hard) base weight was 50, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 7 and above. (7=55,10=75 etc).<br />
*** TenSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears on difficulty 5 and up.<br />
*** TwelveSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears on difficulty 6 and up.<br />
*** AIHome_TwelveSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears up to difficulty 8.<br />
*** AIHome_TenSpreadOutGuardPostsAndTwoByCommand now only appears on difficulty 6 and up.<br />
** All of this combines to give a much more richly-textured scary landscape for the higher difficulties, while keeping things notably simpler at easier difficulties even at the level of a cursory glance.<br />
*** Looking at a difficulty 5, 7, and 10 game, you can see that this is NOT a subtle effect. As we theoretically add more types of seeding patterns, or other people think up seeding patterns, we can make an even richer tapestry.<br />
<br />
* If you have map gen logging on, you can now see entries for "Guard post style for planet" that shows what mark the planet is and what kind of thing it is seeding.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the "BUG: Ship is on burningAndDying list but has not exploded" message to instead just mark the ship as exploded, as there are too many ways to get to that state.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in DetachVisObjectFromSim on ship squads.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in StartReconquestDefenseSeeding for AIs types that do not use non-dire guardians for some reason.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in BattlefieldVisualSingleton.HandleSquadAndShipUpdates, and made it so that it self-repairs when it can or self-reports when it can't. Either way it continues to draw things and update them properly rather than having the display get all strange if such an exception occurs.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for the report.<br />
<br />
* Improved the "find a safe space to be" code for ships so that they are now more likely to find a CLOSE space to be.<br />
<br />
* For guard posts in particular, it does an extra good job of trying to keep it close to the intended point (whatever that is in the given schema).<br />
<br />
* Finally fixed a really annoying bug wherein command stations that got shot to remains and then rebuilt did not count properly (thus not letting anything else be built or rebuilt at their planet) until you saved and loaded the game.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, ArnaudB, Asteroid, KDR_11k, Puffin, Sigma7, Ryulong, Core, and GrimerX for reporting and helping to find it.<br />
** Special thanks to Ryulong for the recent savegame that let us reliably reproduce this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where some achievements relating to killing specific AIs was not triggering because it was trying to match the internal name to the display name. Now it checks both display name and internal name to be doubly sure.<br />
** This makes Full Ensemble in particular now properly trigger when you beat them.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If you have existing saves where you already beat the game, loading those savegames will now trigger the achievements for you that you properly earned (just load them, unpause, and wait at least 2 seconds).<br />
** It's much better this way, versus having to dig up a savegame from right before you won, etc, if you're going back to get achievements that you earned but didn't log because you were offline, or there was a bug, or whatever factor.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hover planet text<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of some Instigator base hovertexts<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting<br />
<br />
* Since it is now possible for non-combatant ships to contain lots of combatant ships (unarmed guard posts on the AI side, but frankly also your own transports), the game now takes great pains to make sure that it isn't overlooking the combatant-nature of ships contained within non-combatant ships when checking things like strength.<br />
** Compared to prior versions of the game (where all guard posts were combatants) this doesn't fix or change anything, but it might make player combat strength more accurate in the case of transports if there was some issue there (though there's no sure evidence that was a problem).<br />
<br />
* When ships are dying, you no longer get a bunch of red "null fleet" messages hovering over them, unless you have debug info turned on for tooltips.<br />
<br />
* The game should now say "release" to show a more or less detailed tooltip on the various screens if you're already holding down the button to make it do whatever it's doing (you can invert the behavior, so which is held and released should match that).<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the tooltip for Risk Analyzer Notifications<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Completely reworked how the long range planning threads keep track of how long it has been since they have run, so that they should probably run at appropriate intervals when the game is running faster than 1x speed now. Previously these were running slower the faster the game ran, which made the AI stupider at 10x speed than 1x speed.<br />
<br />
==== Fixes For XML Modding ====<br />
<br />
Example tiny mods and discussion are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22433<br />
<br />
* Several different things were not staying properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them:<br />
** exp_to_grant_on_death<br />
** watch_planets_at_X_hops<br />
** tags (ow this would cause many problems)<br />
** capturable_seed_weight (again very problematic)<br />
** capturable_max_per_galaxy<br />
** capturable_can_seed_at_all<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of things that would complain they could not be found properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them (but in reality these were carrying over fine from the base version being modded):<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_sfx<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_if_on_other_planet_sfx<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If outgoing_damage_modifier or incoming_damage_modifier entries are duplicated in the list of rows for a system or entity (respectively), whether that be through mods or just in the original definition, it now only uses the last-to-apply version. This last-to-apply one is always going to be a mod version if there is a mod version.<br />
** This makes it so that you can't have two different modifiers on the same weapon that both are based off of the hull health of a ship, for example, but I don't think we're doing that anywhere and it would be messy in the UI if we were, anyway.<br />
** This then fixes the issue with various weapon bonuses and the like duplicating themselves when you are using an is_partial_record entry to mod a weapon.<br />
** It's worth noting at this point that xml modding is inherently slightly fraught in terms of minor bugs or oversights like this which can have major repercussions. Please just let us know on a case by case basis what you find, ideally with the xml you're using and a savegame that shows the wrong behavior, and we can likely fix it up pretty fast.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Both ai_ship_group_membership and fleet_membership now properly adjust the existing membership when there is a duplicate entry entered for them (from a mod or whatever else) linking a given ship type to a given template or group. It now adjusts the weight and so on in the template or group, rather than adding a duplicate entry.<br />
** Note that if you change the category for a template, it will assume you mean it to be a duplicate and will add that accordingly. There really should never be any valid reason to mod the category of a ship, but if you must then you can just 0 out the min and max of the old one maybe?<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting something next to this, although not exactly this.<br />
<br />
* Creating a mod to replace or redefine parts of the fleet design templates (like the starting fleets) now works properly rather than creating duplicate entries or extra counts or both.<br />
** For an example of a mod that works with this new function, the raw xml bits are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22136<br />
** Note that if you choose to change the category of ships from HERE, that will work fine. You just can't change categories of fleet template items from within the game entity side.<br />
** Also please note that this change now prevents you from having duplicate lines of the exact same type of ship in a starting fleet. So something with two lines of fusion bombers would not work anymore, for instance, even with no mods in play, and would just take the count of the last fusion bomber entry and use that.<br />
*** This doesn't stop you from using multiple duplicate ship lines in-game of course, but it does stop it in the starting fleet designs, none of which (that are still active) were using that function anyhow.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Grand_New_AI&diff=37961AI War 2:The Grand New AI2020-02-10T06:16:28Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Version 1.325 */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After lots of feedback, we're ready to take it to the next level! Major new functionality and improvements across the board are incoming to make games more interesting than ever, and we're also going to start building toward multiplayer.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.325 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* When a ship is built, it starts with its weapon on cooldown.<br />
** This prevents a problem where if you had a lot of rebuild capacity for a fleet, you could technically scrap things with long gun cooldowns right after firing and rebuild them faster than the cooldown, increasing your fleet's DPS<br />
** Suggested by the puffin<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where structures might not build even if you had energy for them<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, including Chthon and NRSirLimbo. And thanks to Starkelp for helping me notice what the symptoms looked like.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer wasn't shooting the Zenith Trader<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Potentially make fireteams more willing to press home an attack until all the enemies are dead<br />
<br />
* AIs in Civil War Mode are now more willing to kill each other’s defensive structures like Raid Engines<br />
** Pointed out by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where warping in guard posts had guns<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.324 Forcefield Beautification ==<br />
(Released February 7th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed Adaptive AI achievements being granted regardless of intensity.<br />
** Thanks Rifi8 for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a missing ui window from the last checkin.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Work ===<br />
<br />
* The shield visuals on Gyrn have been redone, as seen here: https://youtu.be/Ns9Kz_lHR6I<br />
<br />
* The overall forcefields have been completely redone, as seen here: https://youtu.be/nub6EkyF8Og<br />
** On these videos, if you want the full story, be sure to read the description notes on the videos. They explain a lot!<br />
<br />
* The spire have a new look, although it's not final by any stretch. It's something that will need to be adjusted for a lot of the specific models, but we're at a starting point with them at least.<br />
** We actually developed three new looks for the spire, and may use some variants of them for different things; we'll see how those work out. Even out of the three main looks, they are able to have variants in each of them, too.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the various other missing shaders and materials from the prior version. For the warp gates, those now look slightly different, and in particular the dyson warp gate.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate, Bounty Hunter and Apparition damage bonus duration 8s -> 12s.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate and Bounty Hunter resist 75% of ranged damage, up from 50%.<br />
<br />
=== Macrophage ===<br />
<br />
* The Hive Wars Update<br />
<br />
* Many of these features will not be available on old saves. They will continue to use existing Macrophage logic.<br />
<br />
* Telium Taming<br />
** Teliums can now be hacked in order to tame them.<br />
*** Expect an extremely heavy response in this hack that will cause discord throughout the galaxy for a period of time after its finished.<br />
** Tamed Teliums create friendly Harvesters and Spores.<br />
** Anytime a Telium is created, if at least one of the consumed Spores is Tamed, the resulting Telium will also be Tamed.<br />
** Taming as a whole is disabled if Macrophage are set to be allied to the player in the lobby.<br />
<br />
* Harvesters, both normal and Enraged, will now stop to chomp down on ships as they move between planets.<br />
** They will not do so forever, so running from them is a valid tactic.<br />
<br />
* Enraged Harvesters will no longer beeline for home planets, and will instead slowly migrate in the direction of a home planet.<br />
** They will also no longer always attack just humans, they will happily much on any entity that comes near them.<br />
<br />
* Wild Telium will now go Berserk when they are either outnumbered by Tamed Telium, or have less than 3 active Wild Telium.<br />
** While Berserk, the cost for them to build things is reduced by 75%.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.323 Everybody Buff Now ==<br />
(Released February 5th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Communication Nodes stop existing when you start the game in civil war mode<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting. That's thot.<br />
<br />
* Some additional clarification to the CPA mechanic for the CPA tooltip<br />
<br />
* Some defensive code in the astro train notification hovertext<br />
<br />
* When you outnumber the AI sufficiently on a planet, the AI uses "hunker logic" to have its units hide near the strongest guard post on the planet, instead of always the command station. The goal of the AI here is to make you pay as high a price as possible for the planet; perhaps they'll distract you long enough for the Warden Fleet to arrive, or for the Hunter to take advantage of your fleet's placement to strike at a weak spot.<br />
* Drones no longer try to hunker, but will always just go fight<br />
** Thanks to a bug report from StarKelp<br />
<br />
* Improve the ion cannon description<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting<br />
<br />
* To reduce some of the RNG of AIP reduction, the player always gets 1 of the data centers reasonably close to their homeworld. Games with no nearby AIP reduction are much harder.<br />
* Games with an AI at difficulty >= 8 have the remaining data centers seeded further from their homeworld.<br />
<br />
* Game will now check for the last savegame on startup, and if it isn't present, will not display the "Continue Last Game" button.<br />
** It will also do a check when you click the button. If it isn't there, it will now just show a popup saying to verify the file.<br />
*** This should only be an issue if you delete a save while the game is running, since the game will check on startup.<br />
** Thanks CyberKun for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Make some changes to fireteams to make different factions able to have different levels of aggressiveness. Make the Hunter more aggressive.<br />
* Fix a bug where the Warden Fleet could wind up with invalid targets (in this case, ones it would need to path through a player planet to get to), preventing it from actually doing anything.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for some very useful saves.<br />
<br />
=== Graphical Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* All of the fonts used in the game have been re-imported using a few new settings to help with clarity when they are drawn extra large or small.<br />
** First of all, they are using vastly larger atlases now for their data (1024x1024 or 1024x512 as the case may be) instead of 512x512. This lets them have more precision.<br />
** They are also now all using SDFAA_Hinted rather than just SDFAA, which should help with some small corners being rounded when they should not be, etc.<br />
** We're also definitely importing the kerning pairs from all the fonts, in case any of them have any such information that is useful. Most fonts lack that.<br />
** And lastly we are now using a padding of 20 between characters instead of a padding of 5, which makes it so that when fonts are drawn very small they shouldn't accidentally get some extra bits in from neighboring letters anymore.<br />
<br />
* The brightness of the directional "sun light" has been increased from 1.21 to 1.78.<br />
** This helps the light and dark side of models be a bit more diffentiated, and makes things a little more clear to see. There's no performance impact from this.<br />
<br />
* We're now using a new HDRI environment reflection map that has a rich variety of colors, at intensity 0.348, which gives all of the ships a proper metallic sheen rather than a flat look like they had before.<br />
** This was a major oversight in some of our past work; we had been working with studio-style HDRI lights for a while, but a year or more ago turned that off because it was interfering with how our bloom worked at the time.<br />
** The overall visual effect when zoomed in on ships and looking at them is of something a lot more modern, and this is without any extra GPU or CPU power. About 8mb extra of RAM.<br />
<br />
* A three-tone gradient ambient light source is now used. Previously there was a very basic flat white light, and we're still using that for the top of the gradient, but we now shift into some blues and then reds below and to the side, which gives the whole scene a slight bit more sense of life especially when you're panning around or rotating the view.<br />
** Again this comes at practically no cost on the GPU, and zero on ram or the CPU.<br />
<br />
* Updated the Botnet Golem to have a new variant of our shader that also includes a new custom HDRI reflection cubemap, as shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTMgEc2iXY<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem has been updated to use the new cubemap shader as well.<br />
** Ditto the black widow golem and Armored Golem. And Hive.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Cubemap shader variant that allows for HSV shifting of the cubemap, and the regenerator golem uses that. Most real-life HDRI sources don't have crazy bright greens.<br />
<br />
* And then also added a new cubemap shader variant of THAT which also allows for radial uv distortion, and the result is this: https://youtu.be/vGl4O6zoTCE<br />
<br />
* And then used that same shader in a different way for the cursed golem: https://youtu.be/LkGTAPc5y8Y<br />
** And then further edited to this: https://youtu.be/_vkmpR833Po<br />
<br />
* And the zenith trader: https://youtu.be/e2f74kk6ulY<br />
<br />
* Added a new Combined Emissive HSV Refractive shader variant specifically for the devourer golem. But then promptly couldn't get that to work as well as I wanted, so made it look like this instead: https://youtu.be/6KWzouM_qVg<br />
<br />
==== Ability To See And Alter LODs In-Game ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new option in game settings under the debug section, "Show LOD Info In Ship Tooltips."<br />
** When enabled, hovering over a ship will make its tooltip show you info about its number of LODs, its vertex count per LOD, at what distance it transfers between LODs, and what its current distance from the camera is.<br />
** This actually can be a pretty fun thing to look at if you're just curious about the innards of the game, to be honest. A number of ships are so low-poly that they only have an LOD0, or they're so large that multiple LODs couldn't be hidden effectively. Normal maps and shader tricks tend to make up the difference in complexity on the very low-poly ones. Others have LODs and you'd never have noticed it because the swapping between them is so smooth.<br />
** You can see a similar view of the LOD data outside of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko60opBhhKY<br />
<br />
* Added a new lod_distance_overrides field, which allows us to override the LOD distances for a specific ship.<br />
** This actually can be extra useful if we're using one ship model at a variety of scales (for instance for a guardian and a drone). We'll get far better performance for the drone if the LODs switch to higher numbers faster, and we'll get far better visuals if there is an oversized version of the guardian that switches more slowly.<br />
** This lets us balance all that out, particularly as we are changing ship visual sizes.<br />
** In the debug info for meshes, you can now see the original and new values if they are overridden.<br />
** You can set things like this to get a look at LOD2 even when zoomed in very close, for instance: lod_distance_overrides="20,21,22" Those would override the real numbers and let you see a far LOD right in front of your case.<br />
*** Whatever the LAST LOD number is, however, is the "distance at which I stop rendering at all." For really large ships it's something absurd like 100k. For smaller ships it might be more like 16k when they effectively become invisible (and thus literally get removed from bothering to be drawn).<br />
*** So for a ship with only a single LOD, or fewer LODs than specified in your overrides, setting low values would make the ship simply disappear, since that's the role of the "last LOD," whatever that is.<br />
<br />
* Added a new keybind in the utility section, "Reload Select Xml Data," default bound to F8.<br />
** Useful mainly for developers. Reads a few xml bits out of specific fields we might want to change frequently.<br />
** Right now this just re-reads lod_distance_overrides for all entities, but it can be expanded a bit in the future as needed. Whether this will work on sub-nodes and copy-from and partial nodes all properly will need testing if we ever have a reason to do that.<br />
** This has been confirmed and is fully working for its initial use case.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Some buffs to the Dyson Sphere, one of which is it now has some drones solely for defending itself.<br />
<br />
* Difficulty 10 now has some tougher defenses.<br />
<br />
* Auto Bomb, Cluster Bomb and Nanoswarm damage radius 1,200 -> 600, targets hit per "shot" 12 -> 9.<br />
<br />
* Auto Bomb and Nanoswarm speed 2,900 -> 2,200.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted some of the Lone Wolf seed weights and max limits, so you shouldn't see just Hive Golems all the time.<br />
<br />
* Eyebots decloak in 1 shot instead of 2.<br />
<br />
==== Counter Attacks ====<br />
<br />
* Counter Attacks now require at least half their strength in present player forces to stall, instead of a fifth.<br />
<br />
* Lowered the initial thresholds for some difficulties, mostly higher.<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* They now use the same armour, albedo and speed as their normal version (if applicable).<br />
<br />
* They now follow the 2/1 hull/shield ratio often found elsewhere.<br />
<br />
* Those with a damage bonus of 20x now use a 6x bonus.<br />
<br />
* Upgraded the durability of the drones they use, and made the Tethuida drone a bit better at hitting stuff.<br />
<br />
* Added Dire Vampire, Tritium Sniper, Gravity, Stealth, Temperamental, Fragmenting, and MLRS variants.<br />
** Temperamental and Fragmenting should only be usable on defense.<br />
<br />
* Unlocked a bit earlier on Difficulty 10 for the Hunter Fleet.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guardian reload time 12s -> 9s, speed 500 -> 400, targets hit per shot 80 -> 100, no longer has the Fortified defensive bonus.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guardian shots per salvo 12 -> 36.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian targets hit per shot 10 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Forcefield Guardian damage 10,000 -> 40,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Heavy Beam Guardian damage 15,000 -> 7,500, reload time 4s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
* Dire Widow Guardian shots per salvo 20 -> 60, tractor beam count 200 -> 550.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Guardian 10,000 -> 5,000, shots per salvo 1 -> 20, range 6,000 -> 8,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Pike Guardian shots per salvo 20 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian damage 8,000 -> 80,000, shots per salvo 3 -> 1.<br />
<br />
* Dire Grenade Launcher Guardian shots per salvo 1 -> 3.<br />
<br />
==== Golems ====<br />
<br />
* They now have the same damage as a MK5 player one, with 66% of the health.<br />
** This is a large damage bump to them, as they were left behind with the last player Golem/Ark buffs due to lack of data, but now seems a good time for this.<br />
<br />
* The AI has received an interesting box and a suit.<br />
** It also received a strangely shaped green rock.<br />
<br />
* These are unlocked a bit earlier on Difficulty 10 for the Warden Fleet.<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem health 4,000,000 -> 3,000,000, damage 5,000 -> 4,000, AIP cost 15 -> 20.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for taking this thing too far.<br />
<br />
* Increased metal to claim and repair Golems by 150%, energy cost from 30,000 -> 50,000.<br />
** Also thanks to Ryulong for taking some of these too far.<br />
** This might be a little strange, but with the shields being free, and hull being 50% off to repair, the current cost to repair a Golem was only 700k metal - you could go very close to that just building up your initial Fleet. That, and the energy, are both intended to add extra costs onto using these things, particularly due to some advantages they hold (such as never contributing to a counter attack unless it's crippled).<br />
<br />
==== Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Replaced all the old AI Ship Groups with newer, hopefully more interesting ones.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian damage 1,500 -> 3,600, total durability 60,000 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Tritium Sniper Guardian total durability 37,500 -> 40,000.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian shots per salvo 5 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian damage 250 -> 150, shots per salvo 12 -> 30, total durability 40,000 -> 80,000, speed 400 -> 1,400, range 10,100 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Guardian shots per salvo 12 -> 20, reload time 6s -> 4s, total durability 40,000 -> 80,000, speed 400 -> 1,400, range 10,100 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Guardian damage 1,000 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 1 -> 5, reload time 4s -> 8s, total durability 60,000 -> 80,000, tractor system gains slightly more targets per Mark.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Guardian targets hit per shot 20 -> 40, total durability 45,000 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian shots per salvo 1 -> 3, explosion size 600 -> 350, total durability 52,500 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Guardian damage 5,000 -> 15,000, range 10,100 -> 12,000, total durability 30,000 -> 60,000.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Guardian shield radius increased around 35%, shield durability 75,000 -> 160,000.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guardian shots per salvo 5 -> 10, total durability 42,000 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian damage 300 -> 200, shots per salvo 10 -> 30, range 5,000 -> 4,000, reload time 4s -> 6s, Mark 1 slow effect 0.8x -> 0.6x, slow gained per mark 0.1x -> 0.05x, slow range 5,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Heavy Beam Guardian damage 1,300 -> 1,350, targets hit per shot 10 -> 9, reload time 6s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Guardian albedo 0.3 -> 0.7, damage 1,000 -> 1,250, reload time 2s -> 1s, total durability 52,500 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Carrier Guardian range 6,000 -> 12,000, total durability 24,000 -> 40,000.<br />
<br />
* Added the normal Tethuida Guardian and MLRS Guardian.<br />
<br />
==== Raid Frigates (And Variants) ====<br />
<br />
* All decloak in 1 shot rather than 10.<br />
** Way too abusable.<br />
<br />
* Health of all increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Damage of all increased 66%.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigates and Bounty Hunters have the same ranged damage resistance as the Apparition, but only to 50%. Apparition resistance matches the Space Planes.<br />
<br />
* All now have a form of the Pulsar Tank bonus.<br />
<br />
=== Macrophage ===<br />
<br />
* The Territorial Update<br />
<br />
* Harvesters<br />
** Stats when spawned in have been greatly nerfed.<br />
** Now capable of marking up as they deliver metal.<br />
*** Base chance of 50%, reduced by 9% per mark increase.<br />
** Harvesters will only move to planets X/2 hops from their Telium, where X is equal to the number of harvesters their Telium own.<br />
*** Enraged are not considered owned by any Telium, and do not factor into or follow this rule.<br />
** Harvesters harvest metal generators they visit, gaining 2500 Metal per mine.<br />
** Lower Mark Harvesters will attempt to only visit low mark planets.<br />
*** Harvesters will, unless given no other choice, avoid player planets until Mark 2, and the player homeworld until Mark 3.<br />
*** Enraged do not follow the above rule, and will attack as they wish.<br />
<br />
* Telium<br />
** No longer lose all metal whenever an event fires, and instead simply subtract the event's cost.<br />
** Now fully restore a Harvester's shields whenever they complete a full delivery.<br />
** Can now have up to 4 active Harvesters before they get enraged.<br />
** Will have a higher chance to spawn Spores as their Harvester count increases.<br />
*** Base spore chance of 50%, increased by 10% for each additional Harvester beyond the first.<br />
<br />
* New Constants have been added in for a multitude of the above changes.<br />
** In addition, the HarvestersToEnrage Constant has been fixed to properly work again.<br />
<br />
=== Quickstarts ===<br />
<br />
* Players are now able to create a Quickstart from in game. Simply open the development menu, then click Create Preset, and fill in the boxes.<br />
** This will also save your game with the same name as the Preset (What you type in the top box)<br />
** The box for the description can be left blank without issues. The name, for obvious reasons, cannot be<br />
<br />
* Added EditSetup and StartGame buttons to the Quickstart menu. It now requires you to select the game you want to play, type the campaign name in, then click on "Start" in the bottom right corner<br />
** To view the EditSetup button, enable the corresponding setting under the debug category. This is due to the high probability of bugs with the initial rollout, and can be changed once most bugs are taken care of.<br />
** If you do edit the setup, you will also get a popup window reminding you that this is a development feature, and may cause bugs during use.<br />
<br />
* Added the EditSetup and StartGame buttons to the Load Game menu. Same rules apply there.<br />
<br />
* If you double click a save, it will still load it, similar to how it was before this release<br />
** This should help reduce the confusion players have<br />
<br />
* Created new textbox window with a single line on top and a large free text box on bottom.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.321 Enjoy Your Break, Voice Lady ==<br />
(Released January 31st, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Actually fix the bug where dyson antagonizers weren't spawning<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, especially Binary Blitz for finding a save game that let me fix it<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to CalculateRemainingShipLineSlotCount to prevent a null reference in the swap ship lines between fleets code<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* If a player forcefield is bumped out of the way by an astro train (or anything else), it will now go back to where it was after the astro train is gone. <br />
** This was particularly annoying for forcefields protecting wormholes.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, but I don't remember any of their names<br />
<br />
* Adds Damage Amplification, which can be defined in XML<br />
** damage_amplification tag is true/false<br />
** damage_amplification_duration is an integer, and determines how long damage is amplified for in seconds<br />
** damage_amplification_flat is the amount of damage added. It is also an integer, and is a flat increase (if your attack would do 500 damage, and this is marked as 500, your total damage will be 1000)<br />
** Damage is amplified from ALL sources. This includes other ships than the one that caused the effect<br />
** Adds damage_amplification_mult XML tag<br />
*** Functions same as DamageAmplificationFlat tag, except it multiplies damage by the number instead of adding them together<br />
*** May be set to below 1 to reduce all incoming damage as well, if desired<br />
<br />
* Added ability to define amount of damage added per ship of that type on the planet in XML<br />
** Also features an optional max for the damage increase<br />
** Has an EntityRollupType for all entities with that feature<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare bug that could still happen in DetachVisObjectFromSim.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where RelatedString2 and RelatedString3 were not being properly cleared on GameCommands. This was leading to various log messages that should have been silent instead giving outdated voice commands based on whatever was last played. This would get incredibly repetitive and was baffling.<br />
** Huge thanks to StarKelp for figuring out what this was.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.320 Intelligence Intensifies==<br />
(Released January 30th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* "Teach a Man to Fish..." achievement is now properly triggered at Mark VII.<br />
** Thanks Rivet for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed spelling of Megalodon achievement both in game and on Steam.<br />
** Thanks Ovalcircle for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to giant marauder empires; they could get a bit out of control, so fewer raiders overall now. Note that with fireteams the marauders are much smarter, so they don't need as many ships to still be effective<br />
<br />
* Fix a UI annoyance where the Techs That Upgrade This Ship were sometimes listed Weapon First and sometimes Hull First. Now it always lists the weapon first.<br />
** Thanks to Daw11 and Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Nanocausts could go after the player in the early game. You should now be safe from nanocaust incursions for the first 30 minutes<br />
** Thanks to Mayheim on steam for a report<br />
<br />
* Add some colour to the log messages about zenith trader and devourer<br />
<br />
* Exos of sufficient strength can now split that strength across multiple start planets; the smallest unit for a split is 40 strength. This should make defending against them more "Fun"<br />
** Suggested by Starkelp<br />
<br />
* Improve handling of the case where a dyson antagonizer can't find a planet to spawn on<br />
** Thanks to BinaryBlitz for the bug report<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.314 Achieve Those ==<br />
(Released January 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* For both stacks and drones, put in some code to prevent cross-threading race conditions where they could in theory cause incorrect and confusing fluctuations.<br />
** With stacks it seems like this only happened with very low stack count targets.<br />
** With drones it seems this was not actually the problem.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* For all of the non-planetary fleets, it no longer tries to clear excess ships above the cap that you have.<br />
** This was potentially causing some problems with drones in particular where it was killing excess ships as they went back into the drone controller. This may also have affected ships going into transports.<br />
** Essentially it was counting some stuff that was queued for death but not yet dead. And in general with these we frankly don't care if they are over cap, as they wll die soon enough anyhow and it's unlikely that they would be over cap in the first place.<br />
** The big thing with caps needing to clear excess ships is the command station fleets, since you can change command station types which massively adjusts your caps for things, and not handling these would be an exploit.<br />
*** If a command station is ever given drones, then it's likely to be buggy like the hive golem and similar was in the past, and there's no simple solution for that. Don't give command stations drones. ;)<br />
** This is confirmed to fix the hive golem bug and bug with drones in general.<br />
** Thanks to Chthon, Daniexpert, and Ubifan for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Add colour to some log messages:<br />
** The 'starting hack' log message now has colour in it so it looks more interesting<br />
** The messages generated by 'AI sending wave against planet' and 'AIP change by' now have colour. Also, use the Display Name instead of the Internal name for printing the name of the entity killed to change AIP. This just looks a bit better<br />
<br />
* Add some debugging code to allow us to see more easily which faction the AI threat is going after<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bunch of minor faction achievements not triggering. <br />
** They were only looking at Display Name, not Internal name. You can now put either the Display Name or Internal Name in the XML and it will work for either.<br />
** Thanks Hexahedron, ArnaudB, and Ecthelon for reporting<br />
<br />
* AI Tech Level achievements now work as expected<br />
** Thanks Hexahedron for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed SledgeHammer achievement not triggering<br />
** Thanks ArnaudB for reporting!<br />
<br />
* When the game gets enough autosaves that it needs to start deleting older ones, it should no longer will error out.<br />
** This was something that was new in the prior beta build, because of all the changes we made to the save/load/delete pipeline.<br />
** Thanks to StarKeep for reporting.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.313 Listening To Lists ==<br />
(January 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Modify the marauder tooltips to no longer refer to planetary controllers<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a nasty bug where Fireteams (in particular the Hunter) was identifying Command Stations that had died to remains as valid targets.<br />
** From a save game of Ryulong, where 500 strength of Hunter Fleet was Just Chilling for much of the game<br />
<br />
* Increase the overall AI income for difficulty 10 a bit<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in a variety of map types with low planet counts, but particularly octopus.<br />
** This was a pretty rare bug, and it also happened to be in a section of code that did not even do anything anymore. So we simply removed the code and things work as expected now.<br />
** Thanks to Rifi8 for the report that lets us reproduce it.<br />
<br />
* Changing the AI difficulty via the debug menu is now always considered a cheat, even prior to the first 60 seconds passing.<br />
** This basically was something that could cheat mapgen out of giving you the harder structures.<br />
<br />
* Using the debug menu to reveal the entire map is no longer considered a cheat, but rather is a lifestyle choice.<br />
** The first game did allow you to set the entire map to visible right from the start, after all.<br />
** Add a matched "Explore all planet" to go with "Watch all planet", for people who want to see what's happening Right Now but not to have permanenent vision everywhere<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The debug menu is now split into two columns, with the ones that are cheats in their own column and clearly marked as such.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a logic issue in the xml reader that made lists of values such as most_everything_squad_cap_multiplier_list, frigate_squad_cap_multiplier_list, and similar impossible to mod over using copy_from or partial records.<br />
** This also affected some things on achievements, science_cost_per_time_unlocked on techs, tags on ships, tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, build_sidebar_categories_i_am_part_of, fleet_design_templates_i_always_grant, NOT eligible_for_hacks. NOT sounds_on_takes_damage or sounds_on_death, NOT arbitrary_options, engine_stun_multipliers_by_stun_seconds, exp_multipliers_by_player_fleet_count, and exp_multipliers_by_max_fleet_level_difference.<br />
** This is completely untested and hopefully doesn't eat the world. Glad we're in beta.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
* Added a debug menu cheat for finishing all the construction on a planet immediately.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "most_recent_stable_beta" branch on Steam, set to the prior build 1.312 in case this does in fact break the world. ;)<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.312 Stop Threatening Me ==<br />
(Released January 25th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* AI sub-factions (praetorian/hunter/warden) no longer join other AIs when their overlord dies. Instead they stay loyal to their now-rogue AI. The praetorian stops doing anything except fighting on its current planets, but the hunter and warden will remain active and fight you if you attack their AI's planets.<br />
** A number of people have pointed this out, including ArnaudB and Agalyon<br />
<br />
* Instigators can no longer spawn 'anywhere' at high enough AIP. They are always within accessible (if very hard) distance even at high AIP<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where minor factions could trigger AI units to go threat against the player<br />
** Thanks to Agalyon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed SuperTerminal hack achievement.<br />
** Thanks ArnaudB for reporting and Puffin for reminding me to put it in the notes!<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.311 Code Review ==<br />
(Released January 24th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* We exhaustively went through all of our faction (minor and major) code, reviewing things for potential problems -- subtle or otherwise -- that might come up from the increased parallelism of the faction thread.<br />
** We did find a few things that could cause inexplicable wrong behavior if two threads were in just the wrong state at just the right time, but most of the code was clean and those cases were pretty rarely going to occur. We fixed what we found, and having everything else go through a thorough review that verifies it as good is well worth the time.<br />
** Since there were some nontrivial changes in some areas to make things clearer or to fix some of the bugs that were present, most notably around exos, we wanted to go ahead and push another beta branch in the meantime.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.310 A Smarter Warden ==<br />
(Released January 24th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The Warden Fleet now uses Fireteams.<br />
** Needs testing before pushing to the main steam branch.<br />
<br />
* Increase the threshold for "Ships in combat" voice lines. Don't play the "Your home command station is under attack" voice line unless the AI actually has enough ships to be scary.<br />
** I don't want to know if one cloaked AI fleetship is shooting at the shield on my home command station anymore<br />
<br />
== Version 1.309 Instigator Cheekiness ==<br />
(Released January 23rd, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The counterattack notifier hovertext now tells you how many guard posts you have to kill to disable the counterattack<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer wasn't shooting the zenith trader<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* When the game tries to create notifications up at the top part of the screen for the human player, if it runs into an error it now is much more informative about what the error was, although it's still not exact in every case.<br />
** Thanks to DefeatedByTheCat for the report that triggered us to add this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of places where if the AI did not have a "most annoying faction" at a location, it would error instead of simply waiting because it was not annoyed.<br />
** In "send a wave if alerted after X seconds" (raid engine).<br />
** In the human notification checks for raid engines.<br />
** And that's it, from a thorough code review. Everything else actually already checks properly for the most annoying faction index being -1, or the resulting faction object being null, as relevant.<br />
*** Though it is worth noting that if there is mysterious threat showing up because of minor faction aggro against the AI, it's possibly because the AI got a -1 from this at some point.<br />
** Thanks to DefeatedByTheCat for the report that led us to finding this. This isn't actually a new bug at all, just a rare one apparently.<br />
<br />
* Lone Wolf Flagships can no longer have ship lines swapped to them. This is a very longstanding bug.<br />
** Thanks to a bunch of people for reporting, including Chthon, Iocaine and deo<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "Called AI Sentinels_execCont_607 pathfinder from two different contexts! First was executionContext, new one is specialFactionContext_22_AI" error, and probably all related errors.<br />
** The correct pathfinder to use for a faction is now centrally calculated from a method called GetPathfindersOfRelevanceFromContext, and there are now many more pathfinder instances possible to have on a faction instance to avoid the potential case where factions need to pathfind out of cases we were expecting.<br />
*** If pathfinding is done by Faction.FindPath in a generalized sense from certain types of threads (anything other than the main, execution context, or background faction planning threads), then honestly it will probably wind up with an exception and the programmer in question needs to instantiate their own custom pathfinder instance for whatever it is they have in mind.<br />
** As it stands, it's now lazy-instantiating all these new possible pathfinding contexts per thread type per faction, since a lot of factions do next to no pathfinding and all of them only use some of the thread cases.<br />
*** This helps to avoid memory over-usage (even though that would still be minor in the grand scheme), and makes instantiating faction external data slightly faster than it was in the past and would have become in the future.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Also put in a count of pathfinders created in total, and discovered that we were creating and discarding a pathfinder or two every second or so. This was a minor performance drain and is now fixed.<br />
** You will notice that the number of pathfinders goes up over time early in a new game because of the lazy-creation of them as factions need them, and that's normal (even some getting added hours after starting is normal, if a faction enters a new mode for the first time). Exiting one game and creating another will also cause more to get created. But there shouldn't be a runaway growth of them indefinitely.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a cross-threading bug that could cause GetWormholeToOtherPlanetOrNull to have a nullref inside it.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* CPAs no longer allow you to C-click them, and the slight information that was actually useful inside a c-click of one is now just in the direct tooltip, which no longer asks you to c-click them. This is all just a lot more clean and clear.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Change Instigator Base spawning rules to hopefully make them a bit less frustrating<br />
** Previously once you hit 300 AIP the Instigator base could spawn anywhere<br />
** Now between 300 and 600 AIP the instigator base must spawn between 4 and 7 hops from one of your planet, and it's only unlimited after 600 AIP<br />
<br />
== Version 1.308 Mega Performance ==<br />
(Released January 22nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Most Notifications now work as follows. Clicking on them in the Galaxy view will center you on the planet. Clicking on them in the Planet view will take you to that planet.<br />
<br />
* Combat fleets now include their Strength in the tooltip in the Intel menu<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Even on the brief tooltips, the game now shows how many ships and what their strength is for AI reinforcement points. The medium tooltips show the types of ships in there and a bit more info. This is pretty important information at every tooltip level.<br />
<br />
* Add a setting for preventing instigator bases from spawning.<br />
** While canonically the AI gets instigator bases, some people find them frustrating or stressful to play against.<br />
** Requested by Admiral<br />
<br />
* Ghost, Ensnarer and Sniper AI Turrets now say their type, so the Ensnarer Battlestation having them doesn't seem so odd (as it now specifically says "Ensnarer Pike Great-Turret" for instance).<br />
** Mentioned by Ryulong and Venger.<br />
<br />
=== Astro Train Buffs ===<br />
<br />
* Astro trains can now spawn multiple trains at once, based on the intensity of the faction.<br />
* Only for intensity >= 5. Chance for multi-spawn starts at 10% for intensity 5 up to 60% at intensity 10.<br />
** Lets see if this is enough to make them more exciting. From a discussion on Discord with Hyde, zeus and others<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fireteams drop out of 'bonus speed mode' once they are actually attacking the target. A fireteam only gets bonus move speed to make sure all the fireteams attacking arrive in a coordinated fashion<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for pointing this out<br />
<br />
* Fireteam-based Nanocausts now are constrained from attacking the player too early. <br />
* Killing a nanocaust hive now means nanocaust ships won't get any new orders (except 'fight on this planet')<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the bug reports<br />
* Fixed a bug in the last couple of builds where it would always talk about your "best fleet" in the end of the game (win or lose) as "useless cowards" (which is just what it says when it can't find a fleet).<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where factories weren't printing things they were rebuilding<br />
** Thanks to Mongoose on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Macrophages and Enraged Macrophages won't be counted as Threat anymore<br />
** Thanks to WolfWhiteFire for reminding me about this<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Nanocaust invasion could trigger a bunch of threat against the player <br />
** Thanks to vodkasheep on steam for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Norris Effect ships were being blocked from going through wormholes by shields<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in even more of a fix to the fire teams having an INNER exception of thread abort that was being reported erroneously because it could happen during a sort operation.<br />
** This should solve some of the marauder debug code 1200 errors we were seeing that were not really a bug.<br />
<br />
* Units such as Hydra Heads and Mini Cluster Bombs will no longer show in the Double Shipline Cap option screen.<br />
** Thanks to Admiral, Daniexpert and NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception that could happen in rare cases on loading a savegame with a wave incoming, where it might say "Exception in ShipIconImageBase.RenderContents at stage 170"<br />
<br />
* Fixed Royal Tethuida and Shredder Guardians not having Drones.<br />
** Reported by Ryulong.<br />
<br />
* Hacks against the Dark Spire now correctly consume hacking points. Whoops<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Unexplored planets will no longer show their mark level or the number of reinforcement points they had. Previously you could deduce way too much information about planets (including the location of AI Overlords)<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Finally fixed a bunch of spurious errors that could happen when you exited out of the game and it was in the middle of shutting down background threads. They made it seem like things were happening such as clashes between pathfinding calls to the same pathfinder, and other things of that nature, but it was just the threads dying and not being as quiet about it as they should have been.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of nullref exceptions that could happen during DoForEntities and a few related methods if the collection was changing during a cross-thread update clash.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of quasi-invisible bugs where the wrong movement or decollision points could be given to the wrong entity if ships died in between when the command was issued and when they got it.<br />
** This could cause rare random things like a ship of your own suddenly moving without you telling it to, etc. It was likely pretty rare, although it got more common after we stopped pooling ships.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and Badger for helping us accidentally find this.<br />
<br />
* Probably fixed a bug that could happen inside entity order creation for decollision. Whether we really fixed it or not will require more testing, as it was pretty rare in the first case. This was quasi-related to the above fix.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in a lot of extra debugging stage code to help us know what is happening in the faction metal outflows code, so that when we get something like "ERROR In BuildingDronesInternally" we will know where the problem is. As it stands the code looks okay, but someone hit the error, so we'll need them to hit it again in the new code version before we can figure out what it is.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for being our resident nullref exception sponge.<br />
<br />
* Put in a likely fix for a rare exception that could happen in GenerateMercenaryObjectives.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Performance Hunting And Open-Sourcing ===<br />
<br />
* Reduce the number of FindPath calls made by Fireteams<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where empty fireteams in some states were never being disbanded<br />
<br />
* The way that the game tracks commands that are actually queued versus those that are just requested but not actually sent is now much better, giving us insight into what the heck is going on and where we might be able to squeeze out some more performance in giant games in particular.<br />
<br />
* A large amount of code relating to simulation that happens at the planet level has been moved into the open-source dlls.<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch more of the world-step sim logic has been moved into the open-source (moddable) part of the code.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor performance drain where our "combine into stacks" code was pulling thousands more gamecommands from the pool in large savegames, then not using most of them because of whatever invalidities.<br />
<br />
* Put in a variety of fixes to the AI background thread where it could pull a "send wormhole" command prematurely and then realize that it had nothing to send, thus causing it to trigger some locks pointlessly and waste some background CPU cycles.<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code in dark spire, devourer, dyson sphere, instigators, and outguard that could cause it to issue blank wormhole move commands and calculate paths for no ships in potential rare circumstances.<br />
<br />
* Improved some of our utility methods to early-out a lot sooner when they don't have targets to chase, etc.<br />
<br />
* Improved the divide ships among planets code to definitely never send empty wormhole commands anymore.<br />
<br />
* Improved the auto pursuit mode for engineers to not request extra commands and then put them back, again improving performance slightly.<br />
<br />
* If null commands or null types on commands are sent, it now shows those in red in the escape menu.<br />
<br />
* For commands that have a different number of requests and actual queuings in the escape menu, it now shows those in red for easy identification.<br />
<br />
* When the game gets a request to shut down or quit to the main menu or other things of that sort, it is now absolutely brutal with the background threads, killing them all and exiting immediately. It was before trying to be polite and wait for them to tidy up and finish, but that was at the best case slow (now with fire teams in particular), and in the worst case would never exit (in the case of a stalled background thread).<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where if one of the background long term planning fields got stuck or was slow, it could cause others to be very slow to send their commands.<br />
** In general also made it so that long term faction threads now send their commands as they finish their individual work, which is far superior in terms of smooth performance when there are many factions.<br />
<br />
* If the game runs into a background thread that is taking more than 10 seconds (which means it is then blocking all other background threads, too), it now shows a message on the right hand side of the screen saying slow background threads and showing what the slow thread is.<br />
** In this way we can actually tell if something stalls out and then starts blocking the rest of the game, versus before it was pretty invisible.<br />
<br />
* Fixed some excessive requests for SetWaiting and SetBehavior_FromFaction_ThreatTimeToFight that were then never being queued for actual use.<br />
<br />
* Fixed some excessive requests to TransferEntitiesToFaction and ScrapUnits that would then not be queued.<br />
<br />
* Split the singular "SetWormholePath" into 17 distinct variants so we can see what is going on in terms of high volumes of those being sent in some savegames and thus causing a big slowdown.<br />
** The general idea is for us to be able to recognize hotspots at a glance, but all of these function the same so it doesn't matter which one a mod's code uses.<br />
** An interesting side effect of this is that it potentially cuts down on cross-threading contention since the pool has to be locked to take items out and put them back in.<br />
*** The pool being locked and unlocked is one reason not requesting more commands than we need is a really good idea, too.<br />
** There is actually a measurable performance boost from these things alone.<br />
<br />
* Same thing with splitting CreateSpeedGroup into 4 variants.<br />
<br />
* FlushReinforcementPoints can now only be called on a planet once every 5 seconds at most.<br />
** This keeps certain factions from flooding the command queue with hundreds of such requests over the course of a second or two of game time.<br />
<br />
* Refinements to the pathfinding performance, round 1 (existing algorithm changes):<br />
** Starting performance:<br />
*** 3.30017 ms per call on average for marauders, over 25k calls in 84 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread (stopped thread after this).<br />
** After making GetNeighborOfNodeByIndex much more direct and not involving a loop:<br />
*** To start, 2.883 ms per call on average for marauders, over 16k calls in 48 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread.<br />
*** But then 3.212 ms per call on average for marauders, over 30k calls in 98 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread (stopped thread after this)<br />
*** It's worth noting that there's fuzz in all this data, from disk write speeds and application being in the foreground or background more, different routes being considered, etc. So it's only so precise.<br />
** Removed DoForNodesInFlood since it was never used anyway.<br />
** Then changed the pathfinding object itself to not instantiate a ton of stuff on the heap with every call, instead reusing objects and lists and dictionaries except for the final result dictionary.<br />
*** As part of this, made it so that the FindPathInner method now also checks to see if it has simultaneous calls on the same object, to make it complain if it's used in a non-threadsafe manner. A single thread would only call these serially, after all.<br />
*** After this, 2.642 ms per call on average for marauders, over 16k calls in 44 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread (stopped thread after this)<br />
** It's observed that we're doing quite a few calls to these pathfinders on the main thread as well, but nothing at the sort of scale that the long term planning threads do. But some of the substantial performance degradation to the sim is probably this on the main thread also.<br />
** With the logging turned off, the long-running thread for marauders in the super-slow s6 save is now something that takes still north of 136 seconds, so this sort of low-hanging fruit is making very little difference in aggregate and could even simply be the result of instrumentation error (so to speak). The revisions definitely are performance improvements, but are apparently such a tiny portion of the load as to not be noteworthy.<br />
<br />
* Before we get into more extreme changes, the ArcenPathfinder class and its internals have been moved to the external public source code.<br />
** This makes things far quicker for us to change and then test the results with.<br />
<br />
* Added a new abstract Pathfindable class in the Arcen Core area, which is now required for use in the pathfinding code, and which Planet inherits from.<br />
** This lets us make a number of things more efficient, and not just in pathfinding.<br />
** PlanetIndex on the planet object is now just Index on Pathfindable.<br />
** LinkedPlanetIndices is now just LinkedIndices on Pathfindable.<br />
** Added a new LinkedPathfindables on Pathfindable which gets recalculated as needed and which can be manually recalculated via FillLinkedPathfindablesIfNeeded().<br />
*** This actually should speed up calculations for a lot of things with adjacent planet checks, even outside of pathfinding.<br />
** The pathfinding code is now able to directly call a few things on Pathfindable, rather than having to indirectly get things via method calls.<br />
*** This is another incremental improvement, but paves the way for a number of things, and in general makes the load on the call stack lower. Given how many paths are being calculated by fire teams, every little bit matters, even before we get into the larger changes.<br />
<br />
* Made some tweaks to fireteam code to reduce the number of FindPath calls.<br />
** This alone shifts the performance of the s6 savegame case to be able to finish the marauders long-running thread in 98 seconds now instead of it running somewhere north of 150 or 200 seconds.<br />
<br />
* The ArcenSimContext now has a non-sim incrementing loop counter in it that tells us when we need to refresh the pathfinding data and other things.<br />
** This is "non sim" in the sense that it doesn't matter what the loop counter number is, it just matters that it knows when the number is different. This is safe to use for multiplayer and on short and long term planning threads, main thread, etc.<br />
** To check if this is the same execution that it was the last time you were in a thread, you can now check a stored integer against NonsimLoopIndex on the context. If the numbers don't match, sim or not sim, then you should recalculate whatever you're intending to cache on a per-iteration-of-this-thread-whatever-that-is basis.<br />
<br />
* The pathfinding code now requires that an ArcenSimContext so that we can use that new stuff for lazy-load precalculations.<br />
** This lets us be sure that we're not wasting any CPU on precalculations that will never be used, but at the same time since these are per-thread we don't recalculate the same things over and over again. At least that's what will be the case.<br />
<br />
* The pathfinding code now also keeps track of what the first ArcenSimContext was to call into it, and if another context is ever used to call into it, it will complain.<br />
** Thus if we wind up with short term planning code calling long term planning code, we'll know, etc. So far the tests show no instances of this happening, but prior to now that would have been a silent problem if it was happening.<br />
<br />
* More tweaks to fireteam code to even further reduce the number of FindPath calls.<br />
** This shifts the performance of the s6 savegame case to be able to finish the marauders long-running thread in 77 seconds.<br />
<br />
* The background threads are now set to run not in background mode, and with a priority that is above normal. This shouldn't affect the front-end framerate except on extremely limited old-school single-core machines, which don't meet the minimum requirements anyhow.<br />
** This makes better use of your entire processor, and the more cores you have the better the improvement is. This may also be somewhat OS-dependent, as different OSes have different threading models and are better and worse at different things.<br />
** On Windows 10, simply switching from using the unity editor as our test environment to using a standalone build gets us from 40% sim speed to 50-70% sim speed in the s6 savegame, and it drops the background marauder thread from 80 seconds to 55 seconds to execute. On Linux, Badger reports 20 seconds or so for the same background thread, though.<br />
** After these changes to upping the priority, we get a much more solid 70-100% sim speed (those all are running on "background" threads as well, after all), and the background marauder thread drops from 55 seconds to 50.<br />
** We still have a ways to go with the pathfinding efficiency itself, and potentially with culling yet more cases where it's actually calling the pathing threads in a nested fashion, but some of this was based on our internal testing environment (who knew that unity's editor doesn't at all obey thread priorities?), and some of it is improved by giving the background threads in the actual standalone game more freedom to use your available processor space. If your CPU is half idle and the game is running at all slowly, that's just silly.<br />
<br />
* Made a variety of changes to improve pathfinding performance further.<br />
** We're precalculating node passability, which gets rid of the most frequent method call that we were seeing inside the pathfinding code. However, this only drops us from 55 seconds to 51 seconds (a 7.3% increase) for marauder path computations. We need to take it further! (Even though Badger has solved the problem another way that isn't checked in yet, we still want pathfinding to fly.)<br />
<br />
* Made further pathfinding changes to remove all uses of dictionaries and almost all use of lists, and definitely all uses of Contains.<br />
** This has basically linearized the node states into a series of arrays of fixed length 500, and if there are ever more than 500 planets in a galaxy the pathfinding will break unless it is recompiled to support higher numbers of planets. The overall game would burn performance at 500 planets and it would be unpleasant to play, anyway, so this does not seem like a problem to have.<br />
** With the changes to linearize things in this way, performance went down from 51 seconds on the marauder thread to... 7 seconds. So from the recent 55 seconds this is a full 87% improvement to pathfinding speed.<br />
<br />
* Badger figured out a way to also time-slice the fire team logic so that they only scan a certain number of planets (per faction) per check of fire teams.<br />
** This makes some of the fire teams a bit "slower to react" (this is VERY relative) in the super short term in saves with literally hundreds of fire teams on one faction and 200 planets, but it keeps everything running far faster.<br />
** A single fire team might need to evaluate hundreds of planets in order to find out what it needs to do after completing a major objective or just coming into an existence, and this was the case where the game could spike and have really long-running threads (north of 200 seconds prior to this release, now down to 7 seconds as of Chris's prior changes just above).<br />
** While Chris was doing his changes, Badger got in this throttling and managed to make the simulation run at full speed and take an average of 5 seconds instead of 55 even before the pathfinding was 87% more efficient. That was with 1000 planets being scanned at a time, max.<br />
** There is a new galaxy setting which lets you adjust the number of planets to scan, and its new default is now 2500 since between these changes, other fire team improvements, and the pathfinding improvements, what was once taking 200+ seconds now takes a second or two. <br />
** So the fire teams "reacting slower" as noted above means they might delay for a few seconds, maybe 10 at most, in the really huge savegames. But it's not something that will stall the game or performance anymore, and the prior amount of time we had to wait in prior builds for ANYTHING to happen was 200+ seconds. So... it's just plain faster.<br />
** Also, the name of the galaxy option to control this is "Max targets Fireteams can scan in one iteration" in the performance section.<br />
<br />
=== Exo tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where exos were losing their exo target between save/reload<br />
* If a unit had been in an exo but the target died, the ship drops out of the exo and joins the threat<br />
* Units in an exo stuck by a black hole machine should prioritize killing the black hole machine<br />
* This should make exos even more adept at chasing units across planets. Especially big, shard-shaped ones.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Cross Planet Attack (CPA) tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* AI homeworlds can no longer contribute to cross planet attacks (CPAs).<br />
<br />
* When pulling ships for a CPA, the AI now starts with the planets that are at or below its current mark level (whatever that is), minimum 2.<br />
** It then goes to planets 1 mark level above, then two, then random among everything else.<br />
** This makes it most likely, particularly in the early game, that most things will be relatively low-level.<br />
<br />
* To clarify, since many have been confused, while CPAs do have a budget, they do NOT create new ships.<br />
** As with the first AI War, they instead turn guards into threat. Aka, they set guards "free" to come attack you.<br />
** The budget of the CPA determines how many ships they can set free, but doesn't let them purchase anything new.<br />
** Specifically it only pulls from ships that are IN guard posts at the moment.<br />
<br />
* Previously, the mark level of ships in a CPA was downgraded (or upgraded) to whatever the mark level of the AI was in general at the time.<br />
** This was wildly unfair to the AI in a lot of cases, making high-mark ships into low-mark ones.<br />
** Now the AI gets whatever their actual mark of ships are freed, but it tries to free appropriate-or-lower mark ships first before launching harder stuff.<br />
** When it launches things that are lower-mark or higher-mark than its baseline, it pays less or more from its budget based on the strength differential. So the end strength should be the same in general.<br />
<br />
* When ships come out of guard posts for CPAs, previously it would grind some games to a halt because of them coming out unstacked and potentially huge in number.<br />
** Now it tries to stack them up to 99 ships at a time per stack, as it can.<br />
<br />
* Also previously, when the CPA launched you had no idea what you were in for. Now it tells you how many ships, what total strength, and how many of each mark level of ship were freed.<br />
** The idea is definitely to keep you from being surprised by higher-mark ships showing up, or in general by what is happening. Where the ships are and what specifically their composition is remains a mystery, though.<br />
** This also should immediately dispel any confusion about these being new ships versus freed guards, based on the wording of the notification.<br />
<br />
* The in-game Tip now explains these new mechanics<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Some buffs to the Macrophage, who are feeling pretty uninspiring. More buffs to come if they are still underperforming<br />
<br />
* Nanocausts and Marauders that were created before fireteams were an option now default to using fireteams<br />
** This includes Nanocausts and Marauders from quickstarts<br />
<br />
* Altered most of the Fleet Designs again, to fix some problems accidentally introduced previously, regarding Mono-Tech Fleets and the general chances of each Tech line being on paper fine, but in practice notably off.<br />
** Also added 15 new Designs, and removed 2 that were notable culprits.<br />
<br />
* Dark Spire Wraith and Phantoms can now be affected by the Strikecraft Coordinator, as well as have their lines doubled.<br />
** Mentioned by Ryulong.<br />
<br />
* Space Planes, Mirages and Apparitions have their damage resistance range reduced, to account for the recent 0.8x range modifier that does not affect this.<br />
** Also mentioned by Ryulong.<br />
<br />
* Added some more Guardian types to the Instigator Base spawns.<br />
** Requested by ArnaudB and Fluffiest.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Vanguard speed 400 -> 600, shots per salvo 1 -> 8, damage 360 -> 90, reload time 6s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard Hydra speed 600 -> 800, shots per salvo 1 -> 8, damage 180 -> 60, reload time 6s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tank speed 400 -> 500, main weapon range 4,200 -> 5,600, main weapon has the same damage bonus as the secondary.<br />
<br />
* Ablative Gatling speed 600 -> 800.<br />
<br />
* Ablative Troll speed 400 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette and Porcupine speed 500 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette speed 400 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Molotov speed 800 -> 1,000.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Corvette speed 400 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Raptor damage bonus 4x -> 6x.<br />
<br />
* Ranger speed 800 -> 1,000, damage 225 -> 450, reload time 4s -> 8s, range infinite -> 10,100, now has a cloaking device.<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Trader ====<br />
<br />
* Scrubbed Abberation and Abomination now do full Zombification rather than a form of Nanocaustation that would create normal zombies.<br />
** Led to a problem with the changes to Zombification to restrict what could be affected. Those did not affect Nanocaustation, so these units could still give the player zombie versions of Dire Guardians, for instance.<br />
<br />
* Now sells a Trader specific version of the Orbital Mass Driver, as to not interfere with the galaxy wide caps if you hack any.<br />
<br />
* All Zenith Trader goodies have a galaxy wide cap of 2.<br />
** Before you could armour up every planet you owned to a large amount with no other investment. Now you have to choose where these goodies go.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Forcefield is now Markless, but has improved stats over what it used to be.<br />
** Just clarity. It couldn't be upgraded anyhow.<br />
<br />
* All other Trader goodies are Markless.<br />
** Also for clarity, since most weren't affected anyhow, and the one that could (Tamed Macrophage) could have huge power spikes from planetary upgrades.<br />
** This might change in future.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.304 So You Like Combat Engineers? ==<br />
(Released January 14th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The right hand chat/log window in the lobby is now hidden, since it isn't used for now.<br />
** Thanks to Sounds for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the performance section of personal settings: Enable Performance Logging<br />
** Turning this on may hurt performance a bit, but not hugely so in most cases. It lets you then see a lot of information about how the game is spending its CPU time by right-clicking the timer in the bottom left of the main game view. Off by default, as it has no other purpose than that.<br />
** Prior to this build it was always on. It wasn't a performance drain at all that we can tell, but it's worth being careful, and it was a source of some cross-threading issues which would give slight performance issues. But we can't detect even a 1% difference in general performance with this on, presently.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Friendly nanocaust should now honor the 'dont kill command station' setting<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reminding me about this<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo that was causing the outguard to go through withdrawl<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Some text editors put a shadow copy with .xml~ at the end, and that can be a problem for people who have files open to make tweaks (modding or development) while testing the game. It also can cause errors in the game if we accidentally push one out like that. The game now explicitly ignores such files.<br />
<br />
* Put even MORE paranoid-style cross-threading protections in on FramePartTimings, since themouthofsauron reports still seeing a few of those in the very latest 1.303 builds. Our fixes in that build probably cut down on those, but clearly didn't eliminate them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a visual-only bug where factories seemed to be helping build for fleets when the factory was disabled or still self-building or similar. Especially if other factories were actually making progress on the same things the factory was ostensibly helping, it was confusing.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a harmless but annoying exception that could happen as you exit the game or quit to the main menu in the last few versions.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes for a cascade of errors that could happen from a fleet member's type being inexplicably set to null.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of places where the game simply being in the process of exiting could cause the game to log an error that was actually harmless and not something to log.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved performance on the main menu by ensuring that background threads were not able to run (they would be pointless there in general).<br />
<br />
* The way that the performance logging is handled is now a bit more idiot-proof in terms of us being less likely to cause problems with mismatched calls to it.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a kind of face-palmy issue on the main menu that was causing it to lag horribly while everything else was fine. This only happened on Steam, not GOG, and was us basically checking too frequently to see if we needed to update Steam achievements online with things that were achieved locally but not yet logged to Steam.<br />
** Once we got GOG achievements in, this would have hit there as well, so it's good to get that out of the way for both platforms.<br />
** This shifts the framerate on the main menu from a very choppy 20fps to a super fluid 200+ fps.<br />
** This also seems to make the entire game load faster, too.<br />
<br />
* Added a bunch of internal compiler toggles which let us isolate different parts of the code to see where our performance bottlenecks are on the really high planet count late-game high-ship-count peformance problem games.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare cross-threading exception in PlaySFX_ShotHitting, and another one in GameEntity_Shot.ClearVisualObjIfExists.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the prior build where combat engineers and combat sentry frigates could not be built.<br />
** This was due to a rule change in how self-building units work, and these happened to inherit some improper self-building xml.<br />
** Now they properly are able to have their self-building xml overrideen to 0, which makes them work again while still keeping the nice new rules in general.<br />
** Presumably these were the only two ships affected (units that normally are planetary but can be used in battlestations with copy_from variants), but if there are more the fix is a quick xml adjustment.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong, Afferian, Daniexpert, ArnaudB, Vortex, ckellsworth, zerschleisser, Riken Avadur, Maggo 0815, daimyo_willem, XTRMNTR2K, and Distuth for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The Nanocaust can now use fireteams; like marauders, enable "Tactician" mode<br />
<br />
* Tactician is now the default for marauders and nanocaust<br />
<br />
* Some minor buffs to how quickly marauders can consolidate their planets<br />
<br />
* Sabotage hack duration 30 -> 15, Cost 20 -> 15.<br />
<br />
* Slight increase of Super Terminal response intervals.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.303 AI Hunter Fireteams For All ==<br />
(Released January 13th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Build categories on the sidebar now sort their items by the name that they show in the sidebar, not by the actual full name of the entity. Sometimes this is different, and it makes it hard to find things when it is.<br />
<br />
* What factories are up to is now shown even on the brief tooltips, not just medium and up.<br />
** Thanks to several players for suggesting this.<br />
<br />
* Several improvements to what factories show when they have no work to do on various fleets.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes to an exception that could happen in the mercenary code, and also made it more informative if it happens again.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The "GAAAH! We have a command we need to execute during frame" error has finally been retired. Instead it now just executes the command late, which will be a desync in multiplayer that it can fix on its own. Better slightly late than never, in that case. In cases for single player it literally won't affect anything.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for the most recent report.<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements And Related Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Some bugfixing/IQ enhancement for the AI. AI threat against players had a deplorable habit of not realizing it was supposed to be against the player, and getting distracted by any other minor faction in the game. This was A. making the AI threat not press home attacks and B. making the threat not join the threat fleet appropriately. <br />
** From a discussion on discord with a number of people about why the hunter fleet seemed to be absent. This should be a big improvement.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with assassin mode (aka fireteam) hunter fleets where they were using stale/invalid data to decide when to attack. This usually meant they would fling themselves onto your defenses with reckless abandon<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a wide variety of places where RemoveEntity() was not being called properly when removing entities from a speed group.<br />
** This should lead to more correct behavior in group-move for players, and probably it will help with exos and fireteams and whatnot that are also using speed groups.<br />
<br />
* NPC/AI group move now works like it used to (more or less) prior to the player-specific group move enhancements. This keeps things like exos moving at expected speeds, for example.<br />
** Several bugs were fixed in this whole area as well while we were at it, including some things getting left in groups they should not have, and overriding speeds being forgotten when a compound command was given to units that were already in group move, etc.<br />
** Essentially the single group move command now works one way for players and one way for everyone else.<br />
<br />
* The Assassin hunter fleet type has been removed, as that was just for fire teams. Now all of the non-defensive hunter types use fire teams.<br />
** This is a pretty scary update to the hunter, making it so you no longer have to opt in to using their new exciting behaviors!<br />
<br />
* Fireteams in allied factions can now coordinate their assaults. AI-allied fireteams can also coordinate with AI threat forces<br />
<br />
== Version 1.302 Frigate Empowerment ==<br />
(Released January 12th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Added a new amount_added_to_range_per_ship_of_this_type_on_planet for ships, which allows for ships of a certain type to get a bonus of that integer (for instance something like 50 or 500 or whatever we want) for each ship of that same type on the planet beyond the first.<br />
** This currently gives the benefit to all systems of the ship, whether they are weapons or not.<br />
** This allows for the "Networked Targeters" type of mechanic that RocketAssistedPuffin thought up.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting!<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, it now says "Intensity" for factions, like it does in game, rather than saying Strength. Strength means something else in-game, so keeping this separate and consistent is helpful for clarity.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* For external invulnerability to be granted, now the granters have to either have the tag "InvulnerabilityGranter" on them, or be of type guard post.<br />
** This lets things that would become invulnerable do far less checking, thus being far more efficient about it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Infinite-ranged ships now have some new logic that should set them to always attacking ONLY the types of ships that they prefer to shoot (based on your selection) if those sorts of targets are available in their current system.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that are crippled no longer provide vision to the planets they are on. People were able to use crippled flagships as scouts.<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Frigates now automatically have 1/3 as much priority as targets for enemies to shoot. They should feel more beefy now.<br />
<br />
* The deprioritization based on overkill or frigates now only happens if the potential target is "not my special target," meaning not set to specifically be what the player ship shoots at, or the strongest tractor beam grappling the ship.<br />
<br />
* The frigate deprioritization now only affects player frigates. Won't help outguard or other factions or AIs or zombies.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* If a forcefield is sitting on top of a wormhole, it will block enemies from going into the wormhole even if the simulation speed is very high or coarse background processing is on.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of people for reporting, including Waladil, MatterofLight, and KDR_11k.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the targeting was deprioritizing anything that would be overkilled, and not factoring in stacks when doing so. This led to large things being prioritized more in general by ships.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception that could happen when disbanding fireteams if they did not belong to the scourge faction, thus leading to ships no longer moving.<br />
** Thanks to Histidine for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes for an exception that could happen inside GetFleetCap, particularly for mods.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug that could happen in LowerOrRaiseGameSpeedStyle if you tried to raise that kind of alternative game speed increase too many times.<br />
** Please do note that increasing the game speed in this particular way will absolutely hammer even a top-end CPU and probably lead to worse game performance despite not affecting gameplay accuracy. It's kind of meant for computers that don't exist yet, which is why we haven't had anyone run into this before now.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a probably-rare exception that could happen during tooltip generation for factories, most likely related to cross-thread updates.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a RenderShip error that could happen in some rare cases as ships were dying.<br />
** Thanks to NoMoreBlender for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of possible exceptions that could happen during loops through certain entity lists if the list changed during the loop. This is somewhat a side effect of more parallelism, but was already a thing that could happen prior to the most recent updates just because of what we already had in parallel. The game already was guarding against the most common cases where this could happen, but not another few subsets. It now guards against them all.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that could happen inside GetWormholeToOtherPlanet in entity orders.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception in the claiming code for neutral entities that could happen and then spam the log endlessly.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really rare and strange error that could sometimes happen in FramePartTimings. This happened to Chris periodically for the last year, but it had never been seen "in the wild"" until Daniexpert ran into it. We thought it was just related to the dev environment somehow, but it seems to be a cross-threading thing that can rarely happen on startup if things go just wrongly. The game itself will run terribly and spam the world if this happens, so making it gracefully recover is a good thing.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed some typos in the AIP history where it had double "from" and where it would try to say what planet you captured a planet, but always say "null" instead since we don't actually track the linked planets to things.<br />
** Thanks to Histidine for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.3 The Grand New AI ==<br />
( Released January 10th, 2020 )<br />
<br />
* The multipliers in the interface in the bottom left are once again literal (1.5x, 2x, etc, up to 5x).<br />
** Thanks to folks in Discord for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Some updates to the Octopus map generator from Tadrinth<br />
<br />
* Added some more tips, including explanations of Wave, CPA, etc.<br />
<br />
* Some ships are never eligible for repairs because they self-attrition, and now the tooltip says that so that it doesn't seem like a bug when they are not repaired.<br />
<br />
* The "investigating starfields" line on the startup sequence is now randomized with a variety of silly things, because we boot the game so often and get bored of the same text. Enjoy!<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed Forcefields being non-functional in the prior build.<br />
** Thanks to Histidine, ArnaudB and tadrinth for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a visual bug where allied forces were sometimes reported as having negative strength<br />
** Thanks to Histidine, NRSirLimbo and Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the recent internal versions where it was showing lots of the text as brown in the C-click menus because of an un-closed color tag.<br />
** Thanks to Astilious for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the achievements that you had previously completed locally were not properly able to be loaded, and thus would be awarded to you again every time you restarted the game.<br />
<br />
* The "FleetMembership was null on unit" error no longer shows, and instead the game mostly-silently just fixes this in the background.<br />
** However, it also increments CountOfNullFleetMembershipsFixed, which is now shown in the escape menu as "Null Mem Fixes" so we can see if that's skyrocketing for some reason.<br />
** This prevents a bunch of the marauders from being lost and problematic in certain savegames that may have had prior trauma or who knows exactly what the reason was.<br />
** Thanks to eppiox for reporting. This goes back to prior to the current beta versions.<br />
<br />
* Put in a fix for an exception in DoEntityFramePlanningLogic_TargetPrioritizing, such that in particular even if there is an exception it won't cause all targeting to fail forever after that. It will give us a better error message as well as not fouling up the whole system.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting. This goes back to prior to the current beta versions.<br />
<br />
* Suppressing the error "BUG: tried to go past the end of workinShipPool," which was harmless.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in some of the patrol code since more than one faction now uses that. It was particularly likely on multithreaded background factions, but could crop up even in normal play.<br />
<br />
* Warden Fleet Bases are no longer considered reinforcement points, as this caused some weirdness with them, and could result in it being MIA over time as units were stuck inside.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting something about reinforcements, which led into this discovery which was possibly a large root cause.<br />
<br />
* Previously it was possible for map generation algorithms to generate links/wormholes to themselves, which would throw off all manner of logic. Rather than leaving that to individual map authors to fix themselves, the game now checks for those and automatically repairs them, including in existing savegames.<br />
** From testing through the various map types, it looks like this was only happening with linked rings map type and its subtypes, but you never know what might have arisen in the future.<br />
** We're not really sure what negative effects this was having beyond strange visuals, but it probably affected AI decisions in terms of how strong a planet and its "neighbors" were by double-counting the planet itself, and it may have also impacted pathfinding between planets in a negative way.<br />
** Thanks to CaptainTaz, Acuzik, and Rivet for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in general in the code where it could give the wrong mark for a fleet membership if it passed in the wrong ship/structure type line. This probably caused some strangeness in the AI transforming units, it's hard to say.<br />
** This also led to an exploit where you could have a higher-mark command station of one type (military, whatever), then switch to a different command station type and keep the higher mark.<br />
** All of that is now fixed, although it won't retroactively fix any existing savegames.<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'capture flagships' objective hovertext with more colour, to improve readability<br />
<br />
==== No More Ship Pooling ====<br />
<br />
* The "BUG: Could not find a wormhole between" two planets wormhole movement command is no longer silent, but now pops up as an error in your face.<br />
** Additionally, all wormhole commands now should have a reason code for the command (so we can fix cases like this), and this shows the reson code.<br />
*** The sole purpose of the reason code is to help us find the places where wormhole paths are calculated incorrectly.<br />
*** But we can't actually REQUIRE the reason code, because older savegames will pop up with errors if we did so.<br />
<br />
* Found some major bugs in AI_GO_RAID and AI_FLEE_THRT.<br />
** It now logs different errors if trying to send ships from disparate planets along a path from a starting planet that doesn't match.<br />
<br />
* BUT, really, the true bug behind all of this is that we are holding references to GameEntity_Squad objects in various background threads, and those are not reliable in their identity.<br />
** Because of pooling, it's possible for an entity to be an AI ship for a while, then die and get reborn as a player ship. The errors we were seeing were with player ships being ordered around as if they were threatfleet.<br />
** The natural way of solving this that we had developed for the game was to use SquadWrapper, which adds a layer that prevents such mixups from happening.<br />
** The amount of code rework to make SquadWrapper happen all throughout the code is incredibly huge, however, and would be problematic for a wide variety of reasons. Even if we managed to change those thousands of lines of code required, that code would then run more slowly.<br />
** So the only solution, in the end, is... to stop pooling the GameEntity_Squad objects. All other types of objects can continue to be pooled as they are now, because nothing needs to hold onto such long-term references as with these.<br />
** This will cause a lot more weight on the memory garbage collector (GC) during heavy fighting or other circumstances when many ships are being created or killed. In the past, this was unacceptable.<br />
*** However, this is now mitigated by the fact that unity has more recently implemented a time-sliced garbage collector, and so the hits to it are far less severe.<br />
*** And even beyond that, we've implemented stacks of untis, and kill units "off the top," which means that the number of times we have to kill or create GameEntity_Squad units is a whole lot less.<br />
** There is a tradeoff here for sure, but in the end this also means we can then stop using SquadWrapper in other places, which in turn will improve some efficiency (mildly) in other areas of the code.<br />
** This does also mean that if background factions don't ever check for dead entities and prune them, they will wind up causing these entities to never be garbage collected and thus lead to an eventual memory leak. Previously it was that they would have incorrect game function, so this is preferable.<br />
<br />
* No longer using squad wrappers for the factories calculations on the fleets. This has a very tiny benefit to performance, almost nothing.<br />
<br />
=== More Performance! ===<br />
<br />
* VASTLY improved the performance of probably most savegames, but certainly certain ones, by making the following changes.<br />
** (The performance bump in the "performance concern" save from Democracy is from about 10% on Chris's machine to full speed.)<br />
** The following kinds of metal flows never even get checked anymore except for player ships: SelfConstruction, FactoryConstructionForPlayerMobileFleets, ClaimingNeutrals, RebuildingRemains.<br />
*** If any other non-player factions ever need to do these, we can deal with that, but frankly these are all player-centric things. However, tons of NPC and AI faction ships had one or more of these, and would check thorugh them in an expensive way every frame.<br />
** The following kinds of metal flows never even get checked anymore except for non-AI ships (so this means players and other factions do these): RepairingHullsOfFriendlies, RepairingShieldsOfFriendlies, RepairingEnginesOfFriendlies, AssistConstruction.<br />
*** This means that engineers in the hands of the AI are absolutely pointless in every way. And the medic gunboats in the hands of the AI lose their medic capabilities. The AI could field ridiculous numbers of meidc gunboats, which are computationally very expensive, and it also made the battlefield more chaotic.<br />
*** Given the AI doesn't actually pay metal to repair things, just not letting the AI make repairs in the (already super rare) cases where it would try to do so is a big performance gain. But things like outguard and other factions may need to help themselves or player ships, so them still checking it is good.<br />
** And then any faction can still do: BuildingDronesInternally. So no change there.<br />
<br />
* Then we took this even further, changing the efficiency of metal flow checks from millions of calculations and loops per second to mere thousands.<br />
** In other words, as Badger phrased it, O(n^2) == > O(n) ==> happy.<br />
** Essentially something that executed in exponential load as there were more units and more things to repair the units has become something that executes in close to linear time.<br />
** There are a variety of further shortcuts that we put in place that skip processing entirely for planets/factions where there's nothing possible to find, but before it wasted some CPU time checking anyway. We use slightly more RAM to be able to figure all that out, but it's maybe a MB or two.<br />
<br />
==== PFP Goes Mainstream ====<br />
<br />
* In the performance section of your personal settings, we had a setting called "Advanced: Run Massively Parallel Faction Processing"<br />
** That has been removed, and replaced with a new option called "Disable Parallel Faction Processing".<br />
** The default is essentially now that the parallel processing is on, whereas at first it was off by default.<br />
** The purpose of keeping this option at all is for people with very few cores on their machines.<br />
** Description of the new setting:<br />
*** Only matters in single-player, or the host in multiplayer. Parallel Faction Processing (PFP) lets the factions in the game be substantially smarter and faster in how they react to things, and is most notable at higher simulation speeds (5x, etc).<br />
*** On a lot of gaming-style computers, not only does the PFP function make factions and the AI smarter, but it actually can improve performance. We highly recommend you play with this on if your performance in the game is looking suitable.<br />
*** If you are on a computer with very few cores, then we provide the option here to disable PFP so that the processing is time-sliced. This makes the AI and factions notably slower to react, and the higher the simulation speed you choose, the worse it will get.<br />
*** If you play at 5x sim speed and have PFP off, we don't consider that a valid way to beat difficulty 10 AIs -- they're half-braindead, so it's not really a fair fight. With PFP on, or at 1x sim speed, you'll see the true fury of the maximum difficulties.<br />
** Huge thanks to Badger and some others for diagnosing this problem.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord AIP on death 120 -> 37.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord Phase Two AIP on death 20 -> 37, durability increased 25%, Parasite Bolt damage doubled, Fusion Bomb damage increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Both AI Overlord Phases grant 5,000 Science and 30 Hacking on defeat.<br />
<br />
* All Dire Guard Posts increase AIP by 8 on death.<br />
<br />
* Increased the Instigator time interval between each effect triggering.<br />
<br />
* Troop Accelerator effect 2x -> 1.5x.<br />
<br />
* Reduced AIs initial strikecraft a bit.<br />
<br />
* Dire Forcefield Guardian forcefield radius increased 66%.<br />
<br />
* The ai_planet_defense_multiplier values were a bit on the high side, previously.<br />
** Notes: We made mk3 the baseline for balance just because it's in the lower-middle range and something that is very common. It's the start of the real power curve, while mark 1 is incredibly underpowered and mark 2 is just somewhat underpowered. From mk3 up it's meant to be more of a gradient, but with 7s being somewhat overpowered. So really 3-6 are a good gradient is the goal.<br />
** In-game the stuff that is within 1-2 hops of a player homeworld is weakened no matter what mark it is, already, incidentally. And AI homeworlds get a major buff even above mark 7, too.<br />
** Before the marks went 0.6 on budget for mark 1, 0.8 mk2, 1 mk3, then a crazy 1.2 for mk4 (given the higher strength of those units at those planets that could be a jump from 20 to 120 strength), then 1.6 mk5, 2 mk5, 2.5 mk7<br />
** So let's try this instead: keep all of that the same, but make mk4 0.95 (so smaller budget but WAY more powerful stuff), 1.05 mk5, 1.15 mk6, and then 1.8 mk7. These are the fortresses.<br />
<br />
* Neutering of AI planets is now more effective.<br />
** The resulting percentage of "number of reinforcement points divided by max seen here" now squares itself. So 0.8 becomes 0.64, it's an exponential falloff.<br />
** But don't let it go below 0.05, or 5%, as the multiplier.<br />
** Additionally, if there are no reinforcement points left at all, don't let the AI have any reinforcement budget at all.<br />
** And if there is only ONE reinforcement point left (assuming this is the command station, but you never know), then it automatically drops to 0.05, 5%.<br />
** People would fully neuter a planet and then still see the budget just be far too high.<br />
<br />
* If there is more than twice the "enemy" strength on an AI planet ("enemy" here meaning you-the-player, your friends, or mutual enemies of you and the AI), then the AI now loses all its reinforcement budgets at that planet. But only after the first 5 seconds of the game, so this doesn't impact mapgen with things like nanocaust seeding or whatever else.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Improved some of the mapgen logic to have different logic on how it's able to seed things when quarters get tight. There are now several different modes for expansion of the seedable area, which for instance on maze map types and other low-granularity types should make it so that you still get a global command agumenter within 2 hops, even if it's not within 1.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Order of mapgen seeding was fleets, then tv, then ars, then gca, then fce.<br />
** This has been improved to fleets, gca, ars, tv, then fce.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== Planet Mark Level Assignment Rework ====<br />
* The code that determines the mark levels of planets has been significantly overhauled. The practical upshot of this is that the planetary mark levels are now more reasonably distributed. Here's how it works now.<br />
** For each Player homeworld, the game assigns low mark (marks 1-3) planets nearby. Note that if the highest ai difficulty is <= 5 has some extra low-mark planets<br />
** For each AI homeworld, the game assigns high mark (marks 5-7) planets nearby<br />
** For the remaining planets, they are randomly allocated based on percentages. The base values for those are as follows (with minor adjustments for particularly low or high ai difficulties) <br />
*** Mark 2: 5%<br />
*** Mark 3: 25%<br />
*** Mark 4: 35%<br />
*** Mark 5: 30%<br />
*** Mark 6: 5%<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.104 The Speed We Need ==<br />
(Released January 7th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Updated the test chamber so that you can better assign things like allied factions and so on.<br />
<br />
* Game Speed Types of Faster Ships, and all those above, now only have a 1.4x ship movement speed multiplier, instead of going up to 8x at the highest setting.<br />
<br />
=== Performance ===<br />
<br />
* Precalculated a lot more pieces of data that get checked very frequently, giving general minor speed boosts for things that get checked millions of times per second cumulatively.<br />
** It's the sort of thing that is really a minor improvement per check, but the volume of checks makes a big deal in a variety of circumstances.<br />
** Some of this stuff was as minor as avoiding an extra method call on the stack, virtual or otherwise, and others were as major as avoiding internal loops over systems once per frame per unit.<br />
** More such improvements could be made, but all the ones that were likely to be any notable performance hit have been fixed at this point.<br />
<br />
* The game now only goes up to the equivalent of what the old 5x was, but labels that as a new 9x as the top end.<br />
** We were finding that above these higher speeds, accuracy of battles was highly off. You'd essentially be playing against a lobotomized AI on anything above 5x, and above even 3x it really wasn't quite the same in terms of battle results.<br />
** The new scaling actually shows how it improves overall simulation performance (relative to realtime), so if you had a 50% speed of frames and you move up the sim speed it could accurately show you as having actually 250% clock speed if you max out the multiplier. You can typically get just under 500% of clock speed if your CPU is keeping up and you go up to the new 9x.<br />
** There are still things that don't work as accurately when you overdrive things to this degree, but it's not absolutely on easy mode in quite the same way anymore.<br />
*** As an example, it would typically take the Warden Fleet was taking 90-120 seconds to notice that you'd attacked a planet at the old 10x speed. So you could go capture a planet adjacent to a major warden fleet force before they would even think about joining the battle.<br />
<br />
* On tier 3 planets, guardians that patrol don't bother patrolling. It eats up CPU time (and later bandwidth) for no purpose at all, since it's invisible and doesn't impact your units either.<br />
<br />
* Renamed a bunch of methods to be a lot more clear what is sim and what is not. Turns out lots of stuff in the factions code that we thought might not be okay actually is, and it is now marked as such.<br />
** Other bits of the code we marked as "definitely breaks in multiplayer" or "not sure if breaks in multiplayer" to come back to. Multiplayer can recover from it, but it would be highly wasteful of network traffic.<br />
<br />
* Noticed a huge number of commands being sent for SetBehavior, so split that out some so that we can use the escape menu to try and figure out why that's the case.<br />
** Split all of the "set behavior" commands out into different variants so that in the escape menu we can see what is causing a bunch of them if there are a bunch being sent.<br />
** Then used that to fix a general performance regression in the betas that was sending a ton of SetBehavior_FromFaction_ITractoredShips for ships that were not relevant for that. This was the biggest part of the performance regression seen by Democracy, but it was also in all campaigns.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a number of leaks of gamecommands out of their pools. This isn't strictly a memory leak, but it acts vaguely similarly and doesn't help with garbage collection at any rate.<br />
** Essentially if "you" (the programmer or modder) queue a gamecommand, it will automatically go back in the pool after you use it. However, if you decide not to queue it even after pulling it out of the pool (it turns out there are no relevant entities, etc), then you have to call ReturnToPool() on it. In a few cases these were just being set to null instead, which doesn't help much.<br />
** In some other cases here, we didn't really reduce the turnover of the gamecommands, but we did make improvements to places where it might send a largely-pointless gamecommand saying "send all these ships through this wormhole path" and the list of ships turned out to be empty, etc. This sort of thing helps with performance even in single player far more than one might expect.<br />
** There wasn't anything truly egregious, but it was enough to be a drain. There are probably more such things, of lower incidence. Watching the escape menu numbers while unpaused gives clues as to where problems might be.<br />
<br />
* The way that metal flows are calculated are now literally an order of magnitude more efficient in terms of how many things they allocate and why. They now lazy-allocate things when they really have to, and otherwise just skip creating flow objects if there's nothing to do.<br />
** This was another major component of Democracy's slowdown, and this is extremely longstanding in the game in general (as old as the game itself), but it's not something that fully fixes the particular performance hole we were chasing. At least not fully.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* V-Wing range 4,200 -> 3,200.<br />
<br />
* Fusion Bomber range 4,000 -> 4,200.<br />
<br />
* Parasite range 3,200 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboat tachyon range 1,700 -> 3,200.<br />
<br />
* Ranger tachyon range 3,200 -> 5,000.<br />
** Thanks to tadrinth for some notes on the above units.<br />
<br />
* Consolidated all the Auto Bomb variants into a lower cap style of ship, with health and damage increased to compensate.<br />
** They should be more or less very similar, just with less performance strain from units constantly dying then being rebuilt.<br />
** Cluster Bombs only spawn 3 Mini Bombs now instead of 5, but their damage is increased to compensate, beyond what was already done above.<br />
<br />
* Consolidated the Railpod into the same style.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard Hydras now spawn 3 heads on death instead of 5, stats bumped to compensate.<br />
<br />
* Stingray Hydras now spawn 2 heads on death instead of 3.<br />
<br />
* Automated Construction Bots now spawn only 3 Mini versions, stats bumped up to compensate.<br />
<br />
* Slight reduction to most Frigate metal and energy costs.<br />
** Going slow with this, as increasing energy cost later if it's overdone can cause brownouts in existing saves.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.103 Tooltip Sweet Brevity ==<br />
(Released January 6th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Wave tooltips now correctly show 'adaptive' or 'random' where appropriate, instead of always telling you the real AI type<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* The 'remove unlock variance' option now applies to fleets you can capture<br />
** Thanks to CyberKun for reporting<br />
<br />
* The hack options for ARS grant ship line now correctly report how many ships would be granted, as does C-Clicking on the ARS<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting<br />
<br />
* Maps now default to having 7 FCEs instead of 11 (there were just too many before)<br />
<br />
=== Tooltips Three Modes of Verbosity ===<br />
<br />
* TLDR of the below: There are now three levels of detail on the planet and ship tooltips: brief, medium, and full.<br />
** The default is now brief, which is new for both planets and ships, and is WAY smaller. Just the real basics, easier to understand.<br />
*** It's probably worth keeping this as the default even if you like more detail, just because these specific bits are the really core facts about a given ship. We may pare a few bits down even more. BUT if you prefer the old style of tooltips...<br />
** Medium is what the old "brief" used to be, and it has very slightly less detail than before. In the main it's better while not being much less detailed than before. A lot of the contrast of this with the other view is something that highlights the second tier of details better than ever, which is kind of cool.<br />
*** If you want this to be your new default, just turn on a setting and it will be. You can't shift "down" to brief if you do that, though.<br />
** Full is what it always has been, tons of information. You now have to hold ctrl and alt to see it, while ctrl OR alt will give you the medium view.<br />
*** You can also see full as your default, as you always could, if you prefer. However you can no longer go "down" to medium or the new brief from the full view if it's your default.<br />
<br />
* Old hotkey being removed: Toggle Ship And Planet Tooltip Detail Mode<br />
** Description: By default, the amount of information about ships and planets is abbreviated. Hold this key to see the full thing.<br />
** In the tooltips section of the settings menu, you can switch it so that the default is showing the full text, in which case holding this causes the abbreviation.<br />
<br />
* New hotkeys added: Increase Ship And Planet Tooltip Detail (Key 1) and (Key 2)<br />
** Description of both: By default, the amount of information about ships and planets is heavily abbreviated. Hold this key alone to see the medium detail view. Hold this AND the other 'increase detail' key to see the max detail.<br />
** In the tooltips section of the settings menu, you can adjust the default up to show medium or high detail. In those cases, there's no way to see the abbreviated versions.<br />
<br />
* Old game setting: Show Ship And Planet Detail Mode By Default<br />
** Renamed to Show Ship And Planet Complete Detail By Default<br />
** New description: Normally ships and planets show a very condensed amount of information about themselves in their tooltips. However, you can hold a key (shown at the bottom of those tooltips) to make them show a little more info or a whole lot more info. If you prefer to see the complete info by default, then you can enable this option.<br />
<br />
* New game setting: Show Ship And Planet Medium Detail By Default<br />
** Normally ships and planets show a very condensed amount of information about themselves in their tooltips. However, you can hold a key (shown at the bottom of those tooltips) to make them show a little more info or a whole lot more info. If you prefer to see the medium level of info by default, then you can enable this option.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Spider reload time 4s -> 3s, shots per salvo 1 -> 3, engine stun per shot 12 -> 6, damage 96 -> 45.<br />
** Tarantula is same.<br />
<br />
* Terrier reload time 4s -> 3s, shots per salvo 1 -> 3, engine stun per shot 16 -> 8, damage 51 -> 30, speed 1,000 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
* Paralyser reload time 9s -> 4s, damage 135 -> 68, shots per salvo 1 -> 2, paralysis per shot 4 -> 2.<br />
<br />
* Railpods use the same self damage mechanism as Minefields, now self destruct in 2 shots regardless of other factors. Reload time 4s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.102 Fireteam Refinements ==<br />
(Released January 3rd, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Add a "Select all non-flagship military on planet" selection option<br />
** Suggested by Iocaine<br />
<br />
* Some minor improvements to fireteam based factions<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.101 Ship Cap Reversions ==<br />
(Released January 2nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Fifteen new achievements have been added, to account for the new adaptive AI types. That brings us up to 154 achievements in total!<br />
* Added "Remove Unlock Variance in Capturables" option. This option removes the random ranges ships and turrets can be found with, fixing it at a constant average. Suggested by Flypaste, Fluffiest, CyberKun and many others on Discord. Thanks donblas.<br />
<br />
=== Fireteam and Minor Faction changes ===<br />
<br />
* Consolidate the Hunter Fleet and Marauder fireteam logic. This should make it quite easy to add fireteam logic to new minor factions, and allow for improved intelligence of fireteams going forward<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where marauder fireteams weren't always detecting that they had won a battle<br />
<br />
* Allied Marauders are back to killing command stations by default, but with a setting to disable it. This is a no-longer-basically-cheating version of "minor factions don't cause AIP increases". Allied Marauders always kill warp gates though. If this works then I'm going to deprecate "minor factions don't cause AIP increase" since that's too cheaty for my tastes<br />
<br />
=== Balance ===<br />
<br />
* In the prior release there was a thing with "growth versus stagnant" multipliers. Those are gone now, reverted to how they were before.<br />
<br />
* Also in the prior release, there were a lot of things that didn't get cap increases anymore, but now they work like strikecraft (and thus like they always did, although with some extra clarity because the cap scaling is still iterative as noted last release).<br />
** Frigates are unaffected by all this, as their scaling was essentially just evened out and they were still "growth style" units.<br />
<br />
* uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant has been removed, as the mechanic it was working with is now gone.<br />
<br />
* AI Great Turret health 3x instead of 5x. Tesla isn't mostly in hull anymore.<br />
<br />
* Tesla Turret bit more expensive for the AI too.<br />
<br />
* Put in some changes to how strikecraft reinforcements are placed, which makes them evenly fill all the available guard posts as much as they can. Previously the logic was really strange and also really slow, so now mapgen is a bit faster yet again (other changes in the prior build also made it faster).<br />
** So there should no longer be empty guard posts at the start of the game where you run into them and that's strange.<br />
<br />
* Also put in a change that allows more than 800 ships of a category (strikecraft, turrets, etc) to be reinforced at a planet at a time if need be, since that is a thing that can happen with strikecraft. It now allows for up to 8000.<br />
<br />
* Magnifiers and Troop Accelerators are now set to appear on the galaxy map on planets they are at, like most other "devious devices" the AI has.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes And Similar ===<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to mod out or deprecate ship lines in starting fleets or otherwise by setting their max cap to 0, which then takes them out completely.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for requesting this ability.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where display_name was being incorrectly blanked out on partial records when reading xml.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The Adaptive AI types now actually show their names as being easier, harder, moderate, brutal, full, etc, rather than just all showing "adaptive" in the interface. Now you can see what you're getting into!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mysterious bug where sometimes guard posts would not be able to seed during a reconquest seeding. This may have been exclusively related to the adaptive AI type, it's hard to be sure. But at any rate, when it runs into a lack of data on what kinds of guard posts to use, it now chooses what to use properly so that it has something. <br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the actual Random AI type was being shown, instead of just "random"<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where draw_in_galaxy_view being true was not enough to make structures or ships properly show up in the galaxy map view.<br />
** This makes it so that things like black hole machines and so on are visible on the galaxy map for the first time. And ion cannons and mass drivers, etc.<br />
<br />
* If a quick start includes a faction that is not present in the installation of a player later trying to load the quickstart (mods, expansions, etc), it now blanks out the offending faction and continues as normal with all the other factions. Anyone who DOES have that faction will see it work as expected, while anyone else will just see it missing but all else well, which is really the best of both worlds.<br />
** This was affecting a lot of our quick starts in the prior beta build.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.1 So Much Stuff We Can't Even, But More Is Still Coming ==<br />
(Released January 1st, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Add the "Extreme" category of Quickstarts, with 2 default, 1 nearly default, and 2 bonus scenarios.<br />
** Thanks to CyberKun for suggesting the category.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers will now be automatically targeted by units again, but are set to a low priority.<br />
** They still seem to like shooting these first however, if they happen to be in the way.<br />
** This lets factions destroy these again rather than being shot to bits, ignoring them.<br />
** Feedback is appreciated - this is a fairly opinion heavy thing.<br />
*** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Updated the "Various Weapons" fleet name styling with DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY's latest changes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Random Any ai type could pick 'random easier'<br />
<br />
* The Tech History menu (viewable by clicking the Science icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen) now shows the total science you've spent.<br />
<br />
* The "Show Entity Strength When Hovering" tooltip has been removed, as we are now going to do this by default. It was strange not showing it.<br />
** Ships now say if they are showing their own strength or the strength of themselves as a stack when you hover over them.<br />
<br />
* Targeting behavior of ships that are freely moving around (pursuit mode, whether of the player or other factions) are now vastly smarter in how they deal with non-combatants in general (things without guns but that need to die).<br />
** They'll still shoot at them just as frequently as ever IN PASSING, if there's nothing else to shoot at or that thing is the most important priority to shoot at based on the various metrics. But they no longer will specifically pursue those sorts of things with an excess weight just because they happen to be close.<br />
** If there are non-combatants with a high priority, then ships should still beeline for those just as well as ever, it's worth noting. And if they're not in pursuit mode, then nothing is different at all.<br />
** The net effect of this is that ships will generally approach and destroy dangerous things like great-turrets before they start messing about with an unarmed guard post or a gravity generator or whatever else. Survivability goes way up.<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust construction centers and Marauder Outposts now warp in over time (a short time interval, like 30 seconds to a minute) rather than warping in instantly. This gives their enemies a bigger window to counter attack in.<br />
<br />
* The Tech Menu now tells you a very approximate strength increase for both defenses and ships after upgrading.<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to hack Global Command Augmenters to re-roll provided turrets. (Thanks donblas)<br />
<br />
=== Optional Advanced: Massively Parallel Faction Processing ===<br />
<br />
* New setting in the personal settings: "Advanced: Run Massively Parallel Faction Processing"<br />
** Only matters on the host in multiplayer. This lets the factions in the game be substantially smarter and faster in how they react to things, and is most notable at higher simulation speeds (10x, etc).<br />
** But all this may come at a cost that your CPU can't handle; we're still testing that and would love feedback on the difference you see in simulation speed (the percent under the game speed multiplier) if you turn this on and off.<br />
** You will have a much fiercer foe at 10x speed with this on, versus an almost braindead one without it. At regular speed it won't matter much between one or the other.<br />
** We're hoping to build toward this being the default for everyone, but for now we don't want to inflict slower framerates on everyone just so that 10x speed runs smarter. One step at a time.<br />
** Right now this is off by default, and needs a lot of testing, but amazingly with the current design it did not slow down at all in a relatively-small-number-of-factions game on Chris's i7-6700 HQ. Much more data is needed.<br />
<br />
* You may experience some strange and awful bugs by enabling this, at least at first, as the factions have never been parallel in quite this way before. This may tank performance or cause lots of strange errors, and in most cases we can find and fix them if you send us the errors or the savegame with the bad performance. In most cases it would be two threads from different factions trying to use the same list or other collection. To report: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/<br />
** Thank you!<br />
<br />
=== Fireteams ===<br />
<br />
* Fireteams are a concept developed by Badger to allow non-player factions to flexibly coordinate a variety of simultaneous actions. It's the smartest strategic AI mechanism in either AIWC or AIW2 (in theory at least). Fireteams were developed to power the Scourge, a feature for the first DLC, but we can use the same basic logic for other minor factions to give those factions a nice intelligence boost. We are backporting R&D done for an expansion-only feature to the base game because the base game isn't hard enough yet. Mwahahaha. <br />
* Allied ships using fireteams (just marauder raiders for now) will show you what that fireteam is planning on doing in the verbose hovertext, to make coordinating between you and your allies more possible.<br />
** The simplest description for how Fireteams work is like this. All units for a given minor faction are assigned to small fireteams of 1-4 strength, so there will be lots of fireteams. Each fireteam determines its own objectives independently. If multiple fireteams have the same objective then they will coordinate their attacks.<br />
** This is currently available for the Hunter Fleet (via the 'Assassin' type in the Game Lobby) or the Marauders (via choosing "Intelligence: Tactician" in the game lobby).<br />
*** The Fireteam implementation for Marauders and Hunter Fleets is brand new, so I expect some teething pains and would love feedback (with save games)<br />
<br />
=== All-New "Adaptive" AI Type ===<br />
<br />
* Add in a new Adaptive AI type, which alternates between available types every so often. They work similarly to Random, in that there is "Adaptive Easier", "Adaptive Brutal", "Adaptive Any", and so on.<br />
** Change interval is in XML, and is once per hour. It won't change any existing units, but reinforcements/wave composition and so on will change. <br />
** There are currently no Achievements for these AI types<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Orbital Mass Driver reload time 9s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Hack Ion Cannon and Mass Driver now takes 2 seconds, rather than 15.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers that the player either hacked or bought now die to remains.<br />
<br />
* Replaced Military Command Stations engine stun with paralysis.<br />
** Engine Stun on this thing could be fairly exploitable, allowing it to hold off incredible amounts of enemy strength.<br />
** However, that was only possible if the enemy could be slowed at all. If they couldn't, it tended to fall relatively easily.<br />
** Swapping it to paralysis should let it not be as strong in the old ideal case, but also improves it in the worst possible case.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian damage 4,000 -> 8,000, shots per salvo 6 -> 3.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of Tesla weapons very slightly (10% ish?) and bumped up the splash size by 15% ish.<br />
** What this means is they effectively act more or less the same, except will not waste their initial shots on the first singular ship to come into range, and will tend to hit more beyond.<br />
** This was split between both the range and splash size to avoid making the visual effect too much larger. Shouldn't have much impact on gameplay, however.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post now has the fortified effect on it.<br />
<br />
* Hydra heads and the like cost no energy.<br />
** This was the cause of mysterious brownouts.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Reworked the way that wave compositions are filled to be more efficient and ensure that absolutely as much of the budget is spent of a wave as possible.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for discovering that this was not happening.<br />
<br />
* In the normal non-stealth-planet themes, the stealth guard posts are now 1/50th as likely to appear as before. There were vastly too many of these showing up in the galaxy prior to now.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guardian damage 2,500 -> 5,000, now has the same durability as the other Dires.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range slightly of MLRS, Concussion and Nucleophilic Guard Posts.<br />
** The main contributors to the "small world problem".<br />
<br />
* Increased the cost of normal Guardians by 50%.<br />
** This is in preparation of the next update, in which these'll be getting buffs. It's done in two stages to avoid current saves suddenly getting much harder.<br />
** With this, old games will be similar, and new ones will have the correct Guardian count for when the buffs hit. So for a time, Guardians'll be a bit easier.<br />
** This is part of making Guardians scarier individually, as right now they can feel a bit flimsy and kind of just too close to Strikecraft overall.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so this is a kind of funny story... cough.<br />
** Essentially, various ships and turrets and whatever have modifiers to kill other specific types of ships or structures with certain characteristics, right?<br />
** So something is really good at killing structures in general, or high-energy-usage stuff, or items with thin hulls or whatever else. Easy enough.<br />
** The problem was, we had these ships getting BETTER at killing those same things at higher marks, while also getting a general damage buff.<br />
** Puffin's example, as he was the one to realize this:<br />
*** MK1 Pike Corvette does 45 damage, 3x to high armour, 2x to high hull remaining, for...270 damage.<br />
*** MK6 is 189 damage, 5.5x to high armour, 3.5x to high hull remaining, for...3,638.<br />
** As he put it, "I feel like I know where the "late game is easier than early" problem is."<br />
** We may need to rebalance some of these units to generally have higher specialized damage or higher damage in general, BUT, we've now removed the increase in damage multipliers from the following categories of stuff:<br />
*** Strikecraft (yours and enemy of course), Turrets (ditto), Frigates (mostly yours), Guardians (mostly enemy), and Guard Posts (mostly enemy).<br />
** We've LEFT this monstrosity of multiplication on a few specific things:<br />
*** The Rorqual Hegira Ark (yours), AI Fortresses (enemies), and any battlestations (yours) with weapons.<br />
*** This may be something we want to give to a few other special units of the AI or you, we'll see, but it would be specifically for Very Special Units.<br />
<br />
* Metabolizing Gangsaw armour 60 -> 90, reduced count found in ARS and Fleets.<br />
<br />
* Consumer Starting Fleet now uses normal Gangsaws instead of the Vicious variant.<br />
<br />
* All normal Turrets (i.e not Plasma or Beam) have armour of 80mm.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now uses Vanguard Hydras instead of the normal one. Also has 25 instead of 20. <br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian speed 600 -> 1,000.<br />
<br />
* The "singular freaky surprises" of AIs now will only appear on planets between marks 2 and up, rather than every planet owned by the AI. No surprises TOO early in the game, then, with golemite and similar.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* GCAs now have a higher chance of having an extra "OtherDefense" item at the end.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for a suggestion in this area.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cost a bit of Weaken Turret and Weaken Guard Post hacks.<br />
<br />
==== Ship Cap Calculation Refinements ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the caps for ships are calculated is now vastly different, and a bit more expensive on the CPU (but worth it).<br />
** Essentially before it was using a floating point number to get a result, and then rounding up. So very often this would lead to things not actually increasing in a manner that you'd expect, or frigate counts not increasing at all for several marks before finally increasing.<br />
** Now it applies each multiplier sequentially to the original number, and then rounds up each time in between, so you always get the expected result.<br />
** This means that, for example, the mark 3 frigates of things with cap 1 now have a cap 3 instead of 2. The end result is usually pretty much the same at mark 6 and 7, or close, but the intervening marks are now more accurate and we shouldn't have people with lots of confusion on their caps not increasing like they would expect.<br />
<br />
* There are now three different ship cap growth styles, rather than one:<br />
** Stikecraft (works about the same as it always has, although will give you slightly more now, working as expected because of iterative math).<br />
*** This was already pretty much working fine.<br />
** Frigates (much lower growth rate than before, but ends up in a similar place numbers-wise, however gives you what you'd expect rather than something surprising now).<br />
*** Numerically this was balanced fine, but people couldn't understand why it jumped around strangely because of rounding with fractions.<br />
** Everything else (does... not gain cap by leveling up).<br />
*** Wait, wut? Hold on a moment, though: one of the most annoying things ever is having to go back and put out more mines or turrets later on on all your planets because you just increased your caps. That still will happen from GCAs, but it's at least less common because general techs won't cause this to happen.<br />
*** Besides which, performance can be a real pain with turrets if there are just excessive numbers of those. How about we increase the strength without that? Same result, but game runs better and also less micro for you. For more about that, see below.<br />
<br />
* On the mark levels, rather than just having a multiplier for hull/shield points and attack, it now has a "growth" one and a "stagnant" one.<br />
** "Growth" are the same numbers as before, and apply to frigates and strikecraft. Aka nothing changes as these have both a power/hull increase AND a ship cap increase as they go up.<br />
** "Stagnant" are used for ships that used to get a mark level bonus to ship cap, but no longer do. So to keep them equal in power while smaller in number, it includes their hull or attack power multiplier multiplied by what their old ship cap multiplier would have been.<br />
*** The end power on these is absolutely identical to what it used to be, but it's for turrets and similar where they are now not something you need to go in and place extra every time you upgrade a tech that improves turrets. See the above notes.<br />
*** This obviously does also apply to things like tractor beam arrays and minefields and so forth, and given that AIs don't use the human-style caps for those that does mean that those are just plain stronger now on AI planets when they are (rarely) used.<br />
**** If we want to change that, we can make AI versions with the uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant flag from below, but that doesn't seem super important for anything but turrets.<br />
<br />
* Added a new uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant flag which, when set to true, causes something that would normally grow attack bonuses and hull bonuses per mark level as if unit cap was stagnant (thus larger bonuses) and change it to grow as if it had an increasing cap (thus smaller bonuses).<br />
** This is used for the Great-Turrets so that they don't get crazy stronger at higher mark levels, since the AI doesn't use normal human-style caps anyway.<br />
<br />
* Any fleet leaders (golems, arks, battlestations, citadels, etc) now act as though uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant is true. Thus they'll scale as they always have. Same with guardians, guard posts, command stations, king units, and drones. Also LargeShips and SmallShips that are used by third party facions.<br />
<br />
* All of the AI structures now explicitly have uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant on them to avoid them getting accidental crazy buffs of any sorts. This mainly benefits AI Fortresses and the like, which could have been very scary otherwise.<br />
<br />
* Fleet Capacity Extenders now only work for strikecraft, as their increasing a frigate could be absolutely crazy in terms of the impact to both your power (in a good way) and your economy (in a bad way).<br />
<br />
* Stationary planet-bound forcefields, tractor beam sources, gravity sources, and tachyon sources now upgrade in the same way that frigates do (aka they behave more or less like they always have, but with slightly more clarity -- they get more unit cap as they go, and the lower "growth" style stats increases instead of the higher "stagnant" ones).<br />
** People do love having more forcefields, that's for sure, and the ability to field more tractors and so forth are similarly not something we want to condense down like we would turrets.<br />
<br />
* Minefields now have their own special_entity_type and also a rollup for easy iteration over them. Some clever AI routines may need that sometime in the future.<br />
** Additionally, minefields now continue to get a larger ship cap at the strikecraft-style rate of addition, and regular growth stats. Got to have enough for coverage, of course!<br />
<br />
==== AI Great-Turrets ====<br />
<br />
* All of the AI turrets were already different from the player turrets in that they generally have half the range of the player counterparts. Now we're taking it even further.<br />
** Mainly because turrets can't stack, and thus will grind the game to a halt if the AI builds full caps of them at the sort of strength and costs that we had them at previously, we've condensed them to being essentially like stacks-in-one right from the start.<br />
** All of the AI turrets are called Great-Turrets instead of just turrets, and they have 5x the cost and firepower and health that the player versions do (while still having half the range).<br />
** This makes them truly terrifying even in small numbers, but it's something that is actually slightly in your favor compared to what it was when they were separate since they had more shots and thus were less likely to overkill your ships (just your framerate).<br />
** This shouldn't really affect existing games too much, because the AIs barely used turrets before -- mostly -- at least compared to what they do now.<br />
<br />
* For any games older than 1.026, it will now remove 4/5ths of the turrets from AI planets, since AI turrets are now a lot stronger and more condensed being great-turrets.<br />
<br />
==== Attack Ranges And The Small World Problem ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new galaxy option to the balance section: "All Ship Attack Ranges"<br />
** Lets you adjust the effective range of all of the ships in the galaxy -- yours and enemies. Does not affect 'infinite' sniper ranges, naturally. Also does impact tractor beams. The default is 0.8x in order to avoid the 'small world' problem where all the enemies are fighting you at once on a planet.<br />
** This does make it so that you need to be slightly more strategic with placements of your own turrets, of course. Your turrets naturally have 2x the range of their AI great-turret counterparts, though.<br />
** If you want to crank this as low as 0.1x (bad idea) you can, or you can crank it all the way up to 1.3x (also probably not the best thing).<br />
** Chris notes: This is a softer nerf than we originally thought of, just to play it safe for now. But if people are interested in trying smaller values, you now can.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Lance weapon of all variants (plus Laser Pulse weapon) 12,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Triple Lance variant damage 4,000 -> 1,800, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Other variants Lance damage 6,000 -> 2,650, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse damage 4,500 -> 3,500.<br />
<br />
==== AI Reinforcement Budget Caps And So Much More ====<br />
<br />
* The five "balance_initial_ai_defenses" xml entries in our central constants have been completely removed, and equivalents are now on the actual AI types instead.<br />
** This lets us completely balance the AI defenses around AI types if we ever want to tune that.<br />
** These are also per-reinforcement-point now, rather than per-planet, and they are also directly in AI cost units rather than "caps" which have to be converted to those units by a mysterious multiplier.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that we calculate what the defensive budget cap at a planet is has been rewritten from scratch. It was giving absurdly high numbers previously, such as 443 strength for the AI home planet's cap at the START of a game. That was just way too much for the start to be sitting at, cap-wise.<br />
** Now things are balanced completely around the number of reinforcement points, like the original game was, so if you go in and neuter a planet it will absolutely cripple their ability to reinforce. More power to you, the player! Yay!<br />
** The overall caps are also far lower than they ever were in the past, this is worth stressing before you read the next two bits.<br />
** But there remains a very tiny (laughably small, really) percentage bonus that the AI gets as the AIP rises. Eh.<br />
** There's also a NEW fairly small percentage bonus based on time spent in the campaign. The way it works out is a 48% increase in budget after TEN HOURS of playing at difficulty TEN. After 10 hours at difficulty 7, it's a much more modest 12% increase. This gives you some time pressure, but it's really nothing major and is still less than the AI could theoretically start out with prior to now. And with your new ability to absolutely cripple the AI by neutering guard posts at no AIP cost... we may need to make some of these multipliers higher, who knows. But probably now, we mainly have other plans.<br />
<br />
* Special Forces Ninja hideouts no longer count as reinforcement points. That was old AIWC-style thinking. Now it's just guard posts and the command station itself.<br />
<br />
* We've been experimentally tuning the numbers a bunch on these, too.<br />
<br />
* planet_dire_guardian_count has been changed to planet_dire_guardian_percentage.<br />
** This lets us be a little more flexible with the marks of planets getting percentages of dire guardians rather than explicit numbers,<br />
** The AI homeworlds are always full-dire, still.<br />
<br />
* The way that guardians are spawned on initial planet creation, and/or on reconquest, is now completely different and respects the budgets and budget caps.<br />
** Previously it was adding guardians kinda-sorta twice, and thus often making the really high-mark planets absurdly overpowered in general but in particular on AI types like Royal.<br />
** Not only was this logic doing the above, but it also was interpreting the budget caps entirely incorrectly, thus more or less ignoring them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section: Write AI Budget Info In Planet Tooltips<br />
** If something seems off with the planet strengths and reinforcements, then this is a way to see what is going on under the hood.<br />
<br />
* Improved the performance of how the game calculates tachyon, tractor, and gravity sources in the rollups. It's now substantially more precalculated than before, no longer having to iterate over any systems.<br />
** There's a small benefit to the strength counting code in this, too.<br />
** And actually, map generation in general seems notably faster with these changes in, despite the below change.<br />
<br />
* The GetAIToPurchaseCostPresentForBudgetType() method is now far slower, but much more accurate (not lumping strikecraft and guardians together, for instance) and always up to the instant accurrate (not having to wait for the strength counting code to run).<br />
** This should solve several issues with the budgets on reinforcements being ignored or improperly overly strict, as the case may be.<br />
<br />
* Found a place where it was seeding extra guardians per guard post, and took that out.<br />
<br />
* During reconquest seeding, the AI no longer gets a bunch of guardians to go with every guard post.<br />
** Guard posts in general are not expected to be tied to guardians, and guardians will eventually be vastly more powerful than they are now.<br />
** This was causing some planets, like AI homeworlds, to get VASTLY more guardians than they should, blowing way past their budget for guardians.<br />
<br />
* The way that AI reinforcement budgets are calculated is no longer based around the number of reinforcement points, but instead just a flat amount for the planet, which gets reduced (severely) by any lost reinforcement points.<br />
** Thus no matter how many reinforcement points there are, you don't have to suddenly worry about super high budgets on the AI planet, or strange spikes in budgets just because there are more guard posts.<br />
** Actually what this means, though, is two things: firstly, each reinforcement point is weaker on a planet with many of them (due to same number of units spread around more); but secondly, destroying a reinforcement point on a planet with fewer of them will do more (due to it reducing the cap of the planet by a larger percentage).<br />
<br />
* There is a new ignore_guardian_restrictions_in_waves that we use on the royal AI type, which lets it use its full capacity in sending waves of guardians at you.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for turrets and non-turret defenses, those will no longer increase based on the mark level of the planet or the fact that the planet is an AI homeworld.<br />
** This keeps them from having way too many of these things on high levels and next to nothing on lower ones.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for guardians, it's no longer doubled for the AI homeworlds.<br />
** This keeps THOSE from becoming so absurdly high.<br />
<br />
* There is a new multiplier_for_starting_guardian_budget_on_reconquest on AI types which makes it so that there CAN be some guardians added back onto planets, per-AI-type, during a reconquest of that planet.<br />
** For most AIs this will just be 0.015, which is an eighth of an eighth (the significance of that will be relevant in a bit).<br />
** This lets the AIs MAYBE get some of their guardians back right as they capture a planet, partialiarly moreso later in the campaign, but often it will be too paltry for them to get anything.<br />
** For the Royal AI, it is set to 0.001 since it has such a higher budget of guardians in general. This may mean they practically get nothing, ever, in those circumstances; but better than too much and we can always tune later.<br />
<br />
* There are then other new multipliers on AI types: multiplier_for_game_starting_guardians_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_turrets_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_non_turret_defenses_from_total_budget, and multiplier_for_game_starting_strikecraft_from_total_budget.<br />
** These all affect how much of the AI's budget for each planet they start with when the game is at the very zeroth second still in mapgen.<br />
** In the past, we always gave -- for some reason -- fully HALF of the budget cap to each planet, which did not give much room for them to expand and get really huge if you ignore them for too long. ;) Most any planet could do would be to double in power, aside from things like the Hunter or other third parties coming in and making it temporarily stronger.<br />
** Now we've got this set to 0.125, which is an eighth of the full budget or a quarter of what the old starting strength was. This lets us multiply the final budget by 4x to still have the same starting strength (and we have done that), but now the starting strength can get 8x stronger if you leave them alone for THAT long. And that's before you get into the (very small, as noted in prior notes) increases based on time elapsed and AIP. <br />
** So the AI has more growth potential, BUT this is measured against the fact that your neutering of them is incredibly powerful.<br />
*** If they had 4 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/5th of whatever its max would have been.<br />
*** If they had 10 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/11th of whatever its max would have been. Wowzers.<br />
*** In both cases this keeps you from neutering things to be TOO absolutely weak, but also gives an incentive for popping guard posts when you can that are not related to your main objectives but might threaten you in the future. Aka a lot like the first game.<br />
<br />
* Added the fields always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point and always_is_ai_non_turret_defense_spawn_point, both bools, to game entities (ships only).<br />
** This lets us override the logic that says "only primary keys of modulus 6 get turrets around them" and things of that nature.<br />
** This is now used for the AI overlord, to always let it be surrounded by both types of things (phase 1 only).<br />
** Note that these fields only work for ships that are already a spawn point (mainly guard posts and command stations).<br />
<br />
* The Turtle AI type now has 4x the turret budget of other AI types.<br />
** Fortress Baron has 3x the turret budget.<br />
** Peacemaker has 2x the turret budget.<br />
** These heavier-turret variants are certainly interesting to run into and give the game a very different feel. These are the more defensive-oriented AIs, after all.<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_reinforcement_location bool field. This lets us make things other than command stations and guard posts into reinforcement points.<br />
** Now that reinforcement points don't actually cause the AI to get more budget, but rather just have it spread out more, it's far more interesting to have this.<br />
** Plus it makes it so you can do even harder neutering to certain planets, since the total number of reinforcement points will be higher by definition, which is good for you as a player.<br />
** But it also makes it so that isolated units with this flag on it will now be more protected than before, possibly with turrets around them, which is in itself quite interesting.<br />
** BUT that still means that forces are being spread more thin around the planet, potentially, so there are pros and cons to you strategically in general with this.<br />
** AI structures that thus now act as reinforcement points:<br />
*** Warden Fleet Base (again -- back to the same as the prior version that was last public anyway).<br />
*** Data Center<br />
*** Fortified Data Center<br />
*** Major Data Center<br />
*** Plasma Eye<br />
*** Ion Eye<br />
*** Troop Accelerator<br />
*** AI Fortress<br />
*** Raid Engine<br />
*** Alarm Post<br />
*** Magnifier<br />
*** Instigator Base<br />
*** Astro Train Depot<br />
*** Risk Analyzer<br />
*** All of those new ones above also now have always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point="true" on them. Yet more texture in the planets, as well as giving them more inherent defenses.<br />
<br />
* Guardians, as well as anything marked as a reinforcement location, can no longer be transported or put inside a guard post.<br />
** Older savegames may have some of them in there.<br />
** This causes FAR more guardians to be out and patrolling around now than were before. Some of them were just sitting inside guard posts in a very boring fashion before, rather than doing their patrol thing from what we can tell.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for planets on the galaxy map now show you how many reinforcement points the AI has there out of how many total there have ever been there if it's an AI planet.<br />
<br />
* Added modulus_for_turrets_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 6) and modulus_for_non_turret_defenses_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 3) as fields to the AI type. Previously these values were hardcoded in, but now they can be changed for various AI types. This will make turrets appear around more structures for those AI types, or non-turret-defenses do the same.<br />
** Turtle now uses 1 and 2 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Fortress Baron now uses 2 and 3 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Peace Maker now uses 2 and 3 instead of 3 and 3.<br />
** This makes it so that their turrets are more spread out on their planets rather than being clumped in super-crazy places on just some locations.<br />
<br />
* Added a variety of new levers that determine now how budgets are distributed intra faction or inter faction, nor what the caps or starting amounts are... but instead affect how bonuses (or penalties) work to various AI types. These can be regular floating point numbers with three decimal points of precision (0.001)<br />
** multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement, multiplier_for_budget_wave, multiplier_for_budget_cpa, multiplier_for_budget_warden_fleet, multiplier_for_budget_reconquest, multiplier_for_budget_hunter_fleet.<br />
** These don't have any effect on other parts of these AIs -- there are other mechanisms for choosing how much budget goes where, but this lets us set general scales on a per-AI basis on certain types of budget. This is pretty importance for us to be able to balance things reasonably so that there are things like appropriate growth rates of AI budget without you feeling like it starts out with too much, or has too low of a final cap, etc.<br />
** Most of these are just set to 1 for now, but multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 2 for almost all AIs. multiplier_for_budget_wave is 2.2 for the Vicious Raider, and multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 4 on the Turtle.<br />
** We'll undoubtably balance things more using this in the future, but for now this is a nice new lever for us to be able to use to give AIs their own unique characters as well as simply making them not have anemic defenses 30 minutes in even if their defenses 1 second in are smaller now.<br />
<br />
* The way that the AI tries to spend its funds on reinforcements DURING gameplay is absolutely reworked from scratch. <br />
** It was doing a strange thing where it would kind of roll a die and depending on the results try to reinforce certain things with more or less priority, and this often led to some funky results. Potentially it resulted in under-spending at times, and sometimes it may have meant a larger portion of the budget went to non-turret defenses than was at all warranted. And sometimes there were no turrets being put in at all. The reasoning was sound, really, but it was old and didn't fit with the modern economy of the AIs in the game.<br />
** Now it instead goes through a complicated set of calculations of percentages of what goes where, within random tolerances, dividing out budgets in a certain priority between strikecraft, turrets, non-turret defenses (NTDs), and guardians. If something will get lower amounts of funding, then other things naturally will pick up the slack in a pretty sensible order of priority. It then tries to spend its money more wisely once it has sub-budgets allocated, and rolls any excesses into guardians first (to give more of a chance of buying one), and then into strikecraft (to try to fully deplete the budget if at all possible.<br />
<br />
* Changed multiplier_for_starting_guardian_budget_on_reconquest to be 0.125 instead of 0.015.<br />
** This will substantially hurt. The AI is kind of taking a beating on some of the econ changes lately, so this seems warranted.<br />
<br />
* Changed all the various multiplier_for_game_starting_whatever_from_total_budget to be twice what they were before, or therefore a quarter of the max starting budget in most cases rather than an eighth.<br />
** This should eliminate the sense that you're able to just bumrush planets in the early game before they can reinforce. We could have upped the actual caps of the AIs, but then the late game would have swung too much in their favor if the game runs really long.<br />
** We'll see what happens; if the starts are still too easy, then we'll be upping the starting caps instead of the percentage again. More than a quarter of the cap at the start seems like planets will just be far too cramped.<br />
<br />
* The "defensive budget multiplier" that comes from the AI difficulty is now split into ongoing and initial. This lets us make the lower-difficulty starting amounts not SO anemic that they are pathetic, and then as we get into difficulties higher than 7 not have them be so ludicrously overpowered right at the start. Difficulty 7 is also toned down to 90% of its ongoing defensive budget when it comes to initial seeding, now.<br />
<br />
==== Completely Revised Way Of Seeding Guard Posts and Command Stations ====<br />
<br />
* There's a new AIGuardPostAndCommandPlacer set of xml data that lets us define a lot of different ways that guard posts and command stations can be arranged on planets beyond what has been the basic prior to now (one one each metal generation point).<br />
** These can be varied by mark level ranges of planets, and have different sets for the homeworlds of AIs. They can easily be modded in or added to like map types or whatnot.<br />
<br />
* The way that human homeworlds have their home command station seeded is now a bit more randomized than before, but also does a better job of keeping itself away from wormholes.<br />
** This should make your starts slightly less predictable.<br />
<br />
* The AI Homeworld was set to always put its command station dead center. That's no longer the case. This will make some games easier, others harder, and is fine with Chris.<br />
<br />
* Over the years, the concept of what a "guard post" is has changed quite a lot. Originally in the first AI War, they were literally just a gathering point for other ships. Then in 4.0+ of that game we started making them scary weapons in their own right.<br />
** This sequel has always had the armed variant, but that causes some problems in balance with them sometimes overshadowing the actual ships that are at their location, and in many cases making it impossible for you to fight just a single guard post or two at a time with the way that their weapon ranges were so large that they could pick you off.<br />
** Thus we've hybridized the old and new concepts, making a new "Unarmed Guard Post" type (and Ghost and Swarmer variants), and then adding in a chance per post for it to be armed versus not armed now.<br />
** We've split it out so that normal and home AI planets each have their own chance, per AI type: chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_normal_planet and chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_home_planet.<br />
** Bear in mind that, prior to this build, it was always 100 for each one, essentially.<br />
** Old numbers: Now for most AIs it is 15 and 60, turtle is 60 and 90, Fortress Baron 50 and 80, Peace Maker 30 and 60.<br />
** Please note that these are not the pure percentages of guard posts on a planet that will be armed: rather, at each guard post it essentially rolls a 100-sided die and if the number is lower than what is stated there, it will be armed.<br />
*** So you'll see all sorts of funky distributions, ranging from completely unarmed guard post planets to completely armed ones.<br />
** This DOES make things easier for the player, but mainly it gives other units a chance to shine and makes the armed guard posts more interesting in that they are more rare.<br />
*** Ideally we'll be able to make guardians scarier in their stead, but one thing at a time right now. This release has a lot of changes already!<br />
<br />
* The way that unarmed guard posts were seeding has been changed yet again. There's now a 100% chance of armed guard posts on mark 7 worlds and homeworlds, and then a per-AI setting for what the percentage chance is for every mark level below that. The percentages are generally much higher than they were before, making for far fewer unarmed guard posts as the game progresses and in general fewer overall.<br />
<br />
* The "initial reinforcements" that get seeded into/around reinforcement points now happens as the absolutely last thing, which means that things that should have turrets or whatever around them from the very start, or which are not guard posts but act kind of like them and are added normally during the "special entity seeding" period of mapgen will now get their initial followers properly.<br />
<br />
* Usurpers now have to be on the target planet for 10 seconds before they can reclaim it, otherwise you never even see the usurper if you don't have a defending force.<br />
<br />
* When a reconquest of a planet happens by the AI, it now uses only armed guard posts regardless of the ratio of armed and unarmed it would have previously used.<br />
<br />
* Previously there was mostly just the AI seeding guard posts one metal deposit spots, which is boooring. Now that we have the ability to do more, we have a variety of new types:<br />
** Guarding Wormholes Generally: this can start at mark 1 and go all the way to mark 7 (not homeworlds, though).<br />
*** These are highly aggressive stances that make it hard to get into the planets, and on very high marks they wind up putting 2-3 guard posts PER wormhole. Talk about ow. If there are too few spots for their posts at just wormholes, the rest are spread out very ambiently.<br />
** Guarding Wormholes Harshly: this can start at mark 3 and go all the way to mark 7 (not homeworlds, though). They should be VERY infrequent based on their weight. These are deathtrap worlds.<br />
*** These start out with 2 guard posts per wormhole, and only go up from there -- by mark 7, it's freaking 5 guard posts per wormhole. Just entering the planet is leaping into death, more or less. But that's part of the fun of having a rare extra difficult guard post design, and bear in mind that it doesn't make for more reinforcements and so the total firepower of the planet doesn't get a boost per se (well, guard post firepower itself aside -- which can be huge on higher marks, admittedly, but... well, have fun with those!).<br />
** One Single Mass: this is another super rare one, and can start at mark 2 and up, but not homeworlds.<br />
*** This puts all of the guard posts pretty much in one big clump somewhere on the planet. Depending on randomness, the clump can be kind of strung out, or more circular, or very tight. In many ways this makes them into one super-guard-post, which is potentially like trying to crack an old-school fortress in AIWC. These have randomized ranges of guard posts per mark level of planet, with 2 on mark 2 to, from 3-4 on mark 3 up to 9-12 on mark 7. This is another intense one.<br />
** Spread Out Guard Posts<br />
** This is a variety of ones that are much more lightweight and which get seeded much more commonly: basically just randomly putting guard posts around the whole planet, but pretty far away from one another to make them easier to approach. The numbers vary a lot, and most planets will use one of these.<br />
** Guarding Metal Deposits: moderately low chance of coming in on any mark 3 and up, but not homeworlds.<br />
*** Places one guard post on every metal deposit, and then no more. This is similar to old behavior, except that it doesn't try to add more if there are fewer metal spots than an "ideal" for the mark level. Consequently the difficulty of these will vary a lot, but stealth guard posts remain easy to find because they're just on the metal spots (that was a big giveaway in the past, cough).<br />
** Spread Out Guard Posts And Two By Command<br />
*** These ones start kicking in on mark 4 worlds and up, and one of the two homeworld variants has this, too.<br />
*** This basically puts two VERY close to the command station, guarding it in a ferocious fashion, but then the rest spread very far around.<br />
** We can always code more of these as we think of them, and these are easy to add in as part of mods or expansions or whatever as well.<br />
*** Extra logic could be added to seed specific extra structures at certain guard posts if we really wanted to, although that's not my favorite and it's not by default possible in the moment. But the possibilities for future additions are pretty endless if we have sufficiently interesting ideas. A lot of the other things are better off being a bit random is the current feeling, though, as it plays into these nicely.<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to have certain guard post layouts only be for certain AI difficulty ranges (based on the max AI difficulty, not the difficulty of the AI at that planet).<br />
** Additionally, based on the max AI difficulty, the ability to have a certain added weight to guard post layouts per difficulty above some cap. For now we're using that in the following ways:<br />
*** (Standard weight for something appearing neutrally frequently is 100, please note.)<br />
*** GuardingMetalDeposits (bit hard) base weight was 20, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=25,7=30,10=50 etc).<br />
*** GuardingWormholesGenerally (quite hard) base weight was 10, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=15,7=25,10=45 etc).<br />
*** GuardingWormholesHarshly (super hard) base weight was 2, but it now gets +3 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=5,7=8,10=17 etc).<br />
*** OneSingleMasss (super hard) base weight was 2, but it now gets +3 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=5,7=8,10=17 etc).<br />
*** ThreeSpreadOutGuardPosts (super easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=90,7=70,10=40 etc).<br />
*** FourSpreadOutGuardPosts (super easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=90,7=70,10=40 etc).<br />
*** SixSpreadOutGuardPosts (easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=90,7=80,10=50 etc).<br />
*** SixSpreadOutGuardPosts_AndTwoByCommand (moderate) base weight was 50, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=55,7=60,10=80 etc).<br />
*** EightSpreadOutGuardPosts (moderate) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 7 and above. (7=90,10=60 etc).<br />
*** EightSpreadOutGuardPosts_AndTwoByCommand (hard) base weight was 50, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 7 and above. (7=55,10=75 etc).<br />
*** TenSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears on difficulty 5 and up.<br />
*** TwelveSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears on difficulty 6 and up.<br />
*** AIHome_TwelveSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears up to difficulty 8.<br />
*** AIHome_TenSpreadOutGuardPostsAndTwoByCommand now only appears on difficulty 6 and up.<br />
** All of this combines to give a much more richly-textured scary landscape for the higher difficulties, while keeping things notably simpler at easier difficulties even at the level of a cursory glance.<br />
*** Looking at a difficulty 5, 7, and 10 game, you can see that this is NOT a subtle effect. As we theoretically add more types of seeding patterns, or other people think up seeding patterns, we can make an even richer tapestry.<br />
<br />
* If you have map gen logging on, you can now see entries for "Guard post style for planet" that shows what mark the planet is and what kind of thing it is seeding.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the "BUG: Ship is on burningAndDying list but has not exploded" message to instead just mark the ship as exploded, as there are too many ways to get to that state.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in DetachVisObjectFromSim on ship squads.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in StartReconquestDefenseSeeding for AIs types that do not use non-dire guardians for some reason.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in BattlefieldVisualSingleton.HandleSquadAndShipUpdates, and made it so that it self-repairs when it can or self-reports when it can't. Either way it continues to draw things and update them properly rather than having the display get all strange if such an exception occurs.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for the report.<br />
<br />
* Improved the "find a safe space to be" code for ships so that they are now more likely to find a CLOSE space to be.<br />
<br />
* For guard posts in particular, it does an extra good job of trying to keep it close to the intended point (whatever that is in the given schema).<br />
<br />
* Finally fixed a really annoying bug wherein command stations that got shot to remains and then rebuilt did not count properly (thus not letting anything else be built or rebuilt at their planet) until you saved and loaded the game.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, ArnaudB, Asteroid, KDR_11k, Puffin, Sigma7, Ryulong, Core, and GrimerX for reporting and helping to find it.<br />
** Special thanks to Ryulong for the recent savegame that let us reliably reproduce this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where some achievements relating to killing specific AIs was not triggering because it was trying to match the internal name to the display name. Now it checks both display name and internal name to be doubly sure.<br />
** This makes Full Ensemble in particular now properly trigger when you beat them.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If you have existing saves where you already beat the game, loading those savegames will now trigger the achievements for you that you properly earned (just load them, unpause, and wait at least 2 seconds).<br />
** It's much better this way, versus having to dig up a savegame from right before you won, etc, if you're going back to get achievements that you earned but didn't log because you were offline, or there was a bug, or whatever factor.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hover planet text<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of some Instigator base hovertexts<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting<br />
<br />
* Since it is now possible for non-combatant ships to contain lots of combatant ships (unarmed guard posts on the AI side, but frankly also your own transports), the game now takes great pains to make sure that it isn't overlooking the combatant-nature of ships contained within non-combatant ships when checking things like strength.<br />
** Compared to prior versions of the game (where all guard posts were combatants) this doesn't fix or change anything, but it might make player combat strength more accurate in the case of transports if there was some issue there (though there's no sure evidence that was a problem).<br />
<br />
* When ships are dying, you no longer get a bunch of red "null fleet" messages hovering over them, unless you have debug info turned on for tooltips.<br />
<br />
* The game should now say "release" to show a more or less detailed tooltip on the various screens if you're already holding down the button to make it do whatever it's doing (you can invert the behavior, so which is held and released should match that).<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the tooltip for Risk Analyzer Notifications<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Completely reworked how the long range planning threads keep track of how long it has been since they have run, so that they should probably run at appropriate intervals when the game is running faster than 1x speed now. Previously these were running slower the faster the game ran, which made the AI stupider at 10x speed than 1x speed.<br />
<br />
==== Fixes For XML Modding ====<br />
<br />
Example tiny mods and discussion are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22433<br />
<br />
* Several different things were not staying properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them:<br />
** exp_to_grant_on_death<br />
** watch_planets_at_X_hops<br />
** tags (ow this would cause many problems)<br />
** capturable_seed_weight (again very problematic)<br />
** capturable_max_per_galaxy<br />
** capturable_can_seed_at_all<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of things that would complain they could not be found properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them (but in reality these were carrying over fine from the base version being modded):<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_sfx<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_if_on_other_planet_sfx<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If outgoing_damage_modifier or incoming_damage_modifier entries are duplicated in the list of rows for a system or entity (respectively), whether that be through mods or just in the original definition, it now only uses the last-to-apply version. This last-to-apply one is always going to be a mod version if there is a mod version.<br />
** This makes it so that you can't have two different modifiers on the same weapon that both are based off of the hull health of a ship, for example, but I don't think we're doing that anywhere and it would be messy in the UI if we were, anyway.<br />
** This then fixes the issue with various weapon bonuses and the like duplicating themselves when you are using an is_partial_record entry to mod a weapon.<br />
** It's worth noting at this point that xml modding is inherently slightly fraught in terms of minor bugs or oversights like this which can have major repercussions. Please just let us know on a case by case basis what you find, ideally with the xml you're using and a savegame that shows the wrong behavior, and we can likely fix it up pretty fast.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Both ai_ship_group_membership and fleet_membership now properly adjust the existing membership when there is a duplicate entry entered for them (from a mod or whatever else) linking a given ship type to a given template or group. It now adjusts the weight and so on in the template or group, rather than adding a duplicate entry.<br />
** Note that if you change the category for a template, it will assume you mean it to be a duplicate and will add that accordingly. There really should never be any valid reason to mod the category of a ship, but if you must then you can just 0 out the min and max of the old one maybe?<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting something next to this, although not exactly this.<br />
<br />
* Creating a mod to replace or redefine parts of the fleet design templates (like the starting fleets) now works properly rather than creating duplicate entries or extra counts or both.<br />
** For an example of a mod that works with this new function, the raw xml bits are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22136<br />
** Note that if you choose to change the category of ships from HERE, that will work fine. You just can't change categories of fleet template items from within the game entity side.<br />
** Also please note that this change now prevents you from having duplicate lines of the exact same type of ship in a starting fleet. So something with two lines of fusion bombers would not work anymore, for instance, even with no mods in play, and would just take the count of the last fusion bomber entry and use that.<br />
*** This doesn't stop you from using multiple duplicate ship lines in-game of course, but it does stop it in the starting fleet designs, none of which (that are still active) were using that function anyhow.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Grand_New_AI&diff=37953AI War 2:The Grand New AI2020-02-09T04:51:38Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Version 1.325 */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After lots of feedback, we're ready to take it to the next level! Major new functionality and improvements across the board are incoming to make games more interesting than ever, and we're also going to start building toward multiplayer.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.325 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* When a ship is built, it starts with its weapon on cooldown.<br />
** This prevents a problem where if you had a lot of rebuild capacity for a fleet, you could technically scrap things with long gun cooldowns right after firing and rebuild them faster than the cooldown, increasing your fleet's DPS<br />
** Suggested by the puffin<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where structures might not build even if you had energy for them<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, including Chthon and NRSirLimbo. And thanks to Starkelp for helping me notice what the symptoms looked like.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer wasn't shooting the Zenith Trader<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Potentially make fireteams more willing to press home an attack until all the enemies are dead<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.324 Forcefield Beautification ==<br />
(Released February 7th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Fixed Adaptive AI achievements being granted regardless of intensity.<br />
** Thanks Rifi8 for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a missing ui window from the last checkin.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Work ===<br />
<br />
* The shield visuals on Gyrn have been redone, as seen here: https://youtu.be/Ns9Kz_lHR6I<br />
<br />
* The overall forcefields have been completely redone, as seen here: https://youtu.be/nub6EkyF8Og<br />
** On these videos, if you want the full story, be sure to read the description notes on the videos. They explain a lot!<br />
<br />
* The spire have a new look, although it's not final by any stretch. It's something that will need to be adjusted for a lot of the specific models, but we're at a starting point with them at least.<br />
** We actually developed three new looks for the spire, and may use some variants of them for different things; we'll see how those work out. Even out of the three main looks, they are able to have variants in each of them, too.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the various other missing shaders and materials from the prior version. For the warp gates, those now look slightly different, and in particular the dyson warp gate.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate, Bounty Hunter and Apparition damage bonus duration 8s -> 12s.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigate and Bounty Hunter resist 75% of ranged damage, up from 50%.<br />
<br />
=== Macrophage ===<br />
<br />
* The Hive Wars Update<br />
<br />
* Many of these features will not be available on old saves. They will continue to use existing Macrophage logic.<br />
<br />
* Telium Taming<br />
** Teliums can now be hacked in order to tame them.<br />
*** Expect an extremely heavy response in this hack that will cause discord throughout the galaxy for a period of time after its finished.<br />
** Tamed Teliums create friendly Harvesters and Spores.<br />
** Anytime a Telium is created, if at least one of the consumed Spores is Tamed, the resulting Telium will also be Tamed.<br />
** Taming as a whole is disabled if Macrophage are set to be allied to the player in the lobby.<br />
<br />
* Harvesters, both normal and Enraged, will now stop to chomp down on ships as they move between planets.<br />
** They will not do so forever, so running from them is a valid tactic.<br />
<br />
* Enraged Harvesters will no longer beeline for home planets, and will instead slowly migrate in the direction of a home planet.<br />
** They will also no longer always attack just humans, they will happily much on any entity that comes near them.<br />
<br />
* Wild Telium will now go Berserk when they are either outnumbered by Tamed Telium, or have less than 3 active Wild Telium.<br />
** While Berserk, the cost for them to build things is reduced by 75%.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.323 Everybody Buff Now ==<br />
(Released February 5th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Communication Nodes stop existing when you start the game in civil war mode<br />
** Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting. That's thot.<br />
<br />
* Some additional clarification to the CPA mechanic for the CPA tooltip<br />
<br />
* Some defensive code in the astro train notification hovertext<br />
<br />
* When you outnumber the AI sufficiently on a planet, the AI uses "hunker logic" to have its units hide near the strongest guard post on the planet, instead of always the command station. The goal of the AI here is to make you pay as high a price as possible for the planet; perhaps they'll distract you long enough for the Warden Fleet to arrive, or for the Hunter to take advantage of your fleet's placement to strike at a weak spot.<br />
* Drones no longer try to hunker, but will always just go fight<br />
** Thanks to a bug report from StarKelp<br />
<br />
* Improve the ion cannon description<br />
** Thanks to Ubifan for reporting<br />
<br />
* To reduce some of the RNG of AIP reduction, the player always gets 1 of the data centers reasonably close to their homeworld. Games with no nearby AIP reduction are much harder.<br />
* Games with an AI at difficulty >= 8 have the remaining data centers seeded further from their homeworld.<br />
<br />
* Game will now check for the last savegame on startup, and if it isn't present, will not display the "Continue Last Game" button.<br />
** It will also do a check when you click the button. If it isn't there, it will now just show a popup saying to verify the file.<br />
*** This should only be an issue if you delete a save while the game is running, since the game will check on startup.<br />
** Thanks CyberKun for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Make some changes to fireteams to make different factions able to have different levels of aggressiveness. Make the Hunter more aggressive.<br />
* Fix a bug where the Warden Fleet could wind up with invalid targets (in this case, ones it would need to path through a player planet to get to), preventing it from actually doing anything.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for some very useful saves.<br />
<br />
=== Graphical Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* All of the fonts used in the game have been re-imported using a few new settings to help with clarity when they are drawn extra large or small.<br />
** First of all, they are using vastly larger atlases now for their data (1024x1024 or 1024x512 as the case may be) instead of 512x512. This lets them have more precision.<br />
** They are also now all using SDFAA_Hinted rather than just SDFAA, which should help with some small corners being rounded when they should not be, etc.<br />
** We're also definitely importing the kerning pairs from all the fonts, in case any of them have any such information that is useful. Most fonts lack that.<br />
** And lastly we are now using a padding of 20 between characters instead of a padding of 5, which makes it so that when fonts are drawn very small they shouldn't accidentally get some extra bits in from neighboring letters anymore.<br />
<br />
* The brightness of the directional "sun light" has been increased from 1.21 to 1.78.<br />
** This helps the light and dark side of models be a bit more diffentiated, and makes things a little more clear to see. There's no performance impact from this.<br />
<br />
* We're now using a new HDRI environment reflection map that has a rich variety of colors, at intensity 0.348, which gives all of the ships a proper metallic sheen rather than a flat look like they had before.<br />
** This was a major oversight in some of our past work; we had been working with studio-style HDRI lights for a while, but a year or more ago turned that off because it was interfering with how our bloom worked at the time.<br />
** The overall visual effect when zoomed in on ships and looking at them is of something a lot more modern, and this is without any extra GPU or CPU power. About 8mb extra of RAM.<br />
<br />
* A three-tone gradient ambient light source is now used. Previously there was a very basic flat white light, and we're still using that for the top of the gradient, but we now shift into some blues and then reds below and to the side, which gives the whole scene a slight bit more sense of life especially when you're panning around or rotating the view.<br />
** Again this comes at practically no cost on the GPU, and zero on ram or the CPU.<br />
<br />
* Updated the Botnet Golem to have a new variant of our shader that also includes a new custom HDRI reflection cubemap, as shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTMgEc2iXY<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem has been updated to use the new cubemap shader as well.<br />
** Ditto the black widow golem and Armored Golem. And Hive.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Cubemap shader variant that allows for HSV shifting of the cubemap, and the regenerator golem uses that. Most real-life HDRI sources don't have crazy bright greens.<br />
<br />
* And then also added a new cubemap shader variant of THAT which also allows for radial uv distortion, and the result is this: https://youtu.be/vGl4O6zoTCE<br />
<br />
* And then used that same shader in a different way for the cursed golem: https://youtu.be/LkGTAPc5y8Y<br />
** And then further edited to this: https://youtu.be/_vkmpR833Po<br />
<br />
* And the zenith trader: https://youtu.be/e2f74kk6ulY<br />
<br />
* Added a new Combined Emissive HSV Refractive shader variant specifically for the devourer golem. But then promptly couldn't get that to work as well as I wanted, so made it look like this instead: https://youtu.be/6KWzouM_qVg<br />
<br />
==== Ability To See And Alter LODs In-Game ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new option in game settings under the debug section, "Show LOD Info In Ship Tooltips."<br />
** When enabled, hovering over a ship will make its tooltip show you info about its number of LODs, its vertex count per LOD, at what distance it transfers between LODs, and what its current distance from the camera is.<br />
** This actually can be a pretty fun thing to look at if you're just curious about the innards of the game, to be honest. A number of ships are so low-poly that they only have an LOD0, or they're so large that multiple LODs couldn't be hidden effectively. Normal maps and shader tricks tend to make up the difference in complexity on the very low-poly ones. Others have LODs and you'd never have noticed it because the swapping between them is so smooth.<br />
** You can see a similar view of the LOD data outside of the game here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko60opBhhKY<br />
<br />
* Added a new lod_distance_overrides field, which allows us to override the LOD distances for a specific ship.<br />
** This actually can be extra useful if we're using one ship model at a variety of scales (for instance for a guardian and a drone). We'll get far better performance for the drone if the LODs switch to higher numbers faster, and we'll get far better visuals if there is an oversized version of the guardian that switches more slowly.<br />
** This lets us balance all that out, particularly as we are changing ship visual sizes.<br />
** In the debug info for meshes, you can now see the original and new values if they are overridden.<br />
** You can set things like this to get a look at LOD2 even when zoomed in very close, for instance: lod_distance_overrides="20,21,22" Those would override the real numbers and let you see a far LOD right in front of your case.<br />
*** Whatever the LAST LOD number is, however, is the "distance at which I stop rendering at all." For really large ships it's something absurd like 100k. For smaller ships it might be more like 16k when they effectively become invisible (and thus literally get removed from bothering to be drawn).<br />
*** So for a ship with only a single LOD, or fewer LODs than specified in your overrides, setting low values would make the ship simply disappear, since that's the role of the "last LOD," whatever that is.<br />
<br />
* Added a new keybind in the utility section, "Reload Select Xml Data," default bound to F8.<br />
** Useful mainly for developers. Reads a few xml bits out of specific fields we might want to change frequently.<br />
** Right now this just re-reads lod_distance_overrides for all entities, but it can be expanded a bit in the future as needed. Whether this will work on sub-nodes and copy-from and partial nodes all properly will need testing if we ever have a reason to do that.<br />
** This has been confirmed and is fully working for its initial use case.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Some buffs to the Dyson Sphere, one of which is it now has some drones solely for defending itself.<br />
<br />
* Difficulty 10 now has some tougher defenses.<br />
<br />
* Auto Bomb, Cluster Bomb and Nanoswarm damage radius 1,200 -> 600, targets hit per "shot" 12 -> 9.<br />
<br />
* Auto Bomb and Nanoswarm speed 2,900 -> 2,200.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted some of the Lone Wolf seed weights and max limits, so you shouldn't see just Hive Golems all the time.<br />
<br />
* Eyebots decloak in 1 shot instead of 2.<br />
<br />
==== Counter Attacks ====<br />
<br />
* Counter Attacks now require at least half their strength in present player forces to stall, instead of a fifth.<br />
<br />
* Lowered the initial thresholds for some difficulties, mostly higher.<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* They now use the same armour, albedo and speed as their normal version (if applicable).<br />
<br />
* They now follow the 2/1 hull/shield ratio often found elsewhere.<br />
<br />
* Those with a damage bonus of 20x now use a 6x bonus.<br />
<br />
* Upgraded the durability of the drones they use, and made the Tethuida drone a bit better at hitting stuff.<br />
<br />
* Added Dire Vampire, Tritium Sniper, Gravity, Stealth, Temperamental, Fragmenting, and MLRS variants.<br />
** Temperamental and Fragmenting should only be usable on defense.<br />
<br />
* Unlocked a bit earlier on Difficulty 10 for the Hunter Fleet.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guardian reload time 12s -> 9s, speed 500 -> 400, targets hit per shot 80 -> 100, no longer has the Fortified defensive bonus.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guardian shots per salvo 12 -> 36.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian targets hit per shot 10 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Forcefield Guardian damage 10,000 -> 40,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Heavy Beam Guardian damage 15,000 -> 7,500, reload time 4s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
* Dire Widow Guardian shots per salvo 20 -> 60, tractor beam count 200 -> 550.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Guardian 10,000 -> 5,000, shots per salvo 1 -> 20, range 6,000 -> 8,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Pike Guardian shots per salvo 20 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian damage 8,000 -> 80,000, shots per salvo 3 -> 1.<br />
<br />
* Dire Grenade Launcher Guardian shots per salvo 1 -> 3.<br />
<br />
==== Golems ====<br />
<br />
* They now have the same damage as a MK5 player one, with 66% of the health.<br />
** This is a large damage bump to them, as they were left behind with the last player Golem/Ark buffs due to lack of data, but now seems a good time for this.<br />
<br />
* The AI has received an interesting box and a suit.<br />
** It also received a strangely shaped green rock.<br />
<br />
* These are unlocked a bit earlier on Difficulty 10 for the Warden Fleet.<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem health 4,000,000 -> 3,000,000, damage 5,000 -> 4,000, AIP cost 15 -> 20.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for taking this thing too far.<br />
<br />
* Increased metal to claim and repair Golems by 150%, energy cost from 30,000 -> 50,000.<br />
** Also thanks to Ryulong for taking some of these too far.<br />
** This might be a little strange, but with the shields being free, and hull being 50% off to repair, the current cost to repair a Golem was only 700k metal - you could go very close to that just building up your initial Fleet. That, and the energy, are both intended to add extra costs onto using these things, particularly due to some advantages they hold (such as never contributing to a counter attack unless it's crippled).<br />
<br />
==== Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Replaced all the old AI Ship Groups with newer, hopefully more interesting ones.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian damage 1,500 -> 3,600, total durability 60,000 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Tritium Sniper Guardian total durability 37,500 -> 40,000.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian shots per salvo 5 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian damage 250 -> 150, shots per salvo 12 -> 30, total durability 40,000 -> 80,000, speed 400 -> 1,400, range 10,100 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Guardian shots per salvo 12 -> 20, reload time 6s -> 4s, total durability 40,000 -> 80,000, speed 400 -> 1,400, range 10,100 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Guardian damage 1,000 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 1 -> 5, reload time 4s -> 8s, total durability 60,000 -> 80,000, tractor system gains slightly more targets per Mark.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Guardian targets hit per shot 20 -> 40, total durability 45,000 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian shots per salvo 1 -> 3, explosion size 600 -> 350, total durability 52,500 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Guardian damage 5,000 -> 15,000, range 10,100 -> 12,000, total durability 30,000 -> 60,000.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Guardian shield radius increased around 35%, shield durability 75,000 -> 160,000.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guardian shots per salvo 5 -> 10, total durability 42,000 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian damage 300 -> 200, shots per salvo 10 -> 30, range 5,000 -> 4,000, reload time 4s -> 6s, Mark 1 slow effect 0.8x -> 0.6x, slow gained per mark 0.1x -> 0.05x, slow range 5,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Heavy Beam Guardian damage 1,300 -> 1,350, targets hit per shot 10 -> 9, reload time 6s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Guardian albedo 0.3 -> 0.7, damage 1,000 -> 1,250, reload time 2s -> 1s, total durability 52,500 -> 80,000.<br />
<br />
* Carrier Guardian range 6,000 -> 12,000, total durability 24,000 -> 40,000.<br />
<br />
* Added the normal Tethuida Guardian and MLRS Guardian.<br />
<br />
==== Raid Frigates (And Variants) ====<br />
<br />
* All decloak in 1 shot rather than 10.<br />
** Way too abusable.<br />
<br />
* Health of all increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Damage of all increased 66%.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigates and Bounty Hunters have the same ranged damage resistance as the Apparition, but only to 50%. Apparition resistance matches the Space Planes.<br />
<br />
* All now have a form of the Pulsar Tank bonus.<br />
<br />
=== Macrophage ===<br />
<br />
* The Territorial Update<br />
<br />
* Harvesters<br />
** Stats when spawned in have been greatly nerfed.<br />
** Now capable of marking up as they deliver metal.<br />
*** Base chance of 50%, reduced by 9% per mark increase.<br />
** Harvesters will only move to planets X/2 hops from their Telium, where X is equal to the number of harvesters their Telium own.<br />
*** Enraged are not considered owned by any Telium, and do not factor into or follow this rule.<br />
** Harvesters harvest metal generators they visit, gaining 2500 Metal per mine.<br />
** Lower Mark Harvesters will attempt to only visit low mark planets.<br />
*** Harvesters will, unless given no other choice, avoid player planets until Mark 2, and the player homeworld until Mark 3.<br />
*** Enraged do not follow the above rule, and will attack as they wish.<br />
<br />
* Telium<br />
** No longer lose all metal whenever an event fires, and instead simply subtract the event's cost.<br />
** Now fully restore a Harvester's shields whenever they complete a full delivery.<br />
** Can now have up to 4 active Harvesters before they get enraged.<br />
** Will have a higher chance to spawn Spores as their Harvester count increases.<br />
*** Base spore chance of 50%, increased by 10% for each additional Harvester beyond the first.<br />
<br />
* New Constants have been added in for a multitude of the above changes.<br />
** In addition, the HarvestersToEnrage Constant has been fixed to properly work again.<br />
<br />
=== Quickstarts ===<br />
<br />
* Players are now able to create a Quickstart from in game. Simply open the development menu, then click Create Preset, and fill in the boxes.<br />
** This will also save your game with the same name as the Preset (What you type in the top box)<br />
** The box for the description can be left blank without issues. The name, for obvious reasons, cannot be<br />
<br />
* Added EditSetup and StartGame buttons to the Quickstart menu. It now requires you to select the game you want to play, type the campaign name in, then click on "Start" in the bottom right corner<br />
** To view the EditSetup button, enable the corresponding setting under the debug category. This is due to the high probability of bugs with the initial rollout, and can be changed once most bugs are taken care of.<br />
** If you do edit the setup, you will also get a popup window reminding you that this is a development feature, and may cause bugs during use.<br />
<br />
* Added the EditSetup and StartGame buttons to the Load Game menu. Same rules apply there.<br />
<br />
* If you double click a save, it will still load it, similar to how it was before this release<br />
** This should help reduce the confusion players have<br />
<br />
* Created new textbox window with a single line on top and a large free text box on bottom.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.321 Enjoy Your Break, Voice Lady ==<br />
(Released January 31st, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Actually fix the bug where dyson antagonizers weren't spawning<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, especially Binary Blitz for finding a save game that let me fix it<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to CalculateRemainingShipLineSlotCount to prevent a null reference in the swap ship lines between fleets code<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for reporting<br />
<br />
* If a player forcefield is bumped out of the way by an astro train (or anything else), it will now go back to where it was after the astro train is gone. <br />
** This was particularly annoying for forcefields protecting wormholes.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for reporting, but I don't remember any of their names<br />
<br />
* Adds Damage Amplification, which can be defined in XML<br />
** damage_amplification tag is true/false<br />
** damage_amplification_duration is an integer, and determines how long damage is amplified for in seconds<br />
** damage_amplification_flat is the amount of damage added. It is also an integer, and is a flat increase (if your attack would do 500 damage, and this is marked as 500, your total damage will be 1000)<br />
** Damage is amplified from ALL sources. This includes other ships than the one that caused the effect<br />
** Adds damage_amplification_mult XML tag<br />
*** Functions same as DamageAmplificationFlat tag, except it multiplies damage by the number instead of adding them together<br />
*** May be set to below 1 to reduce all incoming damage as well, if desired<br />
<br />
* Added ability to define amount of damage added per ship of that type on the planet in XML<br />
** Also features an optional max for the damage increase<br />
** Has an EntityRollupType for all entities with that feature<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare bug that could still happen in DetachVisObjectFromSim.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where RelatedString2 and RelatedString3 were not being properly cleared on GameCommands. This was leading to various log messages that should have been silent instead giving outdated voice commands based on whatever was last played. This would get incredibly repetitive and was baffling.<br />
** Huge thanks to StarKelp for figuring out what this was.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.320 Intelligence Intensifies==<br />
(Released January 30th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* "Teach a Man to Fish..." achievement is now properly triggered at Mark VII.<br />
** Thanks Rivet for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed spelling of Megalodon achievement both in game and on Steam.<br />
** Thanks Ovalcircle for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to giant marauder empires; they could get a bit out of control, so fewer raiders overall now. Note that with fireteams the marauders are much smarter, so they don't need as many ships to still be effective<br />
<br />
* Fix a UI annoyance where the Techs That Upgrade This Ship were sometimes listed Weapon First and sometimes Hull First. Now it always lists the weapon first.<br />
** Thanks to Daw11 and Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Nanocausts could go after the player in the early game. You should now be safe from nanocaust incursions for the first 30 minutes<br />
** Thanks to Mayheim on steam for a report<br />
<br />
* Add some colour to the log messages about zenith trader and devourer<br />
<br />
* Exos of sufficient strength can now split that strength across multiple start planets; the smallest unit for a split is 40 strength. This should make defending against them more "Fun"<br />
** Suggested by Starkelp<br />
<br />
* Improve handling of the case where a dyson antagonizer can't find a planet to spawn on<br />
** Thanks to BinaryBlitz for the bug report<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.314 Achieve Those ==<br />
(Released January 28th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* For both stacks and drones, put in some code to prevent cross-threading race conditions where they could in theory cause incorrect and confusing fluctuations.<br />
** With stacks it seems like this only happened with very low stack count targets.<br />
** With drones it seems this was not actually the problem.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* For all of the non-planetary fleets, it no longer tries to clear excess ships above the cap that you have.<br />
** This was potentially causing some problems with drones in particular where it was killing excess ships as they went back into the drone controller. This may also have affected ships going into transports.<br />
** Essentially it was counting some stuff that was queued for death but not yet dead. And in general with these we frankly don't care if they are over cap, as they wll die soon enough anyhow and it's unlikely that they would be over cap in the first place.<br />
** The big thing with caps needing to clear excess ships is the command station fleets, since you can change command station types which massively adjusts your caps for things, and not handling these would be an exploit.<br />
*** If a command station is ever given drones, then it's likely to be buggy like the hive golem and similar was in the past, and there's no simple solution for that. Don't give command stations drones. ;)<br />
** This is confirmed to fix the hive golem bug and bug with drones in general.<br />
** Thanks to Chthon, Daniexpert, and Ubifan for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Add colour to some log messages:<br />
** The 'starting hack' log message now has colour in it so it looks more interesting<br />
** The messages generated by 'AI sending wave against planet' and 'AIP change by' now have colour. Also, use the Display Name instead of the Internal name for printing the name of the entity killed to change AIP. This just looks a bit better<br />
<br />
* Add some debugging code to allow us to see more easily which faction the AI threat is going after<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bunch of minor faction achievements not triggering. <br />
** They were only looking at Display Name, not Internal name. You can now put either the Display Name or Internal Name in the XML and it will work for either.<br />
** Thanks Hexahedron, ArnaudB, and Ecthelon for reporting<br />
<br />
* AI Tech Level achievements now work as expected<br />
** Thanks Hexahedron for reporting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed SledgeHammer achievement not triggering<br />
** Thanks ArnaudB for reporting!<br />
<br />
* When the game gets enough autosaves that it needs to start deleting older ones, it should no longer will error out.<br />
** This was something that was new in the prior beta build, because of all the changes we made to the save/load/delete pipeline.<br />
** Thanks to StarKeep for reporting.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.313 Listening To Lists ==<br />
(January 27th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Modify the marauder tooltips to no longer refer to planetary controllers<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a nasty bug where Fireteams (in particular the Hunter) was identifying Command Stations that had died to remains as valid targets.<br />
** From a save game of Ryulong, where 500 strength of Hunter Fleet was Just Chilling for much of the game<br />
<br />
* Increase the overall AI income for difficulty 10 a bit<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in a variety of map types with low planet counts, but particularly octopus.<br />
** This was a pretty rare bug, and it also happened to be in a section of code that did not even do anything anymore. So we simply removed the code and things work as expected now.<br />
** Thanks to Rifi8 for the report that lets us reproduce it.<br />
<br />
* Changing the AI difficulty via the debug menu is now always considered a cheat, even prior to the first 60 seconds passing.<br />
** This basically was something that could cheat mapgen out of giving you the harder structures.<br />
<br />
* Using the debug menu to reveal the entire map is no longer considered a cheat, but rather is a lifestyle choice.<br />
** The first game did allow you to set the entire map to visible right from the start, after all.<br />
** Add a matched "Explore all planet" to go with "Watch all planet", for people who want to see what's happening Right Now but not to have permanenent vision everywhere<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The debug menu is now split into two columns, with the ones that are cheats in their own column and clearly marked as such.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a logic issue in the xml reader that made lists of values such as most_everything_squad_cap_multiplier_list, frigate_squad_cap_multiplier_list, and similar impossible to mod over using copy_from or partial records.<br />
** This also affected some things on achievements, science_cost_per_time_unlocked on techs, tags on ships, tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, build_sidebar_categories_i_am_part_of, fleet_design_templates_i_always_grant, NOT eligible_for_hacks. NOT sounds_on_takes_damage or sounds_on_death, NOT arbitrary_options, engine_stun_multipliers_by_stun_seconds, exp_multipliers_by_player_fleet_count, and exp_multipliers_by_max_fleet_level_difference.<br />
** This is completely untested and hopefully doesn't eat the world. Glad we're in beta.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
* Added a debug menu cheat for finishing all the construction on a planet immediately.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "most_recent_stable_beta" branch on Steam, set to the prior build 1.312 in case this does in fact break the world. ;)<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.312 Stop Threatening Me ==<br />
(Released January 25th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* AI sub-factions (praetorian/hunter/warden) no longer join other AIs when their overlord dies. Instead they stay loyal to their now-rogue AI. The praetorian stops doing anything except fighting on its current planets, but the hunter and warden will remain active and fight you if you attack their AI's planets.<br />
** A number of people have pointed this out, including ArnaudB and Agalyon<br />
<br />
* Instigators can no longer spawn 'anywhere' at high enough AIP. They are always within accessible (if very hard) distance even at high AIP<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where minor factions could trigger AI units to go threat against the player<br />
** Thanks to Agalyon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed SuperTerminal hack achievement.<br />
** Thanks ArnaudB for reporting and Puffin for reminding me to put it in the notes!<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.311 Code Review ==<br />
(Released January 24th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* We exhaustively went through all of our faction (minor and major) code, reviewing things for potential problems -- subtle or otherwise -- that might come up from the increased parallelism of the faction thread.<br />
** We did find a few things that could cause inexplicable wrong behavior if two threads were in just the wrong state at just the right time, but most of the code was clean and those cases were pretty rarely going to occur. We fixed what we found, and having everything else go through a thorough review that verifies it as good is well worth the time.<br />
** Since there were some nontrivial changes in some areas to make things clearer or to fix some of the bugs that were present, most notably around exos, we wanted to go ahead and push another beta branch in the meantime.<br />
<br />
== BETA 1.310 A Smarter Warden ==<br />
(Released January 24th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The Warden Fleet now uses Fireteams.<br />
** Needs testing before pushing to the main steam branch.<br />
<br />
* Increase the threshold for "Ships in combat" voice lines. Don't play the "Your home command station is under attack" voice line unless the AI actually has enough ships to be scary.<br />
** I don't want to know if one cloaked AI fleetship is shooting at the shield on my home command station anymore<br />
<br />
== Version 1.309 Instigator Cheekiness ==<br />
(Released January 23rd, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The counterattack notifier hovertext now tells you how many guard posts you have to kill to disable the counterattack<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer wasn't shooting the zenith trader<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* When the game tries to create notifications up at the top part of the screen for the human player, if it runs into an error it now is much more informative about what the error was, although it's still not exact in every case.<br />
** Thanks to DefeatedByTheCat for the report that triggered us to add this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of places where if the AI did not have a "most annoying faction" at a location, it would error instead of simply waiting because it was not annoyed.<br />
** In "send a wave if alerted after X seconds" (raid engine).<br />
** In the human notification checks for raid engines.<br />
** And that's it, from a thorough code review. Everything else actually already checks properly for the most annoying faction index being -1, or the resulting faction object being null, as relevant.<br />
*** Though it is worth noting that if there is mysterious threat showing up because of minor faction aggro against the AI, it's possibly because the AI got a -1 from this at some point.<br />
** Thanks to DefeatedByTheCat for the report that led us to finding this. This isn't actually a new bug at all, just a rare one apparently.<br />
<br />
* Lone Wolf Flagships can no longer have ship lines swapped to them. This is a very longstanding bug.<br />
** Thanks to a bunch of people for reporting, including Chthon, Iocaine and deo<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "Called AI Sentinels_execCont_607 pathfinder from two different contexts! First was executionContext, new one is specialFactionContext_22_AI" error, and probably all related errors.<br />
** The correct pathfinder to use for a faction is now centrally calculated from a method called GetPathfindersOfRelevanceFromContext, and there are now many more pathfinder instances possible to have on a faction instance to avoid the potential case where factions need to pathfind out of cases we were expecting.<br />
*** If pathfinding is done by Faction.FindPath in a generalized sense from certain types of threads (anything other than the main, execution context, or background faction planning threads), then honestly it will probably wind up with an exception and the programmer in question needs to instantiate their own custom pathfinder instance for whatever it is they have in mind.<br />
** As it stands, it's now lazy-instantiating all these new possible pathfinding contexts per thread type per faction, since a lot of factions do next to no pathfinding and all of them only use some of the thread cases.<br />
*** This helps to avoid memory over-usage (even though that would still be minor in the grand scheme), and makes instantiating faction external data slightly faster than it was in the past and would have become in the future.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Also put in a count of pathfinders created in total, and discovered that we were creating and discarding a pathfinder or two every second or so. This was a minor performance drain and is now fixed.<br />
** You will notice that the number of pathfinders goes up over time early in a new game because of the lazy-creation of them as factions need them, and that's normal (even some getting added hours after starting is normal, if a faction enters a new mode for the first time). Exiting one game and creating another will also cause more to get created. But there shouldn't be a runaway growth of them indefinitely.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a cross-threading bug that could cause GetWormholeToOtherPlanetOrNull to have a nullref inside it.<br />
** Thanks to Binary Blitz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* CPAs no longer allow you to C-click them, and the slight information that was actually useful inside a c-click of one is now just in the direct tooltip, which no longer asks you to c-click them. This is all just a lot more clean and clear.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Change Instigator Base spawning rules to hopefully make them a bit less frustrating<br />
** Previously once you hit 300 AIP the Instigator base could spawn anywhere<br />
** Now between 300 and 600 AIP the instigator base must spawn between 4 and 7 hops from one of your planet, and it's only unlimited after 600 AIP<br />
<br />
== Version 1.308 Mega Performance ==<br />
(Released January 22nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Most Notifications now work as follows. Clicking on them in the Galaxy view will center you on the planet. Clicking on them in the Planet view will take you to that planet.<br />
<br />
* Combat fleets now include their Strength in the tooltip in the Intel menu<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Even on the brief tooltips, the game now shows how many ships and what their strength is for AI reinforcement points. The medium tooltips show the types of ships in there and a bit more info. This is pretty important information at every tooltip level.<br />
<br />
* Add a setting for preventing instigator bases from spawning.<br />
** While canonically the AI gets instigator bases, some people find them frustrating or stressful to play against.<br />
** Requested by Admiral<br />
<br />
* Ghost, Ensnarer and Sniper AI Turrets now say their type, so the Ensnarer Battlestation having them doesn't seem so odd (as it now specifically says "Ensnarer Pike Great-Turret" for instance).<br />
** Mentioned by Ryulong and Venger.<br />
<br />
=== Astro Train Buffs ===<br />
<br />
* Astro trains can now spawn multiple trains at once, based on the intensity of the faction.<br />
* Only for intensity >= 5. Chance for multi-spawn starts at 10% for intensity 5 up to 60% at intensity 10.<br />
** Lets see if this is enough to make them more exciting. From a discussion on Discord with Hyde, zeus and others<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fireteams drop out of 'bonus speed mode' once they are actually attacking the target. A fireteam only gets bonus move speed to make sure all the fireteams attacking arrive in a coordinated fashion<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for pointing this out<br />
<br />
* Fireteam-based Nanocausts now are constrained from attacking the player too early. <br />
* Killing a nanocaust hive now means nanocaust ships won't get any new orders (except 'fight on this planet')<br />
** Thanks to Astillious for the bug reports<br />
* Fixed a bug in the last couple of builds where it would always talk about your "best fleet" in the end of the game (win or lose) as "useless cowards" (which is just what it says when it can't find a fleet).<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where factories weren't printing things they were rebuilding<br />
** Thanks to Mongoose on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Macrophages and Enraged Macrophages won't be counted as Threat anymore<br />
** Thanks to WolfWhiteFire for reminding me about this<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Nanocaust invasion could trigger a bunch of threat against the player <br />
** Thanks to vodkasheep on steam for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Norris Effect ships were being blocked from going through wormholes by shields<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in even more of a fix to the fire teams having an INNER exception of thread abort that was being reported erroneously because it could happen during a sort operation.<br />
** This should solve some of the marauder debug code 1200 errors we were seeing that were not really a bug.<br />
<br />
* Units such as Hydra Heads and Mini Cluster Bombs will no longer show in the Double Shipline Cap option screen.<br />
** Thanks to Admiral, Daniexpert and NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception that could happen in rare cases on loading a savegame with a wave incoming, where it might say "Exception in ShipIconImageBase.RenderContents at stage 170"<br />
<br />
* Fixed Royal Tethuida and Shredder Guardians not having Drones.<br />
** Reported by Ryulong.<br />
<br />
* Hacks against the Dark Spire now correctly consume hacking points. Whoops<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Unexplored planets will no longer show their mark level or the number of reinforcement points they had. Previously you could deduce way too much information about planets (including the location of AI Overlords)<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting<br />
<br />
* Finally fixed a bunch of spurious errors that could happen when you exited out of the game and it was in the middle of shutting down background threads. They made it seem like things were happening such as clashes between pathfinding calls to the same pathfinder, and other things of that nature, but it was just the threads dying and not being as quiet about it as they should have been.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of nullref exceptions that could happen during DoForEntities and a few related methods if the collection was changing during a cross-thread update clash.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of quasi-invisible bugs where the wrong movement or decollision points could be given to the wrong entity if ships died in between when the command was issued and when they got it.<br />
** This could cause rare random things like a ship of your own suddenly moving without you telling it to, etc. It was likely pretty rare, although it got more common after we stopped pooling ships.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and Badger for helping us accidentally find this.<br />
<br />
* Probably fixed a bug that could happen inside entity order creation for decollision. Whether we really fixed it or not will require more testing, as it was pretty rare in the first case. This was quasi-related to the above fix.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in a lot of extra debugging stage code to help us know what is happening in the faction metal outflows code, so that when we get something like "ERROR In BuildingDronesInternally" we will know where the problem is. As it stands the code looks okay, but someone hit the error, so we'll need them to hit it again in the new code version before we can figure out what it is.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for being our resident nullref exception sponge.<br />
<br />
* Put in a likely fix for a rare exception that could happen in GenerateMercenaryObjectives.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Performance Hunting And Open-Sourcing ===<br />
<br />
* Reduce the number of FindPath calls made by Fireteams<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where empty fireteams in some states were never being disbanded<br />
<br />
* The way that the game tracks commands that are actually queued versus those that are just requested but not actually sent is now much better, giving us insight into what the heck is going on and where we might be able to squeeze out some more performance in giant games in particular.<br />
<br />
* A large amount of code relating to simulation that happens at the planet level has been moved into the open-source dlls.<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch more of the world-step sim logic has been moved into the open-source (moddable) part of the code.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor performance drain where our "combine into stacks" code was pulling thousands more gamecommands from the pool in large savegames, then not using most of them because of whatever invalidities.<br />
<br />
* Put in a variety of fixes to the AI background thread where it could pull a "send wormhole" command prematurely and then realize that it had nothing to send, thus causing it to trigger some locks pointlessly and waste some background CPU cycles.<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code in dark spire, devourer, dyson sphere, instigators, and outguard that could cause it to issue blank wormhole move commands and calculate paths for no ships in potential rare circumstances.<br />
<br />
* Improved some of our utility methods to early-out a lot sooner when they don't have targets to chase, etc.<br />
<br />
* Improved the divide ships among planets code to definitely never send empty wormhole commands anymore.<br />
<br />
* Improved the auto pursuit mode for engineers to not request extra commands and then put them back, again improving performance slightly.<br />
<br />
* If null commands or null types on commands are sent, it now shows those in red in the escape menu.<br />
<br />
* For commands that have a different number of requests and actual queuings in the escape menu, it now shows those in red for easy identification.<br />
<br />
* When the game gets a request to shut down or quit to the main menu or other things of that sort, it is now absolutely brutal with the background threads, killing them all and exiting immediately. It was before trying to be polite and wait for them to tidy up and finish, but that was at the best case slow (now with fire teams in particular), and in the worst case would never exit (in the case of a stalled background thread).<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where if one of the background long term planning fields got stuck or was slow, it could cause others to be very slow to send their commands.<br />
** In general also made it so that long term faction threads now send their commands as they finish their individual work, which is far superior in terms of smooth performance when there are many factions.<br />
<br />
* If the game runs into a background thread that is taking more than 10 seconds (which means it is then blocking all other background threads, too), it now shows a message on the right hand side of the screen saying slow background threads and showing what the slow thread is.<br />
** In this way we can actually tell if something stalls out and then starts blocking the rest of the game, versus before it was pretty invisible.<br />
<br />
* Fixed some excessive requests for SetWaiting and SetBehavior_FromFaction_ThreatTimeToFight that were then never being queued for actual use.<br />
<br />
* Fixed some excessive requests to TransferEntitiesToFaction and ScrapUnits that would then not be queued.<br />
<br />
* Split the singular "SetWormholePath" into 17 distinct variants so we can see what is going on in terms of high volumes of those being sent in some savegames and thus causing a big slowdown.<br />
** The general idea is for us to be able to recognize hotspots at a glance, but all of these function the same so it doesn't matter which one a mod's code uses.<br />
** An interesting side effect of this is that it potentially cuts down on cross-threading contention since the pool has to be locked to take items out and put them back in.<br />
*** The pool being locked and unlocked is one reason not requesting more commands than we need is a really good idea, too.<br />
** There is actually a measurable performance boost from these things alone.<br />
<br />
* Same thing with splitting CreateSpeedGroup into 4 variants.<br />
<br />
* FlushReinforcementPoints can now only be called on a planet once every 5 seconds at most.<br />
** This keeps certain factions from flooding the command queue with hundreds of such requests over the course of a second or two of game time.<br />
<br />
* Refinements to the pathfinding performance, round 1 (existing algorithm changes):<br />
** Starting performance:<br />
*** 3.30017 ms per call on average for marauders, over 25k calls in 84 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread (stopped thread after this).<br />
** After making GetNeighborOfNodeByIndex much more direct and not involving a loop:<br />
*** To start, 2.883 ms per call on average for marauders, over 16k calls in 48 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread.<br />
*** But then 3.212 ms per call on average for marauders, over 30k calls in 98 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread (stopped thread after this)<br />
*** It's worth noting that there's fuzz in all this data, from disk write speeds and application being in the foreground or background more, different routes being considered, etc. So it's only so precise.<br />
** Removed DoForNodesInFlood since it was never used anyway.<br />
** Then changed the pathfinding object itself to not instantiate a ton of stuff on the heap with every call, instead reusing objects and lists and dictionaries except for the final result dictionary.<br />
*** As part of this, made it so that the FindPathInner method now also checks to see if it has simultaneous calls on the same object, to make it complain if it's used in a non-threadsafe manner. A single thread would only call these serially, after all.<br />
*** After this, 2.642 ms per call on average for marauders, over 16k calls in 44 seconds of processing for the marauders faction long term planning thread (stopped thread after this)<br />
** It's observed that we're doing quite a few calls to these pathfinders on the main thread as well, but nothing at the sort of scale that the long term planning threads do. But some of the substantial performance degradation to the sim is probably this on the main thread also.<br />
** With the logging turned off, the long-running thread for marauders in the super-slow s6 save is now something that takes still north of 136 seconds, so this sort of low-hanging fruit is making very little difference in aggregate and could even simply be the result of instrumentation error (so to speak). The revisions definitely are performance improvements, but are apparently such a tiny portion of the load as to not be noteworthy.<br />
<br />
* Before we get into more extreme changes, the ArcenPathfinder class and its internals have been moved to the external public source code.<br />
** This makes things far quicker for us to change and then test the results with.<br />
<br />
* Added a new abstract Pathfindable class in the Arcen Core area, which is now required for use in the pathfinding code, and which Planet inherits from.<br />
** This lets us make a number of things more efficient, and not just in pathfinding.<br />
** PlanetIndex on the planet object is now just Index on Pathfindable.<br />
** LinkedPlanetIndices is now just LinkedIndices on Pathfindable.<br />
** Added a new LinkedPathfindables on Pathfindable which gets recalculated as needed and which can be manually recalculated via FillLinkedPathfindablesIfNeeded().<br />
*** This actually should speed up calculations for a lot of things with adjacent planet checks, even outside of pathfinding.<br />
** The pathfinding code is now able to directly call a few things on Pathfindable, rather than having to indirectly get things via method calls.<br />
*** This is another incremental improvement, but paves the way for a number of things, and in general makes the load on the call stack lower. Given how many paths are being calculated by fire teams, every little bit matters, even before we get into the larger changes.<br />
<br />
* Made some tweaks to fireteam code to reduce the number of FindPath calls.<br />
** This alone shifts the performance of the s6 savegame case to be able to finish the marauders long-running thread in 98 seconds now instead of it running somewhere north of 150 or 200 seconds.<br />
<br />
* The ArcenSimContext now has a non-sim incrementing loop counter in it that tells us when we need to refresh the pathfinding data and other things.<br />
** This is "non sim" in the sense that it doesn't matter what the loop counter number is, it just matters that it knows when the number is different. This is safe to use for multiplayer and on short and long term planning threads, main thread, etc.<br />
** To check if this is the same execution that it was the last time you were in a thread, you can now check a stored integer against NonsimLoopIndex on the context. If the numbers don't match, sim or not sim, then you should recalculate whatever you're intending to cache on a per-iteration-of-this-thread-whatever-that-is basis.<br />
<br />
* The pathfinding code now requires that an ArcenSimContext so that we can use that new stuff for lazy-load precalculations.<br />
** This lets us be sure that we're not wasting any CPU on precalculations that will never be used, but at the same time since these are per-thread we don't recalculate the same things over and over again. At least that's what will be the case.<br />
<br />
* The pathfinding code now also keeps track of what the first ArcenSimContext was to call into it, and if another context is ever used to call into it, it will complain.<br />
** Thus if we wind up with short term planning code calling long term planning code, we'll know, etc. So far the tests show no instances of this happening, but prior to now that would have been a silent problem if it was happening.<br />
<br />
* More tweaks to fireteam code to even further reduce the number of FindPath calls.<br />
** This shifts the performance of the s6 savegame case to be able to finish the marauders long-running thread in 77 seconds.<br />
<br />
* The background threads are now set to run not in background mode, and with a priority that is above normal. This shouldn't affect the front-end framerate except on extremely limited old-school single-core machines, which don't meet the minimum requirements anyhow.<br />
** This makes better use of your entire processor, and the more cores you have the better the improvement is. This may also be somewhat OS-dependent, as different OSes have different threading models and are better and worse at different things.<br />
** On Windows 10, simply switching from using the unity editor as our test environment to using a standalone build gets us from 40% sim speed to 50-70% sim speed in the s6 savegame, and it drops the background marauder thread from 80 seconds to 55 seconds to execute. On Linux, Badger reports 20 seconds or so for the same background thread, though.<br />
** After these changes to upping the priority, we get a much more solid 70-100% sim speed (those all are running on "background" threads as well, after all), and the background marauder thread drops from 55 seconds to 50.<br />
** We still have a ways to go with the pathfinding efficiency itself, and potentially with culling yet more cases where it's actually calling the pathing threads in a nested fashion, but some of this was based on our internal testing environment (who knew that unity's editor doesn't at all obey thread priorities?), and some of it is improved by giving the background threads in the actual standalone game more freedom to use your available processor space. If your CPU is half idle and the game is running at all slowly, that's just silly.<br />
<br />
* Made a variety of changes to improve pathfinding performance further.<br />
** We're precalculating node passability, which gets rid of the most frequent method call that we were seeing inside the pathfinding code. However, this only drops us from 55 seconds to 51 seconds (a 7.3% increase) for marauder path computations. We need to take it further! (Even though Badger has solved the problem another way that isn't checked in yet, we still want pathfinding to fly.)<br />
<br />
* Made further pathfinding changes to remove all uses of dictionaries and almost all use of lists, and definitely all uses of Contains.<br />
** This has basically linearized the node states into a series of arrays of fixed length 500, and if there are ever more than 500 planets in a galaxy the pathfinding will break unless it is recompiled to support higher numbers of planets. The overall game would burn performance at 500 planets and it would be unpleasant to play, anyway, so this does not seem like a problem to have.<br />
** With the changes to linearize things in this way, performance went down from 51 seconds on the marauder thread to... 7 seconds. So from the recent 55 seconds this is a full 87% improvement to pathfinding speed.<br />
<br />
* Badger figured out a way to also time-slice the fire team logic so that they only scan a certain number of planets (per faction) per check of fire teams.<br />
** This makes some of the fire teams a bit "slower to react" (this is VERY relative) in the super short term in saves with literally hundreds of fire teams on one faction and 200 planets, but it keeps everything running far faster.<br />
** A single fire team might need to evaluate hundreds of planets in order to find out what it needs to do after completing a major objective or just coming into an existence, and this was the case where the game could spike and have really long-running threads (north of 200 seconds prior to this release, now down to 7 seconds as of Chris's prior changes just above).<br />
** While Chris was doing his changes, Badger got in this throttling and managed to make the simulation run at full speed and take an average of 5 seconds instead of 55 even before the pathfinding was 87% more efficient. That was with 1000 planets being scanned at a time, max.<br />
** There is a new galaxy setting which lets you adjust the number of planets to scan, and its new default is now 2500 since between these changes, other fire team improvements, and the pathfinding improvements, what was once taking 200+ seconds now takes a second or two. <br />
** So the fire teams "reacting slower" as noted above means they might delay for a few seconds, maybe 10 at most, in the really huge savegames. But it's not something that will stall the game or performance anymore, and the prior amount of time we had to wait in prior builds for ANYTHING to happen was 200+ seconds. So... it's just plain faster.<br />
** Also, the name of the galaxy option to control this is "Max targets Fireteams can scan in one iteration" in the performance section.<br />
<br />
=== Exo tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where exos were losing their exo target between save/reload<br />
* If a unit had been in an exo but the target died, the ship drops out of the exo and joins the threat<br />
* Units in an exo stuck by a black hole machine should prioritize killing the black hole machine<br />
* This should make exos even more adept at chasing units across planets. Especially big, shard-shaped ones.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Cross Planet Attack (CPA) tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* AI homeworlds can no longer contribute to cross planet attacks (CPAs).<br />
<br />
* When pulling ships for a CPA, the AI now starts with the planets that are at or below its current mark level (whatever that is), minimum 2.<br />
** It then goes to planets 1 mark level above, then two, then random among everything else.<br />
** This makes it most likely, particularly in the early game, that most things will be relatively low-level.<br />
<br />
* To clarify, since many have been confused, while CPAs do have a budget, they do NOT create new ships.<br />
** As with the first AI War, they instead turn guards into threat. Aka, they set guards "free" to come attack you.<br />
** The budget of the CPA determines how many ships they can set free, but doesn't let them purchase anything new.<br />
** Specifically it only pulls from ships that are IN guard posts at the moment.<br />
<br />
* Previously, the mark level of ships in a CPA was downgraded (or upgraded) to whatever the mark level of the AI was in general at the time.<br />
** This was wildly unfair to the AI in a lot of cases, making high-mark ships into low-mark ones.<br />
** Now the AI gets whatever their actual mark of ships are freed, but it tries to free appropriate-or-lower mark ships first before launching harder stuff.<br />
** When it launches things that are lower-mark or higher-mark than its baseline, it pays less or more from its budget based on the strength differential. So the end strength should be the same in general.<br />
<br />
* When ships come out of guard posts for CPAs, previously it would grind some games to a halt because of them coming out unstacked and potentially huge in number.<br />
** Now it tries to stack them up to 99 ships at a time per stack, as it can.<br />
<br />
* Also previously, when the CPA launched you had no idea what you were in for. Now it tells you how many ships, what total strength, and how many of each mark level of ship were freed.<br />
** The idea is definitely to keep you from being surprised by higher-mark ships showing up, or in general by what is happening. Where the ships are and what specifically their composition is remains a mystery, though.<br />
** This also should immediately dispel any confusion about these being new ships versus freed guards, based on the wording of the notification.<br />
<br />
* The in-game Tip now explains these new mechanics<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Some buffs to the Macrophage, who are feeling pretty uninspiring. More buffs to come if they are still underperforming<br />
<br />
* Nanocausts and Marauders that were created before fireteams were an option now default to using fireteams<br />
** This includes Nanocausts and Marauders from quickstarts<br />
<br />
* Altered most of the Fleet Designs again, to fix some problems accidentally introduced previously, regarding Mono-Tech Fleets and the general chances of each Tech line being on paper fine, but in practice notably off.<br />
** Also added 15 new Designs, and removed 2 that were notable culprits.<br />
<br />
* Dark Spire Wraith and Phantoms can now be affected by the Strikecraft Coordinator, as well as have their lines doubled.<br />
** Mentioned by Ryulong.<br />
<br />
* Space Planes, Mirages and Apparitions have their damage resistance range reduced, to account for the recent 0.8x range modifier that does not affect this.<br />
** Also mentioned by Ryulong.<br />
<br />
* Added some more Guardian types to the Instigator Base spawns.<br />
** Requested by ArnaudB and Fluffiest.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Vanguard speed 400 -> 600, shots per salvo 1 -> 8, damage 360 -> 90, reload time 6s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard Hydra speed 600 -> 800, shots per salvo 1 -> 8, damage 180 -> 60, reload time 6s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tank speed 400 -> 500, main weapon range 4,200 -> 5,600, main weapon has the same damage bonus as the secondary.<br />
<br />
* Ablative Gatling speed 600 -> 800.<br />
<br />
* Ablative Troll speed 400 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette and Porcupine speed 500 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette speed 400 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Molotov speed 800 -> 1,000.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Corvette speed 400 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Raptor damage bonus 4x -> 6x.<br />
<br />
* Ranger speed 800 -> 1,000, damage 225 -> 450, reload time 4s -> 8s, range infinite -> 10,100, now has a cloaking device.<br />
<br />
==== Zenith Trader ====<br />
<br />
* Scrubbed Abberation and Abomination now do full Zombification rather than a form of Nanocaustation that would create normal zombies.<br />
** Led to a problem with the changes to Zombification to restrict what could be affected. Those did not affect Nanocaustation, so these units could still give the player zombie versions of Dire Guardians, for instance.<br />
<br />
* Now sells a Trader specific version of the Orbital Mass Driver, as to not interfere with the galaxy wide caps if you hack any.<br />
<br />
* All Zenith Trader goodies have a galaxy wide cap of 2.<br />
** Before you could armour up every planet you owned to a large amount with no other investment. Now you have to choose where these goodies go.<br />
<br />
* Zenith Forcefield is now Markless, but has improved stats over what it used to be.<br />
** Just clarity. It couldn't be upgraded anyhow.<br />
<br />
* All other Trader goodies are Markless.<br />
** Also for clarity, since most weren't affected anyhow, and the one that could (Tamed Macrophage) could have huge power spikes from planetary upgrades.<br />
** This might change in future.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.304 So You Like Combat Engineers? ==<br />
(Released January 14th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* The right hand chat/log window in the lobby is now hidden, since it isn't used for now.<br />
** Thanks to Sounds for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the performance section of personal settings: Enable Performance Logging<br />
** Turning this on may hurt performance a bit, but not hugely so in most cases. It lets you then see a lot of information about how the game is spending its CPU time by right-clicking the timer in the bottom left of the main game view. Off by default, as it has no other purpose than that.<br />
** Prior to this build it was always on. It wasn't a performance drain at all that we can tell, but it's worth being careful, and it was a source of some cross-threading issues which would give slight performance issues. But we can't detect even a 1% difference in general performance with this on, presently.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Friendly nanocaust should now honor the 'dont kill command station' setting<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reminding me about this<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo that was causing the outguard to go through withdrawl<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Some text editors put a shadow copy with .xml~ at the end, and that can be a problem for people who have files open to make tweaks (modding or development) while testing the game. It also can cause errors in the game if we accidentally push one out like that. The game now explicitly ignores such files.<br />
<br />
* Put even MORE paranoid-style cross-threading protections in on FramePartTimings, since themouthofsauron reports still seeing a few of those in the very latest 1.303 builds. Our fixes in that build probably cut down on those, but clearly didn't eliminate them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a visual-only bug where factories seemed to be helping build for fleets when the factory was disabled or still self-building or similar. Especially if other factories were actually making progress on the same things the factory was ostensibly helping, it was confusing.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a harmless but annoying exception that could happen as you exit the game or quit to the main menu in the last few versions.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes for a cascade of errors that could happen from a fleet member's type being inexplicably set to null.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of places where the game simply being in the process of exiting could cause the game to log an error that was actually harmless and not something to log.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved performance on the main menu by ensuring that background threads were not able to run (they would be pointless there in general).<br />
<br />
* The way that the performance logging is handled is now a bit more idiot-proof in terms of us being less likely to cause problems with mismatched calls to it.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a kind of face-palmy issue on the main menu that was causing it to lag horribly while everything else was fine. This only happened on Steam, not GOG, and was us basically checking too frequently to see if we needed to update Steam achievements online with things that were achieved locally but not yet logged to Steam.<br />
** Once we got GOG achievements in, this would have hit there as well, so it's good to get that out of the way for both platforms.<br />
** This shifts the framerate on the main menu from a very choppy 20fps to a super fluid 200+ fps.<br />
** This also seems to make the entire game load faster, too.<br />
<br />
* Added a bunch of internal compiler toggles which let us isolate different parts of the code to see where our performance bottlenecks are on the really high planet count late-game high-ship-count peformance problem games.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare cross-threading exception in PlaySFX_ShotHitting, and another one in GameEntity_Shot.ClearVisualObjIfExists.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the prior build where combat engineers and combat sentry frigates could not be built.<br />
** This was due to a rule change in how self-building units work, and these happened to inherit some improper self-building xml.<br />
** Now they properly are able to have their self-building xml overrideen to 0, which makes them work again while still keeping the nice new rules in general.<br />
** Presumably these were the only two ships affected (units that normally are planetary but can be used in battlestations with copy_from variants), but if there are more the fix is a quick xml adjustment.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong, Afferian, Daniexpert, ArnaudB, Vortex, ckellsworth, zerschleisser, Riken Avadur, Maggo 0815, daimyo_willem, XTRMNTR2K, and Distuth for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The Nanocaust can now use fireteams; like marauders, enable "Tactician" mode<br />
<br />
* Tactician is now the default for marauders and nanocaust<br />
<br />
* Some minor buffs to how quickly marauders can consolidate their planets<br />
<br />
* Sabotage hack duration 30 -> 15, Cost 20 -> 15.<br />
<br />
* Slight increase of Super Terminal response intervals.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.303 AI Hunter Fireteams For All ==<br />
(Released January 13th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Build categories on the sidebar now sort their items by the name that they show in the sidebar, not by the actual full name of the entity. Sometimes this is different, and it makes it hard to find things when it is.<br />
<br />
* What factories are up to is now shown even on the brief tooltips, not just medium and up.<br />
** Thanks to several players for suggesting this.<br />
<br />
* Several improvements to what factories show when they have no work to do on various fleets.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes to an exception that could happen in the mercenary code, and also made it more informative if it happens again.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The "GAAAH! We have a command we need to execute during frame" error has finally been retired. Instead it now just executes the command late, which will be a desync in multiplayer that it can fix on its own. Better slightly late than never, in that case. In cases for single player it literally won't affect anything.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for the most recent report.<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements And Related Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Some bugfixing/IQ enhancement for the AI. AI threat against players had a deplorable habit of not realizing it was supposed to be against the player, and getting distracted by any other minor faction in the game. This was A. making the AI threat not press home attacks and B. making the threat not join the threat fleet appropriately. <br />
** From a discussion on discord with a number of people about why the hunter fleet seemed to be absent. This should be a big improvement.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with assassin mode (aka fireteam) hunter fleets where they were using stale/invalid data to decide when to attack. This usually meant they would fling themselves onto your defenses with reckless abandon<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a wide variety of places where RemoveEntity() was not being called properly when removing entities from a speed group.<br />
** This should lead to more correct behavior in group-move for players, and probably it will help with exos and fireteams and whatnot that are also using speed groups.<br />
<br />
* NPC/AI group move now works like it used to (more or less) prior to the player-specific group move enhancements. This keeps things like exos moving at expected speeds, for example.<br />
** Several bugs were fixed in this whole area as well while we were at it, including some things getting left in groups they should not have, and overriding speeds being forgotten when a compound command was given to units that were already in group move, etc.<br />
** Essentially the single group move command now works one way for players and one way for everyone else.<br />
<br />
* The Assassin hunter fleet type has been removed, as that was just for fire teams. Now all of the non-defensive hunter types use fire teams.<br />
** This is a pretty scary update to the hunter, making it so you no longer have to opt in to using their new exciting behaviors!<br />
<br />
* Fireteams in allied factions can now coordinate their assaults. AI-allied fireteams can also coordinate with AI threat forces<br />
<br />
== Version 1.302 Frigate Empowerment ==<br />
(Released January 12th, 2020)<br />
<br />
* Added a new amount_added_to_range_per_ship_of_this_type_on_planet for ships, which allows for ships of a certain type to get a bonus of that integer (for instance something like 50 or 500 or whatever we want) for each ship of that same type on the planet beyond the first.<br />
** This currently gives the benefit to all systems of the ship, whether they are weapons or not.<br />
** This allows for the "Networked Targeters" type of mechanic that RocketAssistedPuffin thought up.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting!<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, it now says "Intensity" for factions, like it does in game, rather than saying Strength. Strength means something else in-game, so keeping this separate and consistent is helpful for clarity.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* For external invulnerability to be granted, now the granters have to either have the tag "InvulnerabilityGranter" on them, or be of type guard post.<br />
** This lets things that would become invulnerable do far less checking, thus being far more efficient about it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Infinite-ranged ships now have some new logic that should set them to always attacking ONLY the types of ships that they prefer to shoot (based on your selection) if those sorts of targets are available in their current system.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that are crippled no longer provide vision to the planets they are on. People were able to use crippled flagships as scouts.<br />
** Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Frigates now automatically have 1/3 as much priority as targets for enemies to shoot. They should feel more beefy now.<br />
<br />
* The deprioritization based on overkill or frigates now only happens if the potential target is "not my special target," meaning not set to specifically be what the player ship shoots at, or the strongest tractor beam grappling the ship.<br />
<br />
* The frigate deprioritization now only affects player frigates. Won't help outguard or other factions or AIs or zombies.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* If a forcefield is sitting on top of a wormhole, it will block enemies from going into the wormhole even if the simulation speed is very high or coarse background processing is on.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of people for reporting, including Waladil, MatterofLight, and KDR_11k.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the targeting was deprioritizing anything that would be overkilled, and not factoring in stacks when doing so. This led to large things being prioritized more in general by ships.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception that could happen when disbanding fireteams if they did not belong to the scourge faction, thus leading to ships no longer moving.<br />
** Thanks to Histidine for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes for an exception that could happen inside GetFleetCap, particularly for mods.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug that could happen in LowerOrRaiseGameSpeedStyle if you tried to raise that kind of alternative game speed increase too many times.<br />
** Please do note that increasing the game speed in this particular way will absolutely hammer even a top-end CPU and probably lead to worse game performance despite not affecting gameplay accuracy. It's kind of meant for computers that don't exist yet, which is why we haven't had anyone run into this before now.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a probably-rare exception that could happen during tooltip generation for factories, most likely related to cross-thread updates.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a RenderShip error that could happen in some rare cases as ships were dying.<br />
** Thanks to NoMoreBlender for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of possible exceptions that could happen during loops through certain entity lists if the list changed during the loop. This is somewhat a side effect of more parallelism, but was already a thing that could happen prior to the most recent updates just because of what we already had in parallel. The game already was guarding against the most common cases where this could happen, but not another few subsets. It now guards against them all.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that could happen inside GetWormholeToOtherPlanet in entity orders.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception in the claiming code for neutral entities that could happen and then spam the log endlessly.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really rare and strange error that could sometimes happen in FramePartTimings. This happened to Chris periodically for the last year, but it had never been seen "in the wild"" until Daniexpert ran into it. We thought it was just related to the dev environment somehow, but it seems to be a cross-threading thing that can rarely happen on startup if things go just wrongly. The game itself will run terribly and spam the world if this happens, so making it gracefully recover is a good thing.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed some typos in the AIP history where it had double "from" and where it would try to say what planet you captured a planet, but always say "null" instead since we don't actually track the linked planets to things.<br />
** Thanks to Histidine for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.3 The Grand New AI ==<br />
( Released January 10th, 2020 )<br />
<br />
* The multipliers in the interface in the bottom left are once again literal (1.5x, 2x, etc, up to 5x).<br />
** Thanks to folks in Discord for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Some updates to the Octopus map generator from Tadrinth<br />
<br />
* Added some more tips, including explanations of Wave, CPA, etc.<br />
<br />
* Some ships are never eligible for repairs because they self-attrition, and now the tooltip says that so that it doesn't seem like a bug when they are not repaired.<br />
<br />
* The "investigating starfields" line on the startup sequence is now randomized with a variety of silly things, because we boot the game so often and get bored of the same text. Enjoy!<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed Forcefields being non-functional in the prior build.<br />
** Thanks to Histidine, ArnaudB and tadrinth for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a visual bug where allied forces were sometimes reported as having negative strength<br />
** Thanks to Histidine, NRSirLimbo and Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the recent internal versions where it was showing lots of the text as brown in the C-click menus because of an un-closed color tag.<br />
** Thanks to Astilious for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the achievements that you had previously completed locally were not properly able to be loaded, and thus would be awarded to you again every time you restarted the game.<br />
<br />
* The "FleetMembership was null on unit" error no longer shows, and instead the game mostly-silently just fixes this in the background.<br />
** However, it also increments CountOfNullFleetMembershipsFixed, which is now shown in the escape menu as "Null Mem Fixes" so we can see if that's skyrocketing for some reason.<br />
** This prevents a bunch of the marauders from being lost and problematic in certain savegames that may have had prior trauma or who knows exactly what the reason was.<br />
** Thanks to eppiox for reporting. This goes back to prior to the current beta versions.<br />
<br />
* Put in a fix for an exception in DoEntityFramePlanningLogic_TargetPrioritizing, such that in particular even if there is an exception it won't cause all targeting to fail forever after that. It will give us a better error message as well as not fouling up the whole system.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting. This goes back to prior to the current beta versions.<br />
<br />
* Suppressing the error "BUG: tried to go past the end of workinShipPool," which was harmless.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in some of the patrol code since more than one faction now uses that. It was particularly likely on multithreaded background factions, but could crop up even in normal play.<br />
<br />
* Warden Fleet Bases are no longer considered reinforcement points, as this caused some weirdness with them, and could result in it being MIA over time as units were stuck inside.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting something about reinforcements, which led into this discovery which was possibly a large root cause.<br />
<br />
* Previously it was possible for map generation algorithms to generate links/wormholes to themselves, which would throw off all manner of logic. Rather than leaving that to individual map authors to fix themselves, the game now checks for those and automatically repairs them, including in existing savegames.<br />
** From testing through the various map types, it looks like this was only happening with linked rings map type and its subtypes, but you never know what might have arisen in the future.<br />
** We're not really sure what negative effects this was having beyond strange visuals, but it probably affected AI decisions in terms of how strong a planet and its "neighbors" were by double-counting the planet itself, and it may have also impacted pathfinding between planets in a negative way.<br />
** Thanks to CaptainTaz, Acuzik, and Rivet for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in general in the code where it could give the wrong mark for a fleet membership if it passed in the wrong ship/structure type line. This probably caused some strangeness in the AI transforming units, it's hard to say.<br />
** This also led to an exploit where you could have a higher-mark command station of one type (military, whatever), then switch to a different command station type and keep the higher mark.<br />
** All of that is now fixed, although it won't retroactively fix any existing savegames.<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'capture flagships' objective hovertext with more colour, to improve readability<br />
<br />
==== No More Ship Pooling ====<br />
<br />
* The "BUG: Could not find a wormhole between" two planets wormhole movement command is no longer silent, but now pops up as an error in your face.<br />
** Additionally, all wormhole commands now should have a reason code for the command (so we can fix cases like this), and this shows the reson code.<br />
*** The sole purpose of the reason code is to help us find the places where wormhole paths are calculated incorrectly.<br />
*** But we can't actually REQUIRE the reason code, because older savegames will pop up with errors if we did so.<br />
<br />
* Found some major bugs in AI_GO_RAID and AI_FLEE_THRT.<br />
** It now logs different errors if trying to send ships from disparate planets along a path from a starting planet that doesn't match.<br />
<br />
* BUT, really, the true bug behind all of this is that we are holding references to GameEntity_Squad objects in various background threads, and those are not reliable in their identity.<br />
** Because of pooling, it's possible for an entity to be an AI ship for a while, then die and get reborn as a player ship. The errors we were seeing were with player ships being ordered around as if they were threatfleet.<br />
** The natural way of solving this that we had developed for the game was to use SquadWrapper, which adds a layer that prevents such mixups from happening.<br />
** The amount of code rework to make SquadWrapper happen all throughout the code is incredibly huge, however, and would be problematic for a wide variety of reasons. Even if we managed to change those thousands of lines of code required, that code would then run more slowly.<br />
** So the only solution, in the end, is... to stop pooling the GameEntity_Squad objects. All other types of objects can continue to be pooled as they are now, because nothing needs to hold onto such long-term references as with these.<br />
** This will cause a lot more weight on the memory garbage collector (GC) during heavy fighting or other circumstances when many ships are being created or killed. In the past, this was unacceptable.<br />
*** However, this is now mitigated by the fact that unity has more recently implemented a time-sliced garbage collector, and so the hits to it are far less severe.<br />
*** And even beyond that, we've implemented stacks of untis, and kill units "off the top," which means that the number of times we have to kill or create GameEntity_Squad units is a whole lot less.<br />
** There is a tradeoff here for sure, but in the end this also means we can then stop using SquadWrapper in other places, which in turn will improve some efficiency (mildly) in other areas of the code.<br />
** This does also mean that if background factions don't ever check for dead entities and prune them, they will wind up causing these entities to never be garbage collected and thus lead to an eventual memory leak. Previously it was that they would have incorrect game function, so this is preferable.<br />
<br />
* No longer using squad wrappers for the factories calculations on the fleets. This has a very tiny benefit to performance, almost nothing.<br />
<br />
=== More Performance! ===<br />
<br />
* VASTLY improved the performance of probably most savegames, but certainly certain ones, by making the following changes.<br />
** (The performance bump in the "performance concern" save from Democracy is from about 10% on Chris's machine to full speed.)<br />
** The following kinds of metal flows never even get checked anymore except for player ships: SelfConstruction, FactoryConstructionForPlayerMobileFleets, ClaimingNeutrals, RebuildingRemains.<br />
*** If any other non-player factions ever need to do these, we can deal with that, but frankly these are all player-centric things. However, tons of NPC and AI faction ships had one or more of these, and would check thorugh them in an expensive way every frame.<br />
** The following kinds of metal flows never even get checked anymore except for non-AI ships (so this means players and other factions do these): RepairingHullsOfFriendlies, RepairingShieldsOfFriendlies, RepairingEnginesOfFriendlies, AssistConstruction.<br />
*** This means that engineers in the hands of the AI are absolutely pointless in every way. And the medic gunboats in the hands of the AI lose their medic capabilities. The AI could field ridiculous numbers of meidc gunboats, which are computationally very expensive, and it also made the battlefield more chaotic.<br />
*** Given the AI doesn't actually pay metal to repair things, just not letting the AI make repairs in the (already super rare) cases where it would try to do so is a big performance gain. But things like outguard and other factions may need to help themselves or player ships, so them still checking it is good.<br />
** And then any faction can still do: BuildingDronesInternally. So no change there.<br />
<br />
* Then we took this even further, changing the efficiency of metal flow checks from millions of calculations and loops per second to mere thousands.<br />
** In other words, as Badger phrased it, O(n^2) == > O(n) ==> happy.<br />
** Essentially something that executed in exponential load as there were more units and more things to repair the units has become something that executes in close to linear time.<br />
** There are a variety of further shortcuts that we put in place that skip processing entirely for planets/factions where there's nothing possible to find, but before it wasted some CPU time checking anyway. We use slightly more RAM to be able to figure all that out, but it's maybe a MB or two.<br />
<br />
==== PFP Goes Mainstream ====<br />
<br />
* In the performance section of your personal settings, we had a setting called "Advanced: Run Massively Parallel Faction Processing"<br />
** That has been removed, and replaced with a new option called "Disable Parallel Faction Processing".<br />
** The default is essentially now that the parallel processing is on, whereas at first it was off by default.<br />
** The purpose of keeping this option at all is for people with very few cores on their machines.<br />
** Description of the new setting:<br />
*** Only matters in single-player, or the host in multiplayer. Parallel Faction Processing (PFP) lets the factions in the game be substantially smarter and faster in how they react to things, and is most notable at higher simulation speeds (5x, etc).<br />
*** On a lot of gaming-style computers, not only does the PFP function make factions and the AI smarter, but it actually can improve performance. We highly recommend you play with this on if your performance in the game is looking suitable.<br />
*** If you are on a computer with very few cores, then we provide the option here to disable PFP so that the processing is time-sliced. This makes the AI and factions notably slower to react, and the higher the simulation speed you choose, the worse it will get.<br />
*** If you play at 5x sim speed and have PFP off, we don't consider that a valid way to beat difficulty 10 AIs -- they're half-braindead, so it's not really a fair fight. With PFP on, or at 1x sim speed, you'll see the true fury of the maximum difficulties.<br />
** Huge thanks to Badger and some others for diagnosing this problem.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord AIP on death 120 -> 37.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord Phase Two AIP on death 20 -> 37, durability increased 25%, Parasite Bolt damage doubled, Fusion Bomb damage increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Both AI Overlord Phases grant 5,000 Science and 30 Hacking on defeat.<br />
<br />
* All Dire Guard Posts increase AIP by 8 on death.<br />
<br />
* Increased the Instigator time interval between each effect triggering.<br />
<br />
* Troop Accelerator effect 2x -> 1.5x.<br />
<br />
* Reduced AIs initial strikecraft a bit.<br />
<br />
* Dire Forcefield Guardian forcefield radius increased 66%.<br />
<br />
* The ai_planet_defense_multiplier values were a bit on the high side, previously.<br />
** Notes: We made mk3 the baseline for balance just because it's in the lower-middle range and something that is very common. It's the start of the real power curve, while mark 1 is incredibly underpowered and mark 2 is just somewhat underpowered. From mk3 up it's meant to be more of a gradient, but with 7s being somewhat overpowered. So really 3-6 are a good gradient is the goal.<br />
** In-game the stuff that is within 1-2 hops of a player homeworld is weakened no matter what mark it is, already, incidentally. And AI homeworlds get a major buff even above mark 7, too.<br />
** Before the marks went 0.6 on budget for mark 1, 0.8 mk2, 1 mk3, then a crazy 1.2 for mk4 (given the higher strength of those units at those planets that could be a jump from 20 to 120 strength), then 1.6 mk5, 2 mk5, 2.5 mk7<br />
** So let's try this instead: keep all of that the same, but make mk4 0.95 (so smaller budget but WAY more powerful stuff), 1.05 mk5, 1.15 mk6, and then 1.8 mk7. These are the fortresses.<br />
<br />
* Neutering of AI planets is now more effective.<br />
** The resulting percentage of "number of reinforcement points divided by max seen here" now squares itself. So 0.8 becomes 0.64, it's an exponential falloff.<br />
** But don't let it go below 0.05, or 5%, as the multiplier.<br />
** Additionally, if there are no reinforcement points left at all, don't let the AI have any reinforcement budget at all.<br />
** And if there is only ONE reinforcement point left (assuming this is the command station, but you never know), then it automatically drops to 0.05, 5%.<br />
** People would fully neuter a planet and then still see the budget just be far too high.<br />
<br />
* If there is more than twice the "enemy" strength on an AI planet ("enemy" here meaning you-the-player, your friends, or mutual enemies of you and the AI), then the AI now loses all its reinforcement budgets at that planet. But only after the first 5 seconds of the game, so this doesn't impact mapgen with things like nanocaust seeding or whatever else.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Improved some of the mapgen logic to have different logic on how it's able to seed things when quarters get tight. There are now several different modes for expansion of the seedable area, which for instance on maze map types and other low-granularity types should make it so that you still get a global command agumenter within 2 hops, even if it's not within 1.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Order of mapgen seeding was fleets, then tv, then ars, then gca, then fce.<br />
** This has been improved to fleets, gca, ars, tv, then fce.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== Planet Mark Level Assignment Rework ====<br />
* The code that determines the mark levels of planets has been significantly overhauled. The practical upshot of this is that the planetary mark levels are now more reasonably distributed. Here's how it works now.<br />
** For each Player homeworld, the game assigns low mark (marks 1-3) planets nearby. Note that if the highest ai difficulty is <= 5 has some extra low-mark planets<br />
** For each AI homeworld, the game assigns high mark (marks 5-7) planets nearby<br />
** For the remaining planets, they are randomly allocated based on percentages. The base values for those are as follows (with minor adjustments for particularly low or high ai difficulties) <br />
*** Mark 2: 5%<br />
*** Mark 3: 25%<br />
*** Mark 4: 35%<br />
*** Mark 5: 30%<br />
*** Mark 6: 5%<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.104 The Speed We Need ==<br />
(Released January 7th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Updated the test chamber so that you can better assign things like allied factions and so on.<br />
<br />
* Game Speed Types of Faster Ships, and all those above, now only have a 1.4x ship movement speed multiplier, instead of going up to 8x at the highest setting.<br />
<br />
=== Performance ===<br />
<br />
* Precalculated a lot more pieces of data that get checked very frequently, giving general minor speed boosts for things that get checked millions of times per second cumulatively.<br />
** It's the sort of thing that is really a minor improvement per check, but the volume of checks makes a big deal in a variety of circumstances.<br />
** Some of this stuff was as minor as avoiding an extra method call on the stack, virtual or otherwise, and others were as major as avoiding internal loops over systems once per frame per unit.<br />
** More such improvements could be made, but all the ones that were likely to be any notable performance hit have been fixed at this point.<br />
<br />
* The game now only goes up to the equivalent of what the old 5x was, but labels that as a new 9x as the top end.<br />
** We were finding that above these higher speeds, accuracy of battles was highly off. You'd essentially be playing against a lobotomized AI on anything above 5x, and above even 3x it really wasn't quite the same in terms of battle results.<br />
** The new scaling actually shows how it improves overall simulation performance (relative to realtime), so if you had a 50% speed of frames and you move up the sim speed it could accurately show you as having actually 250% clock speed if you max out the multiplier. You can typically get just under 500% of clock speed if your CPU is keeping up and you go up to the new 9x.<br />
** There are still things that don't work as accurately when you overdrive things to this degree, but it's not absolutely on easy mode in quite the same way anymore.<br />
*** As an example, it would typically take the Warden Fleet was taking 90-120 seconds to notice that you'd attacked a planet at the old 10x speed. So you could go capture a planet adjacent to a major warden fleet force before they would even think about joining the battle.<br />
<br />
* On tier 3 planets, guardians that patrol don't bother patrolling. It eats up CPU time (and later bandwidth) for no purpose at all, since it's invisible and doesn't impact your units either.<br />
<br />
* Renamed a bunch of methods to be a lot more clear what is sim and what is not. Turns out lots of stuff in the factions code that we thought might not be okay actually is, and it is now marked as such.<br />
** Other bits of the code we marked as "definitely breaks in multiplayer" or "not sure if breaks in multiplayer" to come back to. Multiplayer can recover from it, but it would be highly wasteful of network traffic.<br />
<br />
* Noticed a huge number of commands being sent for SetBehavior, so split that out some so that we can use the escape menu to try and figure out why that's the case.<br />
** Split all of the "set behavior" commands out into different variants so that in the escape menu we can see what is causing a bunch of them if there are a bunch being sent.<br />
** Then used that to fix a general performance regression in the betas that was sending a ton of SetBehavior_FromFaction_ITractoredShips for ships that were not relevant for that. This was the biggest part of the performance regression seen by Democracy, but it was also in all campaigns.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a number of leaks of gamecommands out of their pools. This isn't strictly a memory leak, but it acts vaguely similarly and doesn't help with garbage collection at any rate.<br />
** Essentially if "you" (the programmer or modder) queue a gamecommand, it will automatically go back in the pool after you use it. However, if you decide not to queue it even after pulling it out of the pool (it turns out there are no relevant entities, etc), then you have to call ReturnToPool() on it. In a few cases these were just being set to null instead, which doesn't help much.<br />
** In some other cases here, we didn't really reduce the turnover of the gamecommands, but we did make improvements to places where it might send a largely-pointless gamecommand saying "send all these ships through this wormhole path" and the list of ships turned out to be empty, etc. This sort of thing helps with performance even in single player far more than one might expect.<br />
** There wasn't anything truly egregious, but it was enough to be a drain. There are probably more such things, of lower incidence. Watching the escape menu numbers while unpaused gives clues as to where problems might be.<br />
<br />
* The way that metal flows are calculated are now literally an order of magnitude more efficient in terms of how many things they allocate and why. They now lazy-allocate things when they really have to, and otherwise just skip creating flow objects if there's nothing to do.<br />
** This was another major component of Democracy's slowdown, and this is extremely longstanding in the game in general (as old as the game itself), but it's not something that fully fixes the particular performance hole we were chasing. At least not fully.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* V-Wing range 4,200 -> 3,200.<br />
<br />
* Fusion Bomber range 4,000 -> 4,200.<br />
<br />
* Parasite range 3,200 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboat tachyon range 1,700 -> 3,200.<br />
<br />
* Ranger tachyon range 3,200 -> 5,000.<br />
** Thanks to tadrinth for some notes on the above units.<br />
<br />
* Consolidated all the Auto Bomb variants into a lower cap style of ship, with health and damage increased to compensate.<br />
** They should be more or less very similar, just with less performance strain from units constantly dying then being rebuilt.<br />
** Cluster Bombs only spawn 3 Mini Bombs now instead of 5, but their damage is increased to compensate, beyond what was already done above.<br />
<br />
* Consolidated the Railpod into the same style.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard Hydras now spawn 3 heads on death instead of 5, stats bumped to compensate.<br />
<br />
* Stingray Hydras now spawn 2 heads on death instead of 3.<br />
<br />
* Automated Construction Bots now spawn only 3 Mini versions, stats bumped up to compensate.<br />
<br />
* Slight reduction to most Frigate metal and energy costs.<br />
** Going slow with this, as increasing energy cost later if it's overdone can cause brownouts in existing saves.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.103 Tooltip Sweet Brevity ==<br />
(Released January 6th, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Wave tooltips now correctly show 'adaptive' or 'random' where appropriate, instead of always telling you the real AI type<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* The 'remove unlock variance' option now applies to fleets you can capture<br />
** Thanks to CyberKun for reporting<br />
<br />
* The hack options for ARS grant ship line now correctly report how many ships would be granted, as does C-Clicking on the ARS<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting<br />
<br />
* Maps now default to having 7 FCEs instead of 11 (there were just too many before)<br />
<br />
=== Tooltips Three Modes of Verbosity ===<br />
<br />
* TLDR of the below: There are now three levels of detail on the planet and ship tooltips: brief, medium, and full.<br />
** The default is now brief, which is new for both planets and ships, and is WAY smaller. Just the real basics, easier to understand.<br />
*** It's probably worth keeping this as the default even if you like more detail, just because these specific bits are the really core facts about a given ship. We may pare a few bits down even more. BUT if you prefer the old style of tooltips...<br />
** Medium is what the old "brief" used to be, and it has very slightly less detail than before. In the main it's better while not being much less detailed than before. A lot of the contrast of this with the other view is something that highlights the second tier of details better than ever, which is kind of cool.<br />
*** If you want this to be your new default, just turn on a setting and it will be. You can't shift "down" to brief if you do that, though.<br />
** Full is what it always has been, tons of information. You now have to hold ctrl and alt to see it, while ctrl OR alt will give you the medium view.<br />
*** You can also see full as your default, as you always could, if you prefer. However you can no longer go "down" to medium or the new brief from the full view if it's your default.<br />
<br />
* Old hotkey being removed: Toggle Ship And Planet Tooltip Detail Mode<br />
** Description: By default, the amount of information about ships and planets is abbreviated. Hold this key to see the full thing.<br />
** In the tooltips section of the settings menu, you can switch it so that the default is showing the full text, in which case holding this causes the abbreviation.<br />
<br />
* New hotkeys added: Increase Ship And Planet Tooltip Detail (Key 1) and (Key 2)<br />
** Description of both: By default, the amount of information about ships and planets is heavily abbreviated. Hold this key alone to see the medium detail view. Hold this AND the other 'increase detail' key to see the max detail.<br />
** In the tooltips section of the settings menu, you can adjust the default up to show medium or high detail. In those cases, there's no way to see the abbreviated versions.<br />
<br />
* Old game setting: Show Ship And Planet Detail Mode By Default<br />
** Renamed to Show Ship And Planet Complete Detail By Default<br />
** New description: Normally ships and planets show a very condensed amount of information about themselves in their tooltips. However, you can hold a key (shown at the bottom of those tooltips) to make them show a little more info or a whole lot more info. If you prefer to see the complete info by default, then you can enable this option.<br />
<br />
* New game setting: Show Ship And Planet Medium Detail By Default<br />
** Normally ships and planets show a very condensed amount of information about themselves in their tooltips. However, you can hold a key (shown at the bottom of those tooltips) to make them show a little more info or a whole lot more info. If you prefer to see the medium level of info by default, then you can enable this option.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Spider reload time 4s -> 3s, shots per salvo 1 -> 3, engine stun per shot 12 -> 6, damage 96 -> 45.<br />
** Tarantula is same.<br />
<br />
* Terrier reload time 4s -> 3s, shots per salvo 1 -> 3, engine stun per shot 16 -> 8, damage 51 -> 30, speed 1,000 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
* Paralyser reload time 9s -> 4s, damage 135 -> 68, shots per salvo 1 -> 2, paralysis per shot 4 -> 2.<br />
<br />
* Railpods use the same self damage mechanism as Minefields, now self destruct in 2 shots regardless of other factors. Reload time 4s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.102 Fireteam Refinements ==<br />
(Released January 3rd, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Add a "Select all non-flagship military on planet" selection option<br />
** Suggested by Iocaine<br />
<br />
* Some minor improvements to fireteam based factions<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.101 Ship Cap Reversions ==<br />
(Released January 2nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Fifteen new achievements have been added, to account for the new adaptive AI types. That brings us up to 154 achievements in total!<br />
* Added "Remove Unlock Variance in Capturables" option. This option removes the random ranges ships and turrets can be found with, fixing it at a constant average. Suggested by Flypaste, Fluffiest, CyberKun and many others on Discord. Thanks donblas.<br />
<br />
=== Fireteam and Minor Faction changes ===<br />
<br />
* Consolidate the Hunter Fleet and Marauder fireteam logic. This should make it quite easy to add fireteam logic to new minor factions, and allow for improved intelligence of fireteams going forward<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where marauder fireteams weren't always detecting that they had won a battle<br />
<br />
* Allied Marauders are back to killing command stations by default, but with a setting to disable it. This is a no-longer-basically-cheating version of "minor factions don't cause AIP increases". Allied Marauders always kill warp gates though. If this works then I'm going to deprecate "minor factions don't cause AIP increase" since that's too cheaty for my tastes<br />
<br />
=== Balance ===<br />
<br />
* In the prior release there was a thing with "growth versus stagnant" multipliers. Those are gone now, reverted to how they were before.<br />
<br />
* Also in the prior release, there were a lot of things that didn't get cap increases anymore, but now they work like strikecraft (and thus like they always did, although with some extra clarity because the cap scaling is still iterative as noted last release).<br />
** Frigates are unaffected by all this, as their scaling was essentially just evened out and they were still "growth style" units.<br />
<br />
* uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant has been removed, as the mechanic it was working with is now gone.<br />
<br />
* AI Great Turret health 3x instead of 5x. Tesla isn't mostly in hull anymore.<br />
<br />
* Tesla Turret bit more expensive for the AI too.<br />
<br />
* Put in some changes to how strikecraft reinforcements are placed, which makes them evenly fill all the available guard posts as much as they can. Previously the logic was really strange and also really slow, so now mapgen is a bit faster yet again (other changes in the prior build also made it faster).<br />
** So there should no longer be empty guard posts at the start of the game where you run into them and that's strange.<br />
<br />
* Also put in a change that allows more than 800 ships of a category (strikecraft, turrets, etc) to be reinforced at a planet at a time if need be, since that is a thing that can happen with strikecraft. It now allows for up to 8000.<br />
<br />
* Magnifiers and Troop Accelerators are now set to appear on the galaxy map on planets they are at, like most other "devious devices" the AI has.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes And Similar ===<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to mod out or deprecate ship lines in starting fleets or otherwise by setting their max cap to 0, which then takes them out completely.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for requesting this ability.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where display_name was being incorrectly blanked out on partial records when reading xml.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The Adaptive AI types now actually show their names as being easier, harder, moderate, brutal, full, etc, rather than just all showing "adaptive" in the interface. Now you can see what you're getting into!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mysterious bug where sometimes guard posts would not be able to seed during a reconquest seeding. This may have been exclusively related to the adaptive AI type, it's hard to be sure. But at any rate, when it runs into a lack of data on what kinds of guard posts to use, it now chooses what to use properly so that it has something. <br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the actual Random AI type was being shown, instead of just "random"<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where draw_in_galaxy_view being true was not enough to make structures or ships properly show up in the galaxy map view.<br />
** This makes it so that things like black hole machines and so on are visible on the galaxy map for the first time. And ion cannons and mass drivers, etc.<br />
<br />
* If a quick start includes a faction that is not present in the installation of a player later trying to load the quickstart (mods, expansions, etc), it now blanks out the offending faction and continues as normal with all the other factions. Anyone who DOES have that faction will see it work as expected, while anyone else will just see it missing but all else well, which is really the best of both worlds.<br />
** This was affecting a lot of our quick starts in the prior beta build.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.1 So Much Stuff We Can't Even, But More Is Still Coming ==<br />
(Released January 1st, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Add the "Extreme" category of Quickstarts, with 2 default, 1 nearly default, and 2 bonus scenarios.<br />
** Thanks to CyberKun for suggesting the category.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers will now be automatically targeted by units again, but are set to a low priority.<br />
** They still seem to like shooting these first however, if they happen to be in the way.<br />
** This lets factions destroy these again rather than being shot to bits, ignoring them.<br />
** Feedback is appreciated - this is a fairly opinion heavy thing.<br />
*** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Updated the "Various Weapons" fleet name styling with DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY's latest changes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Random Any ai type could pick 'random easier'<br />
<br />
* The Tech History menu (viewable by clicking the Science icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen) now shows the total science you've spent.<br />
<br />
* The "Show Entity Strength When Hovering" tooltip has been removed, as we are now going to do this by default. It was strange not showing it.<br />
** Ships now say if they are showing their own strength or the strength of themselves as a stack when you hover over them.<br />
<br />
* Targeting behavior of ships that are freely moving around (pursuit mode, whether of the player or other factions) are now vastly smarter in how they deal with non-combatants in general (things without guns but that need to die).<br />
** They'll still shoot at them just as frequently as ever IN PASSING, if there's nothing else to shoot at or that thing is the most important priority to shoot at based on the various metrics. But they no longer will specifically pursue those sorts of things with an excess weight just because they happen to be close.<br />
** If there are non-combatants with a high priority, then ships should still beeline for those just as well as ever, it's worth noting. And if they're not in pursuit mode, then nothing is different at all.<br />
** The net effect of this is that ships will generally approach and destroy dangerous things like great-turrets before they start messing about with an unarmed guard post or a gravity generator or whatever else. Survivability goes way up.<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust construction centers and Marauder Outposts now warp in over time (a short time interval, like 30 seconds to a minute) rather than warping in instantly. This gives their enemies a bigger window to counter attack in.<br />
<br />
* The Tech Menu now tells you a very approximate strength increase for both defenses and ships after upgrading.<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to hack Global Command Augmenters to re-roll provided turrets. (Thanks donblas)<br />
<br />
=== Optional Advanced: Massively Parallel Faction Processing ===<br />
<br />
* New setting in the personal settings: "Advanced: Run Massively Parallel Faction Processing"<br />
** Only matters on the host in multiplayer. This lets the factions in the game be substantially smarter and faster in how they react to things, and is most notable at higher simulation speeds (10x, etc).<br />
** But all this may come at a cost that your CPU can't handle; we're still testing that and would love feedback on the difference you see in simulation speed (the percent under the game speed multiplier) if you turn this on and off.<br />
** You will have a much fiercer foe at 10x speed with this on, versus an almost braindead one without it. At regular speed it won't matter much between one or the other.<br />
** We're hoping to build toward this being the default for everyone, but for now we don't want to inflict slower framerates on everyone just so that 10x speed runs smarter. One step at a time.<br />
** Right now this is off by default, and needs a lot of testing, but amazingly with the current design it did not slow down at all in a relatively-small-number-of-factions game on Chris's i7-6700 HQ. Much more data is needed.<br />
<br />
* You may experience some strange and awful bugs by enabling this, at least at first, as the factions have never been parallel in quite this way before. This may tank performance or cause lots of strange errors, and in most cases we can find and fix them if you send us the errors or the savegame with the bad performance. In most cases it would be two threads from different factions trying to use the same list or other collection. To report: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/<br />
** Thank you!<br />
<br />
=== Fireteams ===<br />
<br />
* Fireteams are a concept developed by Badger to allow non-player factions to flexibly coordinate a variety of simultaneous actions. It's the smartest strategic AI mechanism in either AIWC or AIW2 (in theory at least). Fireteams were developed to power the Scourge, a feature for the first DLC, but we can use the same basic logic for other minor factions to give those factions a nice intelligence boost. We are backporting R&D done for an expansion-only feature to the base game because the base game isn't hard enough yet. Mwahahaha. <br />
* Allied ships using fireteams (just marauder raiders for now) will show you what that fireteam is planning on doing in the verbose hovertext, to make coordinating between you and your allies more possible.<br />
** The simplest description for how Fireteams work is like this. All units for a given minor faction are assigned to small fireteams of 1-4 strength, so there will be lots of fireteams. Each fireteam determines its own objectives independently. If multiple fireteams have the same objective then they will coordinate their attacks.<br />
** This is currently available for the Hunter Fleet (via the 'Assassin' type in the Game Lobby) or the Marauders (via choosing "Intelligence: Tactician" in the game lobby).<br />
*** The Fireteam implementation for Marauders and Hunter Fleets is brand new, so I expect some teething pains and would love feedback (with save games)<br />
<br />
=== All-New "Adaptive" AI Type ===<br />
<br />
* Add in a new Adaptive AI type, which alternates between available types every so often. They work similarly to Random, in that there is "Adaptive Easier", "Adaptive Brutal", "Adaptive Any", and so on.<br />
** Change interval is in XML, and is once per hour. It won't change any existing units, but reinforcements/wave composition and so on will change. <br />
** There are currently no Achievements for these AI types<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Orbital Mass Driver reload time 9s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Hack Ion Cannon and Mass Driver now takes 2 seconds, rather than 15.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers that the player either hacked or bought now die to remains.<br />
<br />
* Replaced Military Command Stations engine stun with paralysis.<br />
** Engine Stun on this thing could be fairly exploitable, allowing it to hold off incredible amounts of enemy strength.<br />
** However, that was only possible if the enemy could be slowed at all. If they couldn't, it tended to fall relatively easily.<br />
** Swapping it to paralysis should let it not be as strong in the old ideal case, but also improves it in the worst possible case.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian damage 4,000 -> 8,000, shots per salvo 6 -> 3.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of Tesla weapons very slightly (10% ish?) and bumped up the splash size by 15% ish.<br />
** What this means is they effectively act more or less the same, except will not waste their initial shots on the first singular ship to come into range, and will tend to hit more beyond.<br />
** This was split between both the range and splash size to avoid making the visual effect too much larger. Shouldn't have much impact on gameplay, however.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post now has the fortified effect on it.<br />
<br />
* Hydra heads and the like cost no energy.<br />
** This was the cause of mysterious brownouts.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Reworked the way that wave compositions are filled to be more efficient and ensure that absolutely as much of the budget is spent of a wave as possible.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for discovering that this was not happening.<br />
<br />
* In the normal non-stealth-planet themes, the stealth guard posts are now 1/50th as likely to appear as before. There were vastly too many of these showing up in the galaxy prior to now.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guardian damage 2,500 -> 5,000, now has the same durability as the other Dires.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range slightly of MLRS, Concussion and Nucleophilic Guard Posts.<br />
** The main contributors to the "small world problem".<br />
<br />
* Increased the cost of normal Guardians by 50%.<br />
** This is in preparation of the next update, in which these'll be getting buffs. It's done in two stages to avoid current saves suddenly getting much harder.<br />
** With this, old games will be similar, and new ones will have the correct Guardian count for when the buffs hit. So for a time, Guardians'll be a bit easier.<br />
** This is part of making Guardians scarier individually, as right now they can feel a bit flimsy and kind of just too close to Strikecraft overall.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so this is a kind of funny story... cough.<br />
** Essentially, various ships and turrets and whatever have modifiers to kill other specific types of ships or structures with certain characteristics, right?<br />
** So something is really good at killing structures in general, or high-energy-usage stuff, or items with thin hulls or whatever else. Easy enough.<br />
** The problem was, we had these ships getting BETTER at killing those same things at higher marks, while also getting a general damage buff.<br />
** Puffin's example, as he was the one to realize this:<br />
*** MK1 Pike Corvette does 45 damage, 3x to high armour, 2x to high hull remaining, for...270 damage.<br />
*** MK6 is 189 damage, 5.5x to high armour, 3.5x to high hull remaining, for...3,638.<br />
** As he put it, "I feel like I know where the "late game is easier than early" problem is."<br />
** We may need to rebalance some of these units to generally have higher specialized damage or higher damage in general, BUT, we've now removed the increase in damage multipliers from the following categories of stuff:<br />
*** Strikecraft (yours and enemy of course), Turrets (ditto), Frigates (mostly yours), Guardians (mostly enemy), and Guard Posts (mostly enemy).<br />
** We've LEFT this monstrosity of multiplication on a few specific things:<br />
*** The Rorqual Hegira Ark (yours), AI Fortresses (enemies), and any battlestations (yours) with weapons.<br />
*** This may be something we want to give to a few other special units of the AI or you, we'll see, but it would be specifically for Very Special Units.<br />
<br />
* Metabolizing Gangsaw armour 60 -> 90, reduced count found in ARS and Fleets.<br />
<br />
* Consumer Starting Fleet now uses normal Gangsaws instead of the Vicious variant.<br />
<br />
* All normal Turrets (i.e not Plasma or Beam) have armour of 80mm.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now uses Vanguard Hydras instead of the normal one. Also has 25 instead of 20. <br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian speed 600 -> 1,000.<br />
<br />
* The "singular freaky surprises" of AIs now will only appear on planets between marks 2 and up, rather than every planet owned by the AI. No surprises TOO early in the game, then, with golemite and similar.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* GCAs now have a higher chance of having an extra "OtherDefense" item at the end.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for a suggestion in this area.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cost a bit of Weaken Turret and Weaken Guard Post hacks.<br />
<br />
==== Ship Cap Calculation Refinements ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the caps for ships are calculated is now vastly different, and a bit more expensive on the CPU (but worth it).<br />
** Essentially before it was using a floating point number to get a result, and then rounding up. So very often this would lead to things not actually increasing in a manner that you'd expect, or frigate counts not increasing at all for several marks before finally increasing.<br />
** Now it applies each multiplier sequentially to the original number, and then rounds up each time in between, so you always get the expected result.<br />
** This means that, for example, the mark 3 frigates of things with cap 1 now have a cap 3 instead of 2. The end result is usually pretty much the same at mark 6 and 7, or close, but the intervening marks are now more accurate and we shouldn't have people with lots of confusion on their caps not increasing like they would expect.<br />
<br />
* There are now three different ship cap growth styles, rather than one:<br />
** Stikecraft (works about the same as it always has, although will give you slightly more now, working as expected because of iterative math).<br />
*** This was already pretty much working fine.<br />
** Frigates (much lower growth rate than before, but ends up in a similar place numbers-wise, however gives you what you'd expect rather than something surprising now).<br />
*** Numerically this was balanced fine, but people couldn't understand why it jumped around strangely because of rounding with fractions.<br />
** Everything else (does... not gain cap by leveling up).<br />
*** Wait, wut? Hold on a moment, though: one of the most annoying things ever is having to go back and put out more mines or turrets later on on all your planets because you just increased your caps. That still will happen from GCAs, but it's at least less common because general techs won't cause this to happen.<br />
*** Besides which, performance can be a real pain with turrets if there are just excessive numbers of those. How about we increase the strength without that? Same result, but game runs better and also less micro for you. For more about that, see below.<br />
<br />
* On the mark levels, rather than just having a multiplier for hull/shield points and attack, it now has a "growth" one and a "stagnant" one.<br />
** "Growth" are the same numbers as before, and apply to frigates and strikecraft. Aka nothing changes as these have both a power/hull increase AND a ship cap increase as they go up.<br />
** "Stagnant" are used for ships that used to get a mark level bonus to ship cap, but no longer do. So to keep them equal in power while smaller in number, it includes their hull or attack power multiplier multiplied by what their old ship cap multiplier would have been.<br />
*** The end power on these is absolutely identical to what it used to be, but it's for turrets and similar where they are now not something you need to go in and place extra every time you upgrade a tech that improves turrets. See the above notes.<br />
*** This obviously does also apply to things like tractor beam arrays and minefields and so forth, and given that AIs don't use the human-style caps for those that does mean that those are just plain stronger now on AI planets when they are (rarely) used.<br />
**** If we want to change that, we can make AI versions with the uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant flag from below, but that doesn't seem super important for anything but turrets.<br />
<br />
* Added a new uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant flag which, when set to true, causes something that would normally grow attack bonuses and hull bonuses per mark level as if unit cap was stagnant (thus larger bonuses) and change it to grow as if it had an increasing cap (thus smaller bonuses).<br />
** This is used for the Great-Turrets so that they don't get crazy stronger at higher mark levels, since the AI doesn't use normal human-style caps anyway.<br />
<br />
* Any fleet leaders (golems, arks, battlestations, citadels, etc) now act as though uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant is true. Thus they'll scale as they always have. Same with guardians, guard posts, command stations, king units, and drones. Also LargeShips and SmallShips that are used by third party facions.<br />
<br />
* All of the AI structures now explicitly have uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant on them to avoid them getting accidental crazy buffs of any sorts. This mainly benefits AI Fortresses and the like, which could have been very scary otherwise.<br />
<br />
* Fleet Capacity Extenders now only work for strikecraft, as their increasing a frigate could be absolutely crazy in terms of the impact to both your power (in a good way) and your economy (in a bad way).<br />
<br />
* Stationary planet-bound forcefields, tractor beam sources, gravity sources, and tachyon sources now upgrade in the same way that frigates do (aka they behave more or less like they always have, but with slightly more clarity -- they get more unit cap as they go, and the lower "growth" style stats increases instead of the higher "stagnant" ones).<br />
** People do love having more forcefields, that's for sure, and the ability to field more tractors and so forth are similarly not something we want to condense down like we would turrets.<br />
<br />
* Minefields now have their own special_entity_type and also a rollup for easy iteration over them. Some clever AI routines may need that sometime in the future.<br />
** Additionally, minefields now continue to get a larger ship cap at the strikecraft-style rate of addition, and regular growth stats. Got to have enough for coverage, of course!<br />
<br />
==== AI Great-Turrets ====<br />
<br />
* All of the AI turrets were already different from the player turrets in that they generally have half the range of the player counterparts. Now we're taking it even further.<br />
** Mainly because turrets can't stack, and thus will grind the game to a halt if the AI builds full caps of them at the sort of strength and costs that we had them at previously, we've condensed them to being essentially like stacks-in-one right from the start.<br />
** All of the AI turrets are called Great-Turrets instead of just turrets, and they have 5x the cost and firepower and health that the player versions do (while still having half the range).<br />
** This makes them truly terrifying even in small numbers, but it's something that is actually slightly in your favor compared to what it was when they were separate since they had more shots and thus were less likely to overkill your ships (just your framerate).<br />
** This shouldn't really affect existing games too much, because the AIs barely used turrets before -- mostly -- at least compared to what they do now.<br />
<br />
* For any games older than 1.026, it will now remove 4/5ths of the turrets from AI planets, since AI turrets are now a lot stronger and more condensed being great-turrets.<br />
<br />
==== Attack Ranges And The Small World Problem ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new galaxy option to the balance section: "All Ship Attack Ranges"<br />
** Lets you adjust the effective range of all of the ships in the galaxy -- yours and enemies. Does not affect 'infinite' sniper ranges, naturally. Also does impact tractor beams. The default is 0.8x in order to avoid the 'small world' problem where all the enemies are fighting you at once on a planet.<br />
** This does make it so that you need to be slightly more strategic with placements of your own turrets, of course. Your turrets naturally have 2x the range of their AI great-turret counterparts, though.<br />
** If you want to crank this as low as 0.1x (bad idea) you can, or you can crank it all the way up to 1.3x (also probably not the best thing).<br />
** Chris notes: This is a softer nerf than we originally thought of, just to play it safe for now. But if people are interested in trying smaller values, you now can.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Lance weapon of all variants (plus Laser Pulse weapon) 12,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Triple Lance variant damage 4,000 -> 1,800, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Other variants Lance damage 6,000 -> 2,650, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse damage 4,500 -> 3,500.<br />
<br />
==== AI Reinforcement Budget Caps And So Much More ====<br />
<br />
* The five "balance_initial_ai_defenses" xml entries in our central constants have been completely removed, and equivalents are now on the actual AI types instead.<br />
** This lets us completely balance the AI defenses around AI types if we ever want to tune that.<br />
** These are also per-reinforcement-point now, rather than per-planet, and they are also directly in AI cost units rather than "caps" which have to be converted to those units by a mysterious multiplier.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that we calculate what the defensive budget cap at a planet is has been rewritten from scratch. It was giving absurdly high numbers previously, such as 443 strength for the AI home planet's cap at the START of a game. That was just way too much for the start to be sitting at, cap-wise.<br />
** Now things are balanced completely around the number of reinforcement points, like the original game was, so if you go in and neuter a planet it will absolutely cripple their ability to reinforce. More power to you, the player! Yay!<br />
** The overall caps are also far lower than they ever were in the past, this is worth stressing before you read the next two bits.<br />
** But there remains a very tiny (laughably small, really) percentage bonus that the AI gets as the AIP rises. Eh.<br />
** There's also a NEW fairly small percentage bonus based on time spent in the campaign. The way it works out is a 48% increase in budget after TEN HOURS of playing at difficulty TEN. After 10 hours at difficulty 7, it's a much more modest 12% increase. This gives you some time pressure, but it's really nothing major and is still less than the AI could theoretically start out with prior to now. And with your new ability to absolutely cripple the AI by neutering guard posts at no AIP cost... we may need to make some of these multipliers higher, who knows. But probably now, we mainly have other plans.<br />
<br />
* Special Forces Ninja hideouts no longer count as reinforcement points. That was old AIWC-style thinking. Now it's just guard posts and the command station itself.<br />
<br />
* We've been experimentally tuning the numbers a bunch on these, too.<br />
<br />
* planet_dire_guardian_count has been changed to planet_dire_guardian_percentage.<br />
** This lets us be a little more flexible with the marks of planets getting percentages of dire guardians rather than explicit numbers,<br />
** The AI homeworlds are always full-dire, still.<br />
<br />
* The way that guardians are spawned on initial planet creation, and/or on reconquest, is now completely different and respects the budgets and budget caps.<br />
** Previously it was adding guardians kinda-sorta twice, and thus often making the really high-mark planets absurdly overpowered in general but in particular on AI types like Royal.<br />
** Not only was this logic doing the above, but it also was interpreting the budget caps entirely incorrectly, thus more or less ignoring them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section: Write AI Budget Info In Planet Tooltips<br />
** If something seems off with the planet strengths and reinforcements, then this is a way to see what is going on under the hood.<br />
<br />
* Improved the performance of how the game calculates tachyon, tractor, and gravity sources in the rollups. It's now substantially more precalculated than before, no longer having to iterate over any systems.<br />
** There's a small benefit to the strength counting code in this, too.<br />
** And actually, map generation in general seems notably faster with these changes in, despite the below change.<br />
<br />
* The GetAIToPurchaseCostPresentForBudgetType() method is now far slower, but much more accurate (not lumping strikecraft and guardians together, for instance) and always up to the instant accurrate (not having to wait for the strength counting code to run).<br />
** This should solve several issues with the budgets on reinforcements being ignored or improperly overly strict, as the case may be.<br />
<br />
* Found a place where it was seeding extra guardians per guard post, and took that out.<br />
<br />
* During reconquest seeding, the AI no longer gets a bunch of guardians to go with every guard post.<br />
** Guard posts in general are not expected to be tied to guardians, and guardians will eventually be vastly more powerful than they are now.<br />
** This was causing some planets, like AI homeworlds, to get VASTLY more guardians than they should, blowing way past their budget for guardians.<br />
<br />
* The way that AI reinforcement budgets are calculated is no longer based around the number of reinforcement points, but instead just a flat amount for the planet, which gets reduced (severely) by any lost reinforcement points.<br />
** Thus no matter how many reinforcement points there are, you don't have to suddenly worry about super high budgets on the AI planet, or strange spikes in budgets just because there are more guard posts.<br />
** Actually what this means, though, is two things: firstly, each reinforcement point is weaker on a planet with many of them (due to same number of units spread around more); but secondly, destroying a reinforcement point on a planet with fewer of them will do more (due to it reducing the cap of the planet by a larger percentage).<br />
<br />
* There is a new ignore_guardian_restrictions_in_waves that we use on the royal AI type, which lets it use its full capacity in sending waves of guardians at you.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for turrets and non-turret defenses, those will no longer increase based on the mark level of the planet or the fact that the planet is an AI homeworld.<br />
** This keeps them from having way too many of these things on high levels and next to nothing on lower ones.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for guardians, it's no longer doubled for the AI homeworlds.<br />
** This keeps THOSE from becoming so absurdly high.<br />
<br />
* There is a new multiplier_for_starting_guardian_budget_on_reconquest on AI types which makes it so that there CAN be some guardians added back onto planets, per-AI-type, during a reconquest of that planet.<br />
** For most AIs this will just be 0.015, which is an eighth of an eighth (the significance of that will be relevant in a bit).<br />
** This lets the AIs MAYBE get some of their guardians back right as they capture a planet, partialiarly moreso later in the campaign, but often it will be too paltry for them to get anything.<br />
** For the Royal AI, it is set to 0.001 since it has such a higher budget of guardians in general. This may mean they practically get nothing, ever, in those circumstances; but better than too much and we can always tune later.<br />
<br />
* There are then other new multipliers on AI types: multiplier_for_game_starting_guardians_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_turrets_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_non_turret_defenses_from_total_budget, and multiplier_for_game_starting_strikecraft_from_total_budget.<br />
** These all affect how much of the AI's budget for each planet they start with when the game is at the very zeroth second still in mapgen.<br />
** In the past, we always gave -- for some reason -- fully HALF of the budget cap to each planet, which did not give much room for them to expand and get really huge if you ignore them for too long. ;) Most any planet could do would be to double in power, aside from things like the Hunter or other third parties coming in and making it temporarily stronger.<br />
** Now we've got this set to 0.125, which is an eighth of the full budget or a quarter of what the old starting strength was. This lets us multiply the final budget by 4x to still have the same starting strength (and we have done that), but now the starting strength can get 8x stronger if you leave them alone for THAT long. And that's before you get into the (very small, as noted in prior notes) increases based on time elapsed and AIP. <br />
** So the AI has more growth potential, BUT this is measured against the fact that your neutering of them is incredibly powerful.<br />
*** If they had 4 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/5th of whatever its max would have been.<br />
*** If they had 10 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/11th of whatever its max would have been. Wowzers.<br />
*** In both cases this keeps you from neutering things to be TOO absolutely weak, but also gives an incentive for popping guard posts when you can that are not related to your main objectives but might threaten you in the future. Aka a lot like the first game.<br />
<br />
* Added the fields always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point and always_is_ai_non_turret_defense_spawn_point, both bools, to game entities (ships only).<br />
** This lets us override the logic that says "only primary keys of modulus 6 get turrets around them" and things of that nature.<br />
** This is now used for the AI overlord, to always let it be surrounded by both types of things (phase 1 only).<br />
** Note that these fields only work for ships that are already a spawn point (mainly guard posts and command stations).<br />
<br />
* The Turtle AI type now has 4x the turret budget of other AI types.<br />
** Fortress Baron has 3x the turret budget.<br />
** Peacemaker has 2x the turret budget.<br />
** These heavier-turret variants are certainly interesting to run into and give the game a very different feel. These are the more defensive-oriented AIs, after all.<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_reinforcement_location bool field. This lets us make things other than command stations and guard posts into reinforcement points.<br />
** Now that reinforcement points don't actually cause the AI to get more budget, but rather just have it spread out more, it's far more interesting to have this.<br />
** Plus it makes it so you can do even harder neutering to certain planets, since the total number of reinforcement points will be higher by definition, which is good for you as a player.<br />
** But it also makes it so that isolated units with this flag on it will now be more protected than before, possibly with turrets around them, which is in itself quite interesting.<br />
** BUT that still means that forces are being spread more thin around the planet, potentially, so there are pros and cons to you strategically in general with this.<br />
** AI structures that thus now act as reinforcement points:<br />
*** Warden Fleet Base (again -- back to the same as the prior version that was last public anyway).<br />
*** Data Center<br />
*** Fortified Data Center<br />
*** Major Data Center<br />
*** Plasma Eye<br />
*** Ion Eye<br />
*** Troop Accelerator<br />
*** AI Fortress<br />
*** Raid Engine<br />
*** Alarm Post<br />
*** Magnifier<br />
*** Instigator Base<br />
*** Astro Train Depot<br />
*** Risk Analyzer<br />
*** All of those new ones above also now have always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point="true" on them. Yet more texture in the planets, as well as giving them more inherent defenses.<br />
<br />
* Guardians, as well as anything marked as a reinforcement location, can no longer be transported or put inside a guard post.<br />
** Older savegames may have some of them in there.<br />
** This causes FAR more guardians to be out and patrolling around now than were before. Some of them were just sitting inside guard posts in a very boring fashion before, rather than doing their patrol thing from what we can tell.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for planets on the galaxy map now show you how many reinforcement points the AI has there out of how many total there have ever been there if it's an AI planet.<br />
<br />
* Added modulus_for_turrets_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 6) and modulus_for_non_turret_defenses_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 3) as fields to the AI type. Previously these values were hardcoded in, but now they can be changed for various AI types. This will make turrets appear around more structures for those AI types, or non-turret-defenses do the same.<br />
** Turtle now uses 1 and 2 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Fortress Baron now uses 2 and 3 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Peace Maker now uses 2 and 3 instead of 3 and 3.<br />
** This makes it so that their turrets are more spread out on their planets rather than being clumped in super-crazy places on just some locations.<br />
<br />
* Added a variety of new levers that determine now how budgets are distributed intra faction or inter faction, nor what the caps or starting amounts are... but instead affect how bonuses (or penalties) work to various AI types. These can be regular floating point numbers with three decimal points of precision (0.001)<br />
** multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement, multiplier_for_budget_wave, multiplier_for_budget_cpa, multiplier_for_budget_warden_fleet, multiplier_for_budget_reconquest, multiplier_for_budget_hunter_fleet.<br />
** These don't have any effect on other parts of these AIs -- there are other mechanisms for choosing how much budget goes where, but this lets us set general scales on a per-AI basis on certain types of budget. This is pretty importance for us to be able to balance things reasonably so that there are things like appropriate growth rates of AI budget without you feeling like it starts out with too much, or has too low of a final cap, etc.<br />
** Most of these are just set to 1 for now, but multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 2 for almost all AIs. multiplier_for_budget_wave is 2.2 for the Vicious Raider, and multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 4 on the Turtle.<br />
** We'll undoubtably balance things more using this in the future, but for now this is a nice new lever for us to be able to use to give AIs their own unique characters as well as simply making them not have anemic defenses 30 minutes in even if their defenses 1 second in are smaller now.<br />
<br />
* The way that the AI tries to spend its funds on reinforcements DURING gameplay is absolutely reworked from scratch. <br />
** It was doing a strange thing where it would kind of roll a die and depending on the results try to reinforce certain things with more or less priority, and this often led to some funky results. Potentially it resulted in under-spending at times, and sometimes it may have meant a larger portion of the budget went to non-turret defenses than was at all warranted. And sometimes there were no turrets being put in at all. The reasoning was sound, really, but it was old and didn't fit with the modern economy of the AIs in the game.<br />
** Now it instead goes through a complicated set of calculations of percentages of what goes where, within random tolerances, dividing out budgets in a certain priority between strikecraft, turrets, non-turret defenses (NTDs), and guardians. If something will get lower amounts of funding, then other things naturally will pick up the slack in a pretty sensible order of priority. It then tries to spend its money more wisely once it has sub-budgets allocated, and rolls any excesses into guardians first (to give more of a chance of buying one), and then into strikecraft (to try to fully deplete the budget if at all possible.<br />
<br />
* Changed multiplier_for_starting_guardian_budget_on_reconquest to be 0.125 instead of 0.015.<br />
** This will substantially hurt. The AI is kind of taking a beating on some of the econ changes lately, so this seems warranted.<br />
<br />
* Changed all the various multiplier_for_game_starting_whatever_from_total_budget to be twice what they were before, or therefore a quarter of the max starting budget in most cases rather than an eighth.<br />
** This should eliminate the sense that you're able to just bumrush planets in the early game before they can reinforce. We could have upped the actual caps of the AIs, but then the late game would have swung too much in their favor if the game runs really long.<br />
** We'll see what happens; if the starts are still too easy, then we'll be upping the starting caps instead of the percentage again. More than a quarter of the cap at the start seems like planets will just be far too cramped.<br />
<br />
* The "defensive budget multiplier" that comes from the AI difficulty is now split into ongoing and initial. This lets us make the lower-difficulty starting amounts not SO anemic that they are pathetic, and then as we get into difficulties higher than 7 not have them be so ludicrously overpowered right at the start. Difficulty 7 is also toned down to 90% of its ongoing defensive budget when it comes to initial seeding, now.<br />
<br />
==== Completely Revised Way Of Seeding Guard Posts and Command Stations ====<br />
<br />
* There's a new AIGuardPostAndCommandPlacer set of xml data that lets us define a lot of different ways that guard posts and command stations can be arranged on planets beyond what has been the basic prior to now (one one each metal generation point).<br />
** These can be varied by mark level ranges of planets, and have different sets for the homeworlds of AIs. They can easily be modded in or added to like map types or whatnot.<br />
<br />
* The way that human homeworlds have their home command station seeded is now a bit more randomized than before, but also does a better job of keeping itself away from wormholes.<br />
** This should make your starts slightly less predictable.<br />
<br />
* The AI Homeworld was set to always put its command station dead center. That's no longer the case. This will make some games easier, others harder, and is fine with Chris.<br />
<br />
* Over the years, the concept of what a "guard post" is has changed quite a lot. Originally in the first AI War, they were literally just a gathering point for other ships. Then in 4.0+ of that game we started making them scary weapons in their own right.<br />
** This sequel has always had the armed variant, but that causes some problems in balance with them sometimes overshadowing the actual ships that are at their location, and in many cases making it impossible for you to fight just a single guard post or two at a time with the way that their weapon ranges were so large that they could pick you off.<br />
** Thus we've hybridized the old and new concepts, making a new "Unarmed Guard Post" type (and Ghost and Swarmer variants), and then adding in a chance per post for it to be armed versus not armed now.<br />
** We've split it out so that normal and home AI planets each have their own chance, per AI type: chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_normal_planet and chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_home_planet.<br />
** Bear in mind that, prior to this build, it was always 100 for each one, essentially.<br />
** Old numbers: Now for most AIs it is 15 and 60, turtle is 60 and 90, Fortress Baron 50 and 80, Peace Maker 30 and 60.<br />
** Please note that these are not the pure percentages of guard posts on a planet that will be armed: rather, at each guard post it essentially rolls a 100-sided die and if the number is lower than what is stated there, it will be armed.<br />
*** So you'll see all sorts of funky distributions, ranging from completely unarmed guard post planets to completely armed ones.<br />
** This DOES make things easier for the player, but mainly it gives other units a chance to shine and makes the armed guard posts more interesting in that they are more rare.<br />
*** Ideally we'll be able to make guardians scarier in their stead, but one thing at a time right now. This release has a lot of changes already!<br />
<br />
* The way that unarmed guard posts were seeding has been changed yet again. There's now a 100% chance of armed guard posts on mark 7 worlds and homeworlds, and then a per-AI setting for what the percentage chance is for every mark level below that. The percentages are generally much higher than they were before, making for far fewer unarmed guard posts as the game progresses and in general fewer overall.<br />
<br />
* The "initial reinforcements" that get seeded into/around reinforcement points now happens as the absolutely last thing, which means that things that should have turrets or whatever around them from the very start, or which are not guard posts but act kind of like them and are added normally during the "special entity seeding" period of mapgen will now get their initial followers properly.<br />
<br />
* Usurpers now have to be on the target planet for 10 seconds before they can reclaim it, otherwise you never even see the usurper if you don't have a defending force.<br />
<br />
* When a reconquest of a planet happens by the AI, it now uses only armed guard posts regardless of the ratio of armed and unarmed it would have previously used.<br />
<br />
* Previously there was mostly just the AI seeding guard posts one metal deposit spots, which is boooring. Now that we have the ability to do more, we have a variety of new types:<br />
** Guarding Wormholes Generally: this can start at mark 1 and go all the way to mark 7 (not homeworlds, though).<br />
*** These are highly aggressive stances that make it hard to get into the planets, and on very high marks they wind up putting 2-3 guard posts PER wormhole. Talk about ow. If there are too few spots for their posts at just wormholes, the rest are spread out very ambiently.<br />
** Guarding Wormholes Harshly: this can start at mark 3 and go all the way to mark 7 (not homeworlds, though). They should be VERY infrequent based on their weight. These are deathtrap worlds.<br />
*** These start out with 2 guard posts per wormhole, and only go up from there -- by mark 7, it's freaking 5 guard posts per wormhole. Just entering the planet is leaping into death, more or less. But that's part of the fun of having a rare extra difficult guard post design, and bear in mind that it doesn't make for more reinforcements and so the total firepower of the planet doesn't get a boost per se (well, guard post firepower itself aside -- which can be huge on higher marks, admittedly, but... well, have fun with those!).<br />
** One Single Mass: this is another super rare one, and can start at mark 2 and up, but not homeworlds.<br />
*** This puts all of the guard posts pretty much in one big clump somewhere on the planet. Depending on randomness, the clump can be kind of strung out, or more circular, or very tight. In many ways this makes them into one super-guard-post, which is potentially like trying to crack an old-school fortress in AIWC. These have randomized ranges of guard posts per mark level of planet, with 2 on mark 2 to, from 3-4 on mark 3 up to 9-12 on mark 7. This is another intense one.<br />
** Spread Out Guard Posts<br />
** This is a variety of ones that are much more lightweight and which get seeded much more commonly: basically just randomly putting guard posts around the whole planet, but pretty far away from one another to make them easier to approach. The numbers vary a lot, and most planets will use one of these.<br />
** Guarding Metal Deposits: moderately low chance of coming in on any mark 3 and up, but not homeworlds.<br />
*** Places one guard post on every metal deposit, and then no more. This is similar to old behavior, except that it doesn't try to add more if there are fewer metal spots than an "ideal" for the mark level. Consequently the difficulty of these will vary a lot, but stealth guard posts remain easy to find because they're just on the metal spots (that was a big giveaway in the past, cough).<br />
** Spread Out Guard Posts And Two By Command<br />
*** These ones start kicking in on mark 4 worlds and up, and one of the two homeworld variants has this, too.<br />
*** This basically puts two VERY close to the command station, guarding it in a ferocious fashion, but then the rest spread very far around.<br />
** We can always code more of these as we think of them, and these are easy to add in as part of mods or expansions or whatever as well.<br />
*** Extra logic could be added to seed specific extra structures at certain guard posts if we really wanted to, although that's not my favorite and it's not by default possible in the moment. But the possibilities for future additions are pretty endless if we have sufficiently interesting ideas. A lot of the other things are better off being a bit random is the current feeling, though, as it plays into these nicely.<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to have certain guard post layouts only be for certain AI difficulty ranges (based on the max AI difficulty, not the difficulty of the AI at that planet).<br />
** Additionally, based on the max AI difficulty, the ability to have a certain added weight to guard post layouts per difficulty above some cap. For now we're using that in the following ways:<br />
*** (Standard weight for something appearing neutrally frequently is 100, please note.)<br />
*** GuardingMetalDeposits (bit hard) base weight was 20, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=25,7=30,10=50 etc).<br />
*** GuardingWormholesGenerally (quite hard) base weight was 10, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=15,7=25,10=45 etc).<br />
*** GuardingWormholesHarshly (super hard) base weight was 2, but it now gets +3 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=5,7=8,10=17 etc).<br />
*** OneSingleMasss (super hard) base weight was 2, but it now gets +3 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=5,7=8,10=17 etc).<br />
*** ThreeSpreadOutGuardPosts (super easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=90,7=70,10=40 etc).<br />
*** FourSpreadOutGuardPosts (super easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=90,7=70,10=40 etc).<br />
*** SixSpreadOutGuardPosts (easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=90,7=80,10=50 etc).<br />
*** SixSpreadOutGuardPosts_AndTwoByCommand (moderate) base weight was 50, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=55,7=60,10=80 etc).<br />
*** EightSpreadOutGuardPosts (moderate) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 7 and above. (7=90,10=60 etc).<br />
*** EightSpreadOutGuardPosts_AndTwoByCommand (hard) base weight was 50, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 7 and above. (7=55,10=75 etc).<br />
*** TenSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears on difficulty 5 and up.<br />
*** TwelveSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears on difficulty 6 and up.<br />
*** AIHome_TwelveSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears up to difficulty 8.<br />
*** AIHome_TenSpreadOutGuardPostsAndTwoByCommand now only appears on difficulty 6 and up.<br />
** All of this combines to give a much more richly-textured scary landscape for the higher difficulties, while keeping things notably simpler at easier difficulties even at the level of a cursory glance.<br />
*** Looking at a difficulty 5, 7, and 10 game, you can see that this is NOT a subtle effect. As we theoretically add more types of seeding patterns, or other people think up seeding patterns, we can make an even richer tapestry.<br />
<br />
* If you have map gen logging on, you can now see entries for "Guard post style for planet" that shows what mark the planet is and what kind of thing it is seeding.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the "BUG: Ship is on burningAndDying list but has not exploded" message to instead just mark the ship as exploded, as there are too many ways to get to that state.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in DetachVisObjectFromSim on ship squads.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in StartReconquestDefenseSeeding for AIs types that do not use non-dire guardians for some reason.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in BattlefieldVisualSingleton.HandleSquadAndShipUpdates, and made it so that it self-repairs when it can or self-reports when it can't. Either way it continues to draw things and update them properly rather than having the display get all strange if such an exception occurs.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for the report.<br />
<br />
* Improved the "find a safe space to be" code for ships so that they are now more likely to find a CLOSE space to be.<br />
<br />
* For guard posts in particular, it does an extra good job of trying to keep it close to the intended point (whatever that is in the given schema).<br />
<br />
* Finally fixed a really annoying bug wherein command stations that got shot to remains and then rebuilt did not count properly (thus not letting anything else be built or rebuilt at their planet) until you saved and loaded the game.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, ArnaudB, Asteroid, KDR_11k, Puffin, Sigma7, Ryulong, Core, and GrimerX for reporting and helping to find it.<br />
** Special thanks to Ryulong for the recent savegame that let us reliably reproduce this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where some achievements relating to killing specific AIs was not triggering because it was trying to match the internal name to the display name. Now it checks both display name and internal name to be doubly sure.<br />
** This makes Full Ensemble in particular now properly trigger when you beat them.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If you have existing saves where you already beat the game, loading those savegames will now trigger the achievements for you that you properly earned (just load them, unpause, and wait at least 2 seconds).<br />
** It's much better this way, versus having to dig up a savegame from right before you won, etc, if you're going back to get achievements that you earned but didn't log because you were offline, or there was a bug, or whatever factor.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hover planet text<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of some Instigator base hovertexts<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting<br />
<br />
* Since it is now possible for non-combatant ships to contain lots of combatant ships (unarmed guard posts on the AI side, but frankly also your own transports), the game now takes great pains to make sure that it isn't overlooking the combatant-nature of ships contained within non-combatant ships when checking things like strength.<br />
** Compared to prior versions of the game (where all guard posts were combatants) this doesn't fix or change anything, but it might make player combat strength more accurate in the case of transports if there was some issue there (though there's no sure evidence that was a problem).<br />
<br />
* When ships are dying, you no longer get a bunch of red "null fleet" messages hovering over them, unless you have debug info turned on for tooltips.<br />
<br />
* The game should now say "release" to show a more or less detailed tooltip on the various screens if you're already holding down the button to make it do whatever it's doing (you can invert the behavior, so which is held and released should match that).<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the tooltip for Risk Analyzer Notifications<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Completely reworked how the long range planning threads keep track of how long it has been since they have run, so that they should probably run at appropriate intervals when the game is running faster than 1x speed now. Previously these were running slower the faster the game ran, which made the AI stupider at 10x speed than 1x speed.<br />
<br />
==== Fixes For XML Modding ====<br />
<br />
Example tiny mods and discussion are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22433<br />
<br />
* Several different things were not staying properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them:<br />
** exp_to_grant_on_death<br />
** watch_planets_at_X_hops<br />
** tags (ow this would cause many problems)<br />
** capturable_seed_weight (again very problematic)<br />
** capturable_max_per_galaxy<br />
** capturable_can_seed_at_all<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of things that would complain they could not be found properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them (but in reality these were carrying over fine from the base version being modded):<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_sfx<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_if_on_other_planet_sfx<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If outgoing_damage_modifier or incoming_damage_modifier entries are duplicated in the list of rows for a system or entity (respectively), whether that be through mods or just in the original definition, it now only uses the last-to-apply version. This last-to-apply one is always going to be a mod version if there is a mod version.<br />
** This makes it so that you can't have two different modifiers on the same weapon that both are based off of the hull health of a ship, for example, but I don't think we're doing that anywhere and it would be messy in the UI if we were, anyway.<br />
** This then fixes the issue with various weapon bonuses and the like duplicating themselves when you are using an is_partial_record entry to mod a weapon.<br />
** It's worth noting at this point that xml modding is inherently slightly fraught in terms of minor bugs or oversights like this which can have major repercussions. Please just let us know on a case by case basis what you find, ideally with the xml you're using and a savegame that shows the wrong behavior, and we can likely fix it up pretty fast.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Both ai_ship_group_membership and fleet_membership now properly adjust the existing membership when there is a duplicate entry entered for them (from a mod or whatever else) linking a given ship type to a given template or group. It now adjusts the weight and so on in the template or group, rather than adding a duplicate entry.<br />
** Note that if you change the category for a template, it will assume you mean it to be a duplicate and will add that accordingly. There really should never be any valid reason to mod the category of a ship, but if you must then you can just 0 out the min and max of the old one maybe?<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting something next to this, although not exactly this.<br />
<br />
* Creating a mod to replace or redefine parts of the fleet design templates (like the starting fleets) now works properly rather than creating duplicate entries or extra counts or both.<br />
** For an example of a mod that works with this new function, the raw xml bits are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22136<br />
** Note that if you choose to change the category of ships from HERE, that will work fine. You just can't change categories of fleet template items from within the game entity side.<br />
** Also please note that this change now prevents you from having duplicate lines of the exact same type of ship in a starting fleet. So something with two lines of fusion bombers would not work anymore, for instance, even with no mods in play, and would just take the count of the last fusion bomber entry and use that.<br />
*** This doesn't stop you from using multiple duplicate ship lines in-game of course, but it does stop it in the starting fleet designs, none of which (that are still active) were using that function anyhow.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=Getting_Started&diff=37661Getting Started2020-01-08T19:38:03Z<p>Ovalcircle1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__FORCETOC__<br />
== Newcomers ==<br />
<br />
'''Welcome to AI War 2!'''<br />
<br />
AI War 2 is a combination of RTS, 4X, and Tower Defense. You'll be continuously commanding units in battle, explore the galaxy, and defend your planets all at once.<br />
<br />
It's recommended to start with the tutorials.<br />
<br />
Once those are done (or for the impatient), look in the Quick Start section of single player and check out one of the beginner situations. This should help you familiarize yourself with the game's mechanics and quirks. There is also a lot of "How to Play" documentation available from the in-game main menu. <br />
<br />
In general, AI War 2 isn't about going guns blazing and capturing everything in sight. That'll just get you killed. It's about taking only what you need and being as quiet as possible so you don't draw the attention of the AI. The AI doesn't play by the rules, or rather, it plays by a different set of rules. The AI can afford to throw countless ships at you. You (in general) can't do the same. Pick your targets strategically, methodically and carefully. Don't be afraid to cut and run if you start loosing a battle.<br />
<br />
At the top of the UI, you'll see a big red number with the accompanying letters AIP. This is AI Progress, AKA how pissed off the AI is against you. The higher this number rises, the more attention the AI directs to you. At the start of the game, the AI is busy attending to business outside the galaxy (it's probably trying to fight the Spire in the Andromeda Galaxy), but as you start taking planets from the AI and destroying its infrastructure, it'll start turning its attention towards you. More on this below.<br />
<br />
Remember! There are many different ways to play this game. The game is fluid, and what may work against one AI type may not work against another, so adapt and revise how you play constantly. Variety is the spice of life after all.<br />
<br />
The AI can be divided into 6 components, AI Sentinels, AI Threat, AI Warden Fleet, AI Hunter Fleet, AI Instigators and AI Praetorian Guard.<br />
*The AI Sentinels are the main AI faction you'll be fighting. AI Sentinels are usually dormant, found inside Guardposts, or sent as attack waves towards your planets. Most AI units start out as Sentinels but can become AI Threat under certain circumstances, usually after a certain amount of time after you aggro them.<br />
*The AI Warden Fleet are used by the AI to defend only. They will never be committed to an attack on your planets.<br />
*The AI Threat are AI forces actively waiting to strike. These units are ready to come at any time they sense a weakness. Threat is provoked typically by AI defenders who escape a planet after you attack it, or the remainder of defeated waves. If Thread doesn't find a suitable target to attack after a while, those units will join the Hunter Fleet.<br />
*The AI Hunter Fleet will constantly probe your planets for weaknesses and will attack whenever they feel like they can win.<br />
*The AI Instigators are not immediately apparent until later into the game. Every hour or so, an Instigator base will spawn somewhere in the galaxy. Instigators spawn close to your homeworld and on low level planets initially, but as the AIP becomes higher, they will spawn farther away and on higher mark planets. Instigator bases have a variety of nasty effects, ranging from increasing the amount of strength the AI will put into its waves, to spawning units every now and then to attack you. Instigators are usually not immediately threatening, but do not take your time dealing with them. The longer they remain active, the deadlier they get!<br />
*The AI Praetorian Guard behaves like the AI Warden Fleet, except they will only appear near and on AI home worlds and WILL attack any nearby human planets.<br />
<br />
===Difficulty===<br />
AI War's difficulty is non linear. It's more like an exponential curve between 10 points, so difficulty 1-4 isn't to much of a change, difficulty 5-6 is when the AI starts getting notably more powerful, difficulty 7-8 is when the AI really starts kicking you in the shins, difficulty 9 is nigh impossible, difficulty 10 IS supposed to be impossible (if you somehow manage to beat difficulty 10 without cheating or heavily stacking the odds in your favor, please report it to mantis bug tracker).<br />
<br />
When setting the difficulty for the AI, there are 3 main components, the base AI/AI Sentinels, the AI Wardens and the AI Hunters.<br />
<br />
*Increasing AI sentinel difficulty affects the game the most. The default difficulty is set to 5, but the real fun/challenge begins at 7. at lower difficulties, the AI is... pretty much lobotomized and is nowhere near as intelligent as it could be. Its ships pick less than optimal targets, it will never retreat its forces, and it tends to underestimate human defenses, but as you turn up the difficulty, the AI gets much more intelligent, and will actually start overestimating your defenses, causing it to send more forces than necessary to be sure, its units will target other units it's strong against, and will even attempt to slip some attacking forces behind your planets when a big battle takes place. Many nasty things are locked behind difficulty 7.<br />
*Increasing AI Warden difficulty will increase how many Warden Fleet ships spawn at the start of the game, as well as increasing the maximum strength cap of the Warden fleet. Increasing the AI Warden difficulty also allows the Warden Fleet to get closer to your planets as well as how intelligent they are. At higher difficulties, the Warden Fleet gets access to more powerful units up to and including GOLEMS. At low difficulty levels, it will attack more recklessly.<br />
*Increasing AI Hunter difficulty will increase how many Hunter Fleet ships spawn at the start of the game. Once the difficulty high enough, the Hunter Fleet starts getting bonus ships constantly throughout the game, rather than having to wait for threat ships to transition to Hunter Fleet. Just like the AI Warden Fleet, At high enough difficulties, the Hunter Fleet gets access to more powerful units up to and including Dire Guardians. At low difficulty levels, the Hunter Fleet will attack more recklessly.<br />
<br />
===How DOES The AI Work?===<br />
The AI has an "income" that it can "spend" on various "budgets". These budgets are Reinforcement, Wave, CPA, Warden, Hunter, Praetorian, Wormhole Invasion, Reconquest and possibly more. As you increase the AIP and difficulty of the game, the AI gets a bigger income increase and thus more "buying" power. Let's look at this in a simplified way. Let's say that the AI wants to attack a human planet. It needs to build up that fleet using raw materials (income), but must also consider committing some of these soon to built ships to defense, lest the pesky humans perform a counterattack. After finishing building the ships it wants, the AI dedicates (spends) most of the newly created ships to attacking the human planet it wants, and the rest on reinforcing various key points (wave and reinforcement budget). The AI's behavior is also dependent on it's difficulty. <br />
<br />
'''The AI's Attack Process'''<br />
====Standard Waves====<br />
Approximately every 3 minutes, the AI will send a wave of units at you, displayed at the top left. As AIP increases, so does the strength of the wave. The AI at lower difficulties will target its waves at any planet you own with no clear objective in mind. Its attacks are also suicidally overconfident. The units that attack also tend to not retreat, and thus will not become a part of the threat or hunter fleet. As you increase the difficulty though, The AI's attacks tend to get more intelligent, and will actually overestimate how powerful your defenses are, causing it to often picking on the weaker planets or one with irreplaceable capturables on it. This also gives the AI a more "cowardly" attitude towards its attacks on the surface, as the AI's units will now attempt to retreat instead of fighting to the death. This will cause them to become threat fleet and if enough threat is accumulated, then that threat may just roll up to your homeworld in one massive wave. At higher difficulties, if you have multiple connected worlds (most often your homeworld and its adjacent planets), the AI will often attempt to sneak some of a wave's units past your defenses to raid vulnerable worlds behind. This can lead to a sudden power outage if the AI manages to snipe an economic command station planet behind a military station planet. Waves however have one weakness. They can only spawn from AI warp gates. ALL AI planets at the start of the game will have one warp gate. Warp gates allow waves to attack any planets adjacent to the planet the warp gate is located on. As a strategy, you can even cancel incoming waves by destroying the warp gate they are traveling to! However be aware, this causes the AI to choose a different location for that wave to spawn and that wave will have bonus strength attached to it! If there are no planets the AI can attack, due to the lack of warp gates near hostile planets, the AI will instead spawn waves on one of its own planets as long as there is a warp gate present, and that wave will immediately become threat. Every AI planet has a wave "theme". For example, an AI planet might send in large groups of raiders, raptors and stingrays, which are fast swarmers. Other AI planets might send in small groups of vanguards and pulsar tanks, which are slow but mighty units. Knowing which planets will send what type of wave theme, you can base your defenses around this.<br />
<br />
====Reconquest Waves====<br />
Once you cross a certain AIP threshold, the AI will begin sending out reconquest waves, which will aim to take back planets you have stolen from the AI, planets owned by hostile to AI minor factions, or already neutral planets. Reconquest waves have their own budget, separate from Wave budgets, and it's not uncommon for the AI to time a regular wave with a reconquest wave, making you fight a 2 front battle. Reconquest waves spawn threat like regular waves but the wave comes with a special ship called the usurper, and as long as that ship lives, the AI will be able to rebuild whatever was on the planet originally! As long as there is one AI opposed unit on the planet, the ursurper CANNOT rebuild the AI's stuff on the planet. If there is no more opposition, the usurper transforms in to a reinforced AI command station, with more health than a regular command station, and will slowly begin warping in the same guardposts and structures overtime. However, a reconquested planet's command station and warp gate will no longer give out any AIP. So if you want to take back the planet, you can do so without incurring any AIP.<br />
<br />
====Counter Attacks/Reprisal Waves====<br />
Whenever you lose ships on an AI controlled planet, the AI will use the scraped remains of your ships to assemble a counter attack. The more ships you lose, the stronger the counter attack becomes. Whenever a flagship gets crippled on an AI planet, it adds ALOT of strength to the AI counter attack. Take special care not to have any flagships crippled. Whenever a counter attack is building up, notified in the top left of the screen, it will start with a 2 minute timer. This timer will not begin counting down as long as you have enough strength present on the planet. The strength requirement to pause the timer is 1/5th the counter attack's strength. Once you do not meet the strength requirement to stall the timer, the timer begins counting down. As soon as the counter attack timer reaches 0, the counter attack will spawn it's units on the planet where your forces died. These units are a part of the threat fleet, so be careful! They may strike wherever and whenever you least expect!<br />
<br />
====Cross Planet Attack====<br />
Every 2 hours or so, the AI will unleash a Cross Planet Attack (CPA). A CPA is when the AI spawns in a massive amount of ships as threat, and they'll be ready and waiting to raid your homeworld when they feel that they can take it. A CPA spawns its units over any AI "Reinforcement Points" (ie Guard Posts and Command Stations). Once the units spawn, they tend to converge on an AI planet closest to your homeworld, and once they gather enough strength will simply charge towards your homeworld in an attempt to cut the head off the snake. If you raid the planet the CPA's units are gathering on, they tend to disperse and choose a different planet to attack from a different angle. CPAs are no joke, and it's not uncommon for people to die on them the first time around.<br />
<br />
====Exo Wormhole Invasion====<br />
[INFO REDACTED] nothing to see here. Move along<br />
===AI Progress===<br />
AI war is a balancing act. You must make sure you can increase your power, without tipping the AI about how strong you really are. AI progress (AIP) measures how much attention the AI is directing towards you. If you play this game like a conventional RTS, taking everything from the AI in a methodical way, eventually the AI will overpower you and push you back, all the way to your homeworld and then probably kill you. You must play like a guerilla resistance. Hit and run. Take only what you need. Every planet has an AIP price tag that you can see by hovering your mouse cursor over that planet in the galaxy map. The AIP price tag is only paid whenever you or a minor faction allied to you destroys the AI command station. If a Hostile to all faction (like the Dark Spire) destroys the AI command station, then you don't pay the AIP price tag. HOWEVER, if you decide to colonize the planet after the hostile to all faction destroys the command station, then you DO pay the AIP price tag. There is also the AIP floor, which is the minimum value the AIP can be, in case you dedicate to reducing AIP early. 35% of AIP incurred is added to AIP floor (e.g, an AI command station costs 20 AIP to destroy, so therefore 7 AIP will be added to the AIP floor). This is very important at high difficulty games. At certain intervals of AIP, different things unlock, such as Reconquest waves and Hunter waves. The AI also techs up it's units at certain AIP thresholds, which means its waves, Wardens, Hunters and Praetorian will now be at least that level a minimum. For example, if the AI is at tech level 3, all waves will contain units at mark 3 and Warden units that spawn in will be at Mark 3. Different AI difficulties have different AIP tech thresholds.<br />
<br />
There are many ways to Increase AIP, but very few ways to decrease AIP.<br />
====Increasing AI Progress====<br />
*Destroying AI command station: 20 (includes warp gate)<br />
*Destroying AI warp gate: 5<br />
*Destroying AI troop accelerator: 5<br />
*Destroying AI black hole machine: 5<br />
*Destroying AI attack amplifier: 5<br />
*Destroying AI co-processor: 20<br />
*Destroying AI alarm post (whether by your own doing or it's self destruct mechanism): 5<br />
*AI risk analyzer fires off: 1 per risk analyzer every hour<br />
*Failing Spire Archive hack: 80<br />
*Destroying AI overlord phase 1: 100<br />
<br />
====Reducing AI Progress====<br />
*Destroying AI data center: 20<br />
*Destroying the last AI co-processor: 140<br />
*Holding major data center: 60<br />
*Holding Risk Analyzer: 2 per held risk analyzer every hour<br />
*Super terminal hacking: varies<br />
<br />
===Attacking the AI===<br />
<br />
The AI owns all the planets at the start of the game. Every planet has a mark assigned to them from the start of the game. Worlds next to your homeworld are always mark 1, and worlds next to those are mark 2. AI homeworlds and core worlds (planets adjacent to the ai homeworld) are always mark 7, and Worlds next to those are usually mark 6. All planets that do not meet the former criteria are between marks 3 and 5. In general, the higher the difficulty, the more higher mark planets appear and vise versa. What a planet's mark means is how powerful the defenses and units are on it. The Warden Fleet as mentioned prior are a defensive reserve, used to attack you wherever and whenever you show up. However, if you have a really strong presence, they may choose not to interfere with your battle. In general, whenever you vastly outnumber the AI on a planet, it's units will flee to a nearby wormhole. While this may seem cowardly, this allows them to come back at a later time as threat fleet. The AI can decide if certain planets get reinforcements or not, to replace any losses taken by hostile forces. AI planets have two states, alerted, and passive. During the alerted state, the AI Warden fleet tends to head towards them and nearby planets, and the AI will reinforce available posts and command stations more often. In passive state, AI planets will rarely if ever receive reinforcements. AI planets start of in the passive state, and immediately transform into alerted if there is a hostile force on the planet, or a nearby planet.<br />
<br />
===Guardposts===<br />
<br />
Guardposts are the primary source of defense for the AI's planets. They also allow the AI to reinforce the planet with additional units per guard post. Think of guard posts as extremely powerful turrets for their mark level. While they are strong, they have a low hull to shield hp ratio. Using units with fusion can be used to bypass their shields, such as assault frigates and fusion bombers. Be aware, each guard posts has a compliment of units inside of them, and these units will fly out if any combat capable units go near them, or if the Guardpost itself/nearby units and buildings are attacked.<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
===Minor Faction Crash Course===<br />
It's not just about you and the AI. There are all sorts of other factions roaming the galaxy! From the swarming Nanocaust, to the singular Devourer Golem, here's most things you need to know about the minor factions of AI War 2! Certain minor factions have their own AIP values, so the AI will also give them a threat rating. Each minor faction increases the AI's budget, but this budget can be used exclusively against minor factions only. If you want to experience minor factions without spoilers, don't scroll any further!<br />
<br />
====Human Resistance Fighters====<br />
Probably the only faction in the entire game that WANTS to help you win! These helpful fellows will show up whenever you attack an AI planet or a hostile force attacks one of your planets. Whenever either conditions are met and enough time has passed, these guys will send in a group of reinforcements to do battle with hostiles. They spawn in at the edge of a planet's gravity well. Don't rely heavily on them however, as by themselves, they won't accomplish much. They work similarly to the AI, in that they get a budget that slowly adds up, and send a wave to assist you when there is enough budget and combat is happening. Whenever the fighting is over and there are survivors, they will warp away from the planet and will refund their budget. Unlike the AI, Human Resistance Fighters will not mark up their units as AIP increases, so their units will remain weak throughout the game, but their income increases over time, so the longer the game goes on, the more often you'll see them. The higher the intensity of this faction, the more often they show up and their budget grows faster.<br />
<br />
====Marauders====<br />
These guys will fight everyone by default, picking on whoever is the weakest in their eyes. They'll fight you, the AI, and other minor factions. Similarly to HRF, they'll spawn at the edge of a planet's gravity well. If nobody opposes them and at least one marauder is still on the planet, then the marauders will start construction of starbases and turrets. Over time, marauder starbases will mark up, which makes them more durable and spawn more powerful defending units. Once a starbase reaches mark 3, they will start spawning in raider ships (not to be confused with the strikecraft or frigate) who's explicit purpose is to destroy opposition on other planets and then colonize said planets. If the planet has a command station on it (friendly to AI or friendly to human marauders), Marauder starbases cannot be mark 3. This will cause the Marauders to start growing near exponentially. While raiders may cause problems, they will prefer to target weaker planets, so you can goad them into attacking the AI by weakening an AI planet next to Marauders, and retreating when the Marauders come in to sweep up the remaining AI forces. As long as your planets are stronger than nearby AI planets, the marauders will prefer to raid the AI over you. Keep in mind, if you try to exploit colonizing neutral planets caused by Marauders, you still have to pay the AIP price tag if you place a command station. A legitimate strategy is allowing Marauders to take their own planet deep inside AI territory and allowing them to build up. This will cause the AI to dedicate some of it's wave budget against marauders and not you, so you can have an easier time defending against AI incursions. Just remember, the Marauders will target you if they consider you a better target.<br />
<br />
===General Unit Prefixes===<br />
Pike: Deals bonus damage to units above a certain hp% and units with 90mm armor or higher<br />
<br />
Concussion: Deals bonus damage to units with 50mm armor or lower<br />
<br />
MLRS: Deals bonus damage to units below a certain hp% and has lots of shots<br />
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Fusion: Attacks ignore a certain % of shields<br />
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Grenade: Attack has AOE<br />
<br />
Plasma:Deals bonus damage to shields<br />
<br />
Sabot: Deals bonus damage to units at or above 5tx mass<br />
<br />
Nucleophilic: Deals bonus damage to units with an enregy cost of 7,000 or more<br />
<br />
Tritium: Deals bonus damage to units with albedo .3 or lower, usually infinite range.<br />
<br />
===General Tips===<br />
*Don't attempt to conquer everything, only capture planets that have something important/you need, or have strategic value. A planet that has a Zenith Power Generator or a fleet, or worlds directly adjacent to your home world are good for example.<br />
*At certain AIP points, the AI "techs up" its units, so that the Warden Fleet, Hunter Fleet, and waves will be one level higher. This is a major buff to the AI's strength, so be careful about increasing the AIP too much too quickly. You can tell when those points are by clicking on the AIP icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen.<br />
*There is a cap to how strong the Warden Fleet can get. Once it reaches that cap, any resources devoted to the Warden Fleet instead adds to reinforcement budget. If you see planets spike up in strength over a short period of time and no/very little AIP has increased, it's probably because the Warden Fleet is at its maximum capacity. Start grinding down the Warden Fleet to reduce the reinforcement budget to normal strength.<br />
*Neutering planets refers to killing everything on an AI planet except for the Warpgate and Command Station. This makes the planet almost harmless to travel through. Don't just leave it. Note: The AI can rebuild turrets if they were originally around the Command Station on the planet. Be aware.<br />
*Cross Planet Attacks are best dealt with piecemeal. You don't want to have a sudden rush of AI units barge into your homeworld while you're dealing with something else on a different planet. Generally, the units from a cross planet attack will wait outside one of your planets, and once they have amassed enough units or feel confident enough to take on your planet they will charge all at once. While they are gathering, find the planet they are on and kill off as many as you can. While this will typically cause them to retreat and go to a different planet, it's better to deal with that threat a little bit at a time.<br />
*Find and hold (by default) both Major Data Centers for a HUGE AIP reduction.<br />
*Reconquest waves happen once you cross a certain AIP threshold. You can click on the AIP icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen to see what that point is.<br />
*Spending Science on ship upgrades is more useful early than on economics<br />
* ARSs and Tech Vaults are very strong early-game objectives<br />
*Strength does not consider unit counters. 500 pike corvettes have more strength than 300 v-wings, but since v-wings counter pike corvettes, they'll win, despite having an inferior strength value. Carefully consider if you can win against the AI even if your strength is higher than it's.<br />
*AI planets are either on alert, or not on alert. An AI planet that's on alert will very likely receive reinforcements, where non alert planets will almost never be reinforced. An AI planet will become alerted if it is adjacent to a neutral or Human planet, when it has hostile military forces on it (not necessarily Human), when an adjacent planet has hostile military forces on it.<br />
<br />
==== The Intel Menu ====<br />
The Intel Menu in the sidebar is invaluable for figuring out what targets to prioritize in game. There are a lot of different categories of things it tells you about, including where you can get resources, planets of yours you need to defend, where important capturables or destroyables are, etc....<br />
<br />
===Abbreviations===<br />
*MDC: Major Data Center<br />
*CPA: Cross Planet Attack<br />
*ZPG: Zenith Power Generator<br />
*ZMC: Zenith Matter Converter<br />
*ARS: Advanced Research Station<br />
*IGC: Intra-Galactic Coordinator<br />
*ZT: Zenith Trader<br />
*AIP: AI Progress<br />
*ST: Super Terminal<br />
*SA: Spire Archive<br />
*DSVG/VG: Dark Spire Vengeance Generator/Vengeance Generator<br />
*DAS: Dark Spire<br />
*DS: Dyson Sphere <br />
*FCE: Fleet Capacity Extender<br />
<br />
<br />
== Veterans ==<br />
<br />
Welcome back to AI War. The AI has taken over the galaxy (again), but lots of things have changed.<br />
<br />
===Major Mechanic Changes===<br />
*In general, AI War 2 is not as micro intensive as classic, and many things have been removed due to redundancy, clutter, or making things easier to understand.<br />
*Fleetships are renamed to Strikecraft and Starships are renamed to Frigates.<br />
*Instead of producing Strikecraft and Frigates immediately, they are bound to a Flagship. You can't just, say for example, immediately build 150 Fighters, Bombers, missile frigates and a bonus ship. Instead, you must have a Flagship that has those units attached to it. Once built however, there is no limit to how far a Strikecraft or frigate can go across the galaxy, like AI War Classic.<br />
**Flagships are captured much like Golems from Classic and they are what lets you expand your military power. Flagships come in 3 varieties, strike (generic transport Flagship, but many Strikecraft and Frigates), officer (Flagship has a gimmick or is very powerful on it's own) and Lone Wolf fleets (no supporting Strikecraft or frigates, but the Flagship is INSANELY powerful).<br />
**Flagships cannot die. Instead, when they reach 10% health, they become crippled. While crippled, a Flagship cannot have Strikecraft or Frigates assigned to it built and if it has a weapon, can't shoot. The Flagship can still move however and be repaired back to full strength. While this means that you can't lose your Golems anymore, the AI still gets LOTS of salvage for reprisal.<br />
*Units now have shields, which is basically a second health bar. However, anything with a fusion attack such as Raider Frigates and Bombers will ignore a certain % of shields. (For example, a Raider Frigate has 90% fusion damage, so an attack that deals 1000 damage will decrease the target's health by 900 and shields by 100)<br />
*Scout Strikecraft no longer exist. Scouting as a whole has been reworked.<br />
**Planets have 4 states, unscouted, explored, watched and permanently watched.<br />
***Unscouted planets cannot be traveled to at all. Explored planets can be moved to but you have no vision on that planet. Info on explored planets are on a "last seen" basis. Watched planets are planets that you can see in real time because you have a unit there or something providing vision. Permanently watched is the same as watched but no unit is required to be there in order to see what's going on. You scout by destroying AI command stations, which causes 8 unscouted planets to become explored.<br />
*ARS no longer give their contents via capturing their planets, but by hacking them.<br />
**Also they no longer give science AND a ship, but only 1 of the 2. You can also reroll ARS contents.<br />
*Hull and ammo types are gone.<br />
**These have been replaced with the stats Armor, Albedo, Engine and Mass. More info can be found on [[AI War 2: Units of Measurement]]<br />
*You no longer spend knowledge on individual unit upgrades, but instead on categories divided into weapon types and hull types.<br />
**While you spend more knowledge short term, with multiple units upgraded at once, you save knowledge long term.<br />
**All ships are no longer built as individual marks. Instead they are upgraded all at once (For example: if you have Mark 2 V-Wings somewhere in the galaxy, and you upgrade the Generalist tech category, ALL V-Wings currently alive and built after this upgrade will become Mark 3.)<br />
**Units can now be upgraded to Mark 7.<br />
*Hacking points are now earned per planet, rather per AIP.<br />
**Each planet has 30 Hacking points and you can only earn them by building a Command Station on that planet.<br />
**Hacking points can no longer go into the negative.<br />
*Colony ships no longer exist.<br />
**In order to build Command Stations on planets, you must have a Flagship on that planet as well as no AI Command station.<br />
*Supply mechanic no longer exists.<br />
**So feel free to build whatever wherever.<br />
*Energy collectors do not exist anymore. Instead, Economic Command Stations produce 2 energy collectors' worth of energy, Logistical Command Stations produce 1 energy collector's worth of energy and Military Command Stations produce no energy at all.<br />
*Salvage no longer exists, so it's pointless to build a world designed specifically to collect it, but you can make a point of farming EXP to increase that Command station's Level to make it harder for the AI to remove.<br />
*Cloaking is no longer an "on/off" state, but rather each ship that has cloaking has a certain amount of cloaking points, and every time it shoots or gets detected, it loses cloak points by a set amount or certain rate respectively. Once cloak points reach 0, THEN, the ship is no longer cloaked. A ship cannot recharge cloak points until all its cloak points reach 0 and is not being detected or firing for 5 seconds.<br />
**Cloaking boosters have been removed, so a a sentry frigate can't cloak boost another one to be invisible to other detection sources.<br />
*AI strategic reserve has been reworked into the praetorian guard, so they are always "visible"<br />
*Engineers can no longer go through wormholes.<br />
**variants that CAN go through wormholes are called Combat Engineers.<br />
*Currently, no unit teleports.<br />
*Science labs have been removed.<br />
**Command stations automatically collect science. You can still collect science from neutral planets by hacking.<br />
*Mercs have been removed so you can't just hire Mark 4 units right off the bat.<br />
**They have been reworked into Outguards, which work something like this. Hack an Outguard beacon to gain access to various Outguards. You can immediately call in 1 Outguard. for every 100 AIP you gain, you can summon another Outguard. Having 200 AIP and then hacking an Outguard beacon gives you 3 free calls. <br />
*Every fleet and command station can gain exp to level. Leveling up upgrades the flagship/command station and a few units attached to it. eventually you can spend skill points on stuff (this has yet to happen)<br />
*Neinzul (currently) no longer exist<br />
**Cries in Neinzul<br />
*Multi shot units will no longer shoot their excess shots at a single target.<br />
**While yes this means that MLRS will waste a ton of dps vs single targets, at least the AI superfortress can't focus all it's fire on one target.<br />
*You no longer get more of a turret by upgrading it's mark, instead you must capture and hold Global Command Augmenters, which will give you a set amount of turrets. Military stations get double the amount listed, Logistics and homeworld get the amount listed and Economic stations get half the listed amount<br />
*AIs no longer use carriers for massive amounts of free roaming threat. Instead, units of the same type will begin stacking. also applies to humans and other minor factions<br />
**Stacks have unique interactions, such as taking double damage from beam type weapons and AOE explosions,as well as splitting when affected by a status effect for to long. A unit stack multiplies the damage of the unit by the stack amount up to 5, and for every 5 ships inside the stack, another "shot" is added<br />
*Human turrets are pretty much multiplied by 5 vs AI turrets.<br />
**They have 5 times the energy cost, 5 times the damage, .2 times the cap, 5 times the health.<br />
<br />
===Minor Changes===<br />
*Wormhole guardposts no longer exist.<br />
**Yay! No more annoying 2 damage attacks<br />
*The Devourer Golem is killable (Fun fact: In Classic, the Devourer Golem used to be killable, but had insane vampirism. But then the Fallen Spire ships got added, which allowed players to cheese and destroy it rather easily. It was quickly made truly invincible after that.)<br />
**He respawns though. For some reason he also likes to eat the Zenith Trader too.<br />
*Translocation isn't an instant teleport, but rather a burst knockback, which is essentially the same thing.<br />
*Harvester exoshield has been removed<br />
*Decloakers no longer exist. Their role has been given to scout/sentry frigates.<br />
*There is no reclaimation. Parasites and the like now cause zombification.<br />
*By default, music playing is AI War 2 exclusive. If you wanna enable Classic music, check out the options menu.<br />
*ALL forcefields reduce damage output of units being protected by them. Even AI units are not spared from this penalty.<br />
**Hardened forcefields have been removed.<br />
*Mobile builders have been removed<br />
**If you want to build beachheads, look for citadels and battle stations.<br />
*Science labs and Hackers have been removed<br />
**Science labs' job has been given to command stations and flagships commence hacks now.<br />
*Advanced factories, Core fabricators and Experimental fabricators have been removed<br />
*Missile silo and warheads have been removed<br />
**Goodbye Nuclear missile mk3 :(<br />
*Human warp gates have been removed<br />
*Mini forts, Fortresses, Super fortresses and Modular Fortresses have been removed.<br />
**The AI still gets fortresses and super fortresses.<br />
*Alarm posts now trigger automatically rather than activate when the AI command station is destroyed. However they no longer have a 50% chance of alerting other AI forces if destroyed manually or by hacking.<br />
*Ion cannons and OMDs are no longer captured by taking over the planet, but by hacking.<br />
*Most AI capturables (like Black hole machines) can no longer be converted to your side.<br />
*Super Terminal hack is now done via hack menu, not by capturing the planet. Super Terminal will also always spawn.<br />
*Beam weapons are now simplified into one type, rather than having human, spire and zenith variants. <br />
*The beam weapon damages a certain amount of targets in a line, and if that target amount is exceeded, then the max damage per target hit is lowered proportional to targets hit.<br />
*Co-Processors no longer prevent capturing neutral units/structures<br />
*Distribution nodes no longer give metal, instead they give science and hack points.<br />
*Scrapping units no longer gives back a metal refund.<br />
*Deepstriking has been reworked. Instead of the AI building up a wave over time, it deploys the "AI Reserves" to fight any human ships that are more than two planets away from a Human planet. Once these units appear, they will fight the Human ships. If the Human ships leave or are destroyed, the Reserves will wait a few minutes then Warp away but leave a few ships to join the Threat Fleet. Once they warp away, they will be on a cooldown and will not be able to appear on the same planet for a short period of time.<br />
<br />
===List of Currently Removed Content From Classic===<br />
==== Human Exclusive====<br />
*Advance Warp Sensor<br />
*Human warp gate<br />
*Missile Silo and associated warheads<br />
*Harvester Exo shield<br />
*Hackers and their associated extensions<br />
*Science labs<br />
*Warp Jammer station<br />
*Neinzul as a whole, including hybrid hives and silos<br />
*Mobile builders<br />
*Transports and Assault transports (role taken by Flagships)<br />
<br />
====Capturables====<br />
*Radar Jammers<br />
*Armor Boosters<br />
*Counter Spy<br />
*Armor Booster/Inhibitor<br />
*Interplanetary Munitions Booster<br />
*Advanced Factory<br />
*Core and Experimental Fabricators<br />
*Human Rebel Colony<br />
*Captive Human settlement<br />
<br />
====AI Exclusive====<br />
*Counter Attack Guard Post<br />
*Core Shield<br />
*Carriers<br />
*All brutal guard posts<br />
*Several types of guardian<br />
*The avenger<br />
<br />
===Minor Faction Changes===<br />
<br />
====Dyson Sphere====<br />
The Dyson Sphere mechanic wise hasn't changed to much from it's incarnation in classic, however it has a whole slew of new interactions and units.<br />
<br />
*It's units are no longer restricted to being laser gatling guns in space. Divided into 4 units, Sentinel, Defender, Bulwark and Bastion.<br />
*Dyson Antagonizer is no longer a part of hybrid hives, but instead a part of the faction itself after being set to faction intensity 8.<br />
*You can now "hack" the Dyson Sphere for various results, be it increasing unit production or allowing you to produce dyson units yourself! Of course hacking the Dyson Sphere may make it a little bit miffed at you.<br />
*Multiple Dyson Spheres can exist at once now! But all it takes is just one antagonizer to make ALL of them mad...<br />
<br />
====Marauders====<br />
Marauders have changed pretty radically! They are now basically a more evil and simplified version of you!<br />
<br />
*They will no longer throw a few bombers and missile frigates at you or the ai, they will instead attempt to actually colonize planets!<br />
*They still spawn in like classic at the edge of a planet's gravity well.<br />
*Once all oposition has been removed, they will begin colonizing the planet by spawning in starbases and building defense turrets.<br />
**Starbasese mark up over time and once they reach mark III, they will begin to spawn raider frigates (not to be confused with the blazing fast raid frigates) that will attack the closest weakest planet available. A starbase cannot be mark III if there is a planetary controller already planetside (AI or Human command station); this is generally only pertinent for AI or Human allied marauders.<br />
*Starbases can have at max between 6 and 15 (depending on intensity of faction 6 being on int 1 and 15 being on int 10).<br />
*After raider frigates have cleared out human/AI forces, they then colonize that planet, starting the cycle again.<br />
<br />
====Dark Spire====<br />
Still the same grumpy xenophobic fellows from the first game, with a few new interactions.<br />
*You can obtain Dark Spire ships by hacking one of their vengeance genrerators.<br />
*You can also kill vengeance generators now by hacking them to render them vulnerable.<br />
*Vengeance strikes still occur, and you can cause them manually via hacking.<br />
*Hacking a vengeance generator causes it to accumulate energy over time, so make sure you know what your doing.<br />
*Dark Spire wards, used exclusively by the AI insta kills any Dark spire that roam onto planes with one.<br />
*If there is a VG on a planet without any other ships, and there is an adjacent planet without any ships, the Dark Spire can spawn a new VG on that adjacent planet.<br />
<br />
====Astro Trains====<br />
These guys are nowhere near as annoying as classic, so you don't have to worry about a nuclear train randomly blowing up one of your most important worlds. However they now all function as cargo trains. <br />
<br />
*Give knowledge on death, so you can "farm" them for tech upgrades.<br />
*Come in 3 varieties, Drone (spawns drones to distract you) Combat (focuses on killing your stuff directly) and Tank (has MUCH higher health but only has an anti structure weapon.)<br />
*Can spawn prototype guardians (heroic dire guardians) once a project is complete.<br />
*At max intensity, instead of spawning nuke trains, once an astro train project is complete a familiar ''shadow'' may appear...<br />
<br />
====Zenith Trader====<br />
This guy is still a "neutral" roamer who sells stuff to humans and AI. For some reason the Devourer Golem likes to munch on him. We don't know why, perhaps there's something sinister about the Zenith Trader? Don't worry though, if he dies he'll respawn.<br />
<br />
*to humans, he no longer sells the crap from classic. Instead he sells controllable macrophages, nanocaust aberration and abominations, Dark Spire eidolons, black hole generators and lesser Z.power generators.<br />
*to the AI he sells ion cannons, OMD, fortresses, black hole generators, troop accelerators and possibly more to be doccumented.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=Getting_Started&diff=37659Getting Started2020-01-08T19:14:50Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* General Tips */</p>
<hr />
<div>__FORCETOC__<br />
== Newcomers ==<br />
<br />
'''Welcome to AI War 2!'''<br />
<br />
AI War 2 is a combination of RTS, 4X, and Tower Defense. You'll be continuously commanding units in battle, explore the galaxy, and defend your planets all at once.<br />
<br />
It's recommended to start with the tutorials.<br />
<br />
Once those are done (or for the impatient), look in the Quick Start section of single player and check out one of the beginner situations. This should help you familiarize yourself with the game's mechanics and quirks. There is also a lot of "How to Play" documentation available from the in-game main menu. <br />
<br />
In general, AI War 2 isn't about going guns blazing and capturing everything in sight. That'll just get you killed. It's about taking only what you need and being as quiet as possible so you don't draw the attention of the AI. The AI doesn't play by the rules, or rather, it plays by a different set of rules. The AI can afford to throw countless ships at you. You (in general) can't do the same. Pick your targets strategically, methodically and carefully. Don't be afraid to cut and run if you start loosing a battle.<br />
<br />
At the top of the UI, you'll see a big red number with the accompanying letters AIP. This is AI Progress, AKA how pissed off the AI is against you. The higher this number rises, the more attention the AI directs to you. At the start of the game, the AI is busy attending to business outside the galaxy (it's probably trying to fight the Spire in the Andromeda Galaxy), but as you start taking planets from the AI and destroying its infrastructure, it'll start turning its attention towards you. More on this below.<br />
<br />
Remember! There are many different ways to play this game. The game is fluid, and what may work against one AI type may not work against another, so adapt and revise how you play constantly. Variety is the spice of life after all.<br />
<br />
The AI can be divided into 6 components, AI Sentinels, AI Threat, AI Warden Fleet, AI Hunter Fleet, AI Instigators and AI Praetorian Guard.<br />
*The AI Sentinels are the main AI faction you'll be fighting. AI Sentinels are usually dormant, found inside Guardposts, or sent as attack waves towards your planets. Most AI units start out as Sentinels but can become AI Threat under certain circumstances, usually after a certain amount of time after you aggro them.<br />
*The AI Warden Fleet are used by the AI to defend only. They will never be committed to an attack on your planets.<br />
*The AI Threat are AI forces actively waiting to strike. These units are ready to come at any time they sense a weakness. Threat is provoked typically by AI defenders who escape a planet after you attack it, or the remainder of defeated waves. If Thread doesn't find a suitable target to attack after a while, those units will join the Hunter Fleet.<br />
*The AI Hunter Fleet will constantly probe your planets for weaknesses and will attack whenever they feel like they can win.<br />
*The AI Instigators are not immediately apparent until later into the game. Every hour or so, an Instigator base will spawn somewhere in the galaxy. Instigators spawn close to your homeworld and on low level planets initially, but as the AIP becomes higher, they will spawn farther away and on higher mark planets. Instigator bases have a variety of nasty effects, ranging from increasing the amount of strength the AI will put into its waves, to spawning units every now and then to attack you. Instigators are usually not immediately threatening, but do not take your time dealing with them. The longer they remain active, the deadlier they get!<br />
*The AI Praetorian Guard behaves like the AI Warden Fleet, except they will only appear near and on AI home worlds and WILL attack any nearby human planets.<br />
<br />
===Difficulty===<br />
AI War's difficulty is non linear. It's more like an exponential curve between 10 points, so difficulty 1-4 isn't to much of a change, difficulty 5-6 is when the AI starts getting notably more powerful, difficulty 7-8 is when the AI really starts kicking you in the shins, difficulty 9 is nigh impossible, difficulty 10 IS supposed to be impossible (if you somehow manage to beat difficulty 10 without cheating or heavily stacking the odds in your favor, please report it to mantis bug tracker).<br />
<br />
When setting the difficulty for the AI, there are 3 main components, the base AI/AI sentinels, the AI wardens and the AI hunters.<br />
<br />
*Increasing AI sentinel difficulty affects the game the most. The default difficulty is set to 5, but the real fun/challenge begins at 7. at lower difficulties, the AI is... pretty much lobotomized and is nowhere near as intelligent as it could be. Its ships pick less than optimal targets, it will never retreat its forces, and it tends to underestimate human defenses, but as you turn up the difficulty, the AI gets much more intelligent, and will actually start overestimating your defenses, causing it to send more forces than necessary to be sure, its units will target other units it's strong against, and will even attempt to slip some attacking forces behind your planets when a big battle takes place. Many nasty things are locked behind difficulty 7.<br />
*Increasing AI warden difficulty will increase how many wardens will spawn at the start of the game, as well as increasing the maximum strength cap of the warden fleet. Increasing the AI warden difficulty also allows the warden fleet to get closer to your planets as well as how intelligent they are. At higher difficulties, the Warden Fleet gets access to more powerful units up to and including GOLEMS. At low difficulty levels, the Warden Fleet will attack more recklessly.<br />
*Increasing AI hunter difficulty will increase how many hunters spawn at the start of the game. Once the difficulty high enough, the hunter fleet starts getting bonus ships constantly throughout the game, rather than having to wait for threat ships to transition to hunters. Just like AI wardens, At high enough difficulties, the Hunter Fleet gets access to more powerful units up to and including Dire Guardians. At low difficulty levels, the Hunter Fleet will attack more recklessly.<br />
<br />
===How DOES The AI Work?===<br />
The AI has an "income" that it can "spend" on various "budgets". These budgets are Reinforcement, Wave, CPA, Warden, Hunter, Praetorian, Wormhole invasion, Reconquest and possibly more. As you increase the AIP and difficulty of the game, the AI gets a bigger income increase and thus more "buying" power. Let's look at this in a simplified way. Let's say that the AI wants to attack a human planet. It needs to build up that fleet using raw materials (income), but must also consider committing some of these soon to built ships to defense, lest the pesky humans perform a counterattack. After finishing building the ships it wants, the AI dedicates (spends) most of the newly created ships to attacking the human planet it wants, and the rest on reinforcing various key points (wave and reinforcement budget). The AI's behavior is also dependent on it's difficulty. <br />
<br />
'''The AI's Attack Process'''<br />
====Standard Waves====<br />
Approximately every 10 minutes, the AI will send a wave of units at you, displayed at the top left. As AIP increases, so does the strength of the wave. The AI at lower difficulties will target its waves at any planet you own with no clear objective in mind. Its attacks are also suicidally overconfident. The units that attack also tend to not retreat, and thus will not become a part of the threat or hunter fleet. As you increase the difficulty though, The AI's attacks tend to get more intelligent, and will actually overestimate how powerful your defenses are, causing it to often picking on the weaker planets or one with irreplaceable capturables on it. This also gives the AI a more "cowardly" attitude towards its attacks on the surface, as the AI's units will now attempt to retreat instead of fighting to the death. This will cause them to become threat fleet and if enough threat is accumulated, then that threat may just roll up to your homeworld in one massive wave. At higher difficulties, if you have multiple connected worlds (most often your homeworld and its adjacent planets), the AI will often attempt to sneak some of a wave's units past your defenses to raid vulnerable worlds behind. This can lead to a sudden power outage if the AI manages to snipe an economic command station planet behind a military station planet. Waves however have one weakness. They can only spawn from AI warp gates. ALL AI planets at the start of the game will have one warp gate. Warp gates allow waves to attack any planets adjacent to the planet the warp gate is located on. As a strategy, you can even cancel incoming waves by destroying the warp gate they are traveling to! However be aware, this causes the AI to choose a different location for that wave to spawn and that wave will have bonus strength attached to it! If there are no planets the AI can attack, due to the lack of warp gates near hostile planets, the AI will instead spawn waves on one of its own planets as long as there is a warp gate present, and that wave will immediately become threat. Every AI planet has a wave "theme". For example, an AI planet might send in large groups of raiders, raptors and stingrays, which are fast swarmers. Other AI planets might send in small groups of vanguards and pulsar tanks, which are slow but mighty units. Knowing which planets will send what type of wave theme, you can base your defenses around this.<br />
<br />
====Reconquest Waves====<br />
Once you cross a certain AIP threshold, the AI will begin sending out reconquest waves, which will aim to take back planets you have stolen from the AI, planets owned by hostile to AI minor factions, or already neutral planets. Reconquest waves have their own budget, separate from Wave budgets, and it's not uncommon for the AI to time a regular wave with a reconquest wave, making you fight a 2 front battle. Reconquest waves spawn threat like regular waves but the wave comes with a special ship called the usurper, and as long as that ship lives, the AI will be able to rebuild whatever was on the planet originally! As long as there is one AI opposed unit on the planet, the ursurper CANNOT rebuild the AI's stuff on the planet. If there is no more opposition, the usurper transforms in to a reinforced AI command station, with more health than a regular command station, and will slowly begin warping in the same guardposts and structures overtime. However, a reconquested planet's command station and warp gate will no longer give out any AIP. So if you want to take back the planet, you can do so without incurring any AIP.<br />
<br />
====Counter Attacks/Reprisal Waves====<br />
Whenever you lose ships on an AI controlled planet, the AI will use the scraped remains of your ships to assemble a counter attack. The more ships you lose, the stronger the counter attack becomes. Whenever a flagship gets crippled on an AI planet, it adds ALOT of strength to the AI counter attack. Take special care not to have any flagships crippled. Whenever a counter attack is building up, notified in the top left of the screen, it will start with a 2 minute timer. This timer will not begin counting down as long as you have enough strength present on the planet. The strength requirement to pause the timer is 1/5th the counter attack's strength. Once you do not meet the strength requirement to stall the timer, the timer begins counting down. As soon as the counter attack timer reaches 0, the counter attack will spawn it's units on the planet where your forces died. These units are a part of the threat fleet, so be careful! They may strike wherever and whenever you least expect!<br />
<br />
====Cross Planet Attack====<br />
Every 2 hours or so, the AI will unleash a Cross Planet Attack (CPA). A CPA is when the AI spawns in a massive amount of ships as threat, and they'll be ready and waiting to raid your homeworld when they feel that they can take it. A CPA spawns its units over any AI "Reinforcement Points" (ie Guard Posts and Command Stations). Once the units spawn, they tend to converge on an AI planet closest to your homeworld, and once they gather enough strength will simply charge towards your homeworld in an attempt to cut the head off the snake. If you raid the planet the CPA's units are gathering on, they tend to disperse and choose a different planet to attack from a different angle. CPAs are no joke, and it's not uncommon for people to die on them the first time around.<br />
<br />
====Exo Wormhole Invasion====<br />
[INFO REDACTED] nothing to see here. Move along<br />
===AI Progress===<br />
AI war is a balancing act. You must make sure you can increase your power, without tipping the AI about how strong you really are. AI progress (AIP) measures how much attention the AI is directing towards you. If you play this game like a conventional RTS, taking everything from the AI in a methodical way, eventually the AI will overpower you and push you back, all the way to your homeworld and then probably kill you. You must play like a guerilla resistance. Hit and run. Take only what you need. Every planet has an AIP price tag that you can see by hovering your mouse cursor over that planet in the galaxy map. The AIP price tag is only paid whenever you or a minor faction allied to you destroys the AI command station. If a Hostile to all faction (like the dark spire) destroys the AI command station, then you don't pay the AIP price tag. HOWEVER, if you decide to colonize the planet after the hostile to all faction destroys the command station, then you DO pay the AIP price tag. There is also the AIP floor, which is the minimum value the AIP can be, in case you dedicate to reducing AIP early. 35% of AIP incurred is added to AIP floor (e.g, an AI command station costs 20 AIP to destroy, so therefore 7 AIP will be added to the AIP floor). This is very important at high difficulty games. At certain intervals of AIP, different things unlock, such as reconquest waves and hunter waves. The AI also techs up it's units at certain AIP thresholds, which means it's waves, wardens, hunters and praetoreans will now be that level minium. For example, if the AI is at tech level 3, all waves will contain units at mark 3 and warden units that spawn in will be at mark 3. Different AI difficulties have different AIP tech thresholds.<br />
<br />
There are many ways to Increase AIP, but very few ways to decrease AIP.<br />
====Increasing AI Progress====<br />
*Destroying AI command station: 20 (includes warp gate)<br />
*Destroying AI warp gate: 5<br />
*Destroying AI troop accelerator: 5<br />
*Destroying AI black hole machine: 5<br />
*Destroying AI attack amplifier: 5<br />
*Destroying AI co-processor: 20<br />
*Destroying AI alarm post (whether by your own doing or it's self destruct mechanism): 5<br />
*AI risk analyzer fires off: 1 per risk analyzer every hour<br />
*Failing Spire Archive hack: 80<br />
*Destroying AI overlord phase 1: 100<br />
<br />
====Reducing AI Progress====<br />
*Destroying AI data center: 20<br />
*Destroying the last AI co-processor: 140<br />
*Holding major data center: 60<br />
*Holding Risk Analyzer: 2 per held risk analyzer every hour<br />
*Super terminal hacking: varies<br />
<br />
===Attacking the AI===<br />
<br />
The AI owns all the planets at the start of the game. Every planet has a mark assigned to them from the start of the game. Worlds next to your homeworld are always mark 1, and worlds next to those are mark 2. AI homeworlds and core worlds (planets adjacent to the ai homeworld) are always mark 7, and Worlds next to those are usually mark 6. All planets that do not meet the former criteria are between marks 3 and 5. In general, the higher the difficulty, the more higher mark planets appear and vise versa. What a planet's mark means is how powerful the defenses and units are on it. The Warden Fleet as mentioned prior are a defensive reserve, used to attack you wherever and whenever you show up. However, if you have a really strong presence, they may choose not to interfere with your battle. In general, whenever you vastly outnumber the AI on a planet, it's units will flee to a nearby wormhole. While this may seem cowardly, this allows them to come back at a later time as threat fleet. The AI can decide if certain planets get reinforcements or not, to replace any losses taken by hostile forces. AI planets have two states, alerted, and passive. During the alerted state, the AI wardens tend to head towards them and nearby planets, and the AI will reinforce available posts and command stations more often. In passive state, AI planets will rarely if ever receive reinforcements. AI planets start of in the passive state, and immediately transform into alerted if there is a hostile force on the planet, or a nearby planet.<br />
<br />
===Guardposts===<br />
<br />
Guardposts are the primary source of defense for the AI's planets. They also allow the AI to reinforce the planet with additional units per guard post. Think of guard posts as extremley powerful turrets for their mark level. While they are strong, they have a low hull to shield hp ratio. Using units with fusion can be used to bypass their shields, such as assault frigates and fusion bombers. Be aware, each guard posts has a compliment of units inside of them, and these units will fly out if any combat capable units go near them, or if the guardpost itself/nearby units and buildings are attacked.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
===Minor Faction Crash Course===<br />
It's not just about you and the AI. There are all sorts of other factions roaming the galaxy! From the swarming nanocaust, to the singular devourer golem, here's most things you need to know about the minor factions of AI War 2! Certain minor factions have their own AIP values, so the AI will also give them a threat rating. Each minor faction increases the AI's budget, but this budget can be used exclusively against minor factions only. If you want to experience minor factions without spoilers, don't scroll any further!<br />
<br />
====Human Resistance Fighters====<br />
Probably the only faction in the entire game that WANTS to help you win! These helpful fellows will show up whenever you attack an AI planet or a hostile force attacks one of your planets. Whenever either conditions are met and enough time has passed, these guys will send in a group of reinforcements to do battle with hostiles. They spawn in at the edge of a planet's gravity well. Don't rely heavily on them however, as by themselves, they won't accomplish much. They work similarly to the AI, in that they get a budget that slowly adds up, and send a wave to assist you when there is enough budget and combat is happening. Whenever the fighting is over and there are survivors, they will warp away from the planet and will refund their budget. Unlike the AI, Human Resistance Fighters will not mark up their units as AIP increases, so their units will remain weak throughout the game, but their income increases over time, so the longer the game goes on, the more often you'll see them. The higher the intensity of this faction, the more often they show up and their budget grows faster.<br />
<br />
====Marauders====<br />
These guys will fight everyone by default, picking on whoever is the weakest in their eyes. They'll fight you, the AI, and other minor factions. Similarly to HRF, they'll spawn at the edge of a planet's gravity well. If nobody opposes them and at least one marauder is still on the planet, then the marauders will start construction of starbases and turrets. Over time, marauder starbases will mark up, which makes them more durable and spawn more powerful defending units. Once a starbase reaches mark 3, they will start spawning in raider ships (not to be confused with the strikecraft or frigate) who's explicit purpose is to destroy opposition on other planets and then colonize said planets. If the planet has a command station on it (friendly to AI or friendly to human marauders), marauder starbases cannot be mark 3. This will cause the marauders to start growing near exponentially. While raiders may cause problems, they will prefer to target weaker planets, so you can goad them into attacking the AI by weakening an AI planet next to marauders, and retreating when the marauders come in to sweep up the remaining AI forces. As long as your planets are stronger than nearby AI planets, the marauders will prefer to raid the AI over you. Keep in mind, if you try to exploit colonizing neutral planets caused by marauders, you still have to pay the AIP price tag if you place a command station. A legitimate strategy is allowing marauders to take their own planet deep inside AI territory and allowing them to build up. This will cause the AI to dedicate some of it's wave budget against marauders and not you, so you can have an easier time defending against AI incursions. Just remember, the marauders will target you if they consider you a better target.<br />
<br />
===General Unit Prefixes===<br />
Pike: Deals bonus damage to units above a certain hp% and units with 90mm armor or higher<br />
<br />
Concussion: Deals bonus damage to units with 50mm armor or lower<br />
<br />
MLRS: Deals bonus damage to units below a certain hp% and has lots of shots<br />
<br />
Fusion: Attacks ignore a certain % of shields<br />
<br />
Grenade: Attack has AOE<br />
<br />
Plasma:Deals bonus damage to shields<br />
<br />
Sabot: Deals bonus damage to units at or above 5tx mass<br />
<br />
Nucleophilic: Deals bonus damage to units with an enregy cost of 7,000 or more<br />
<br />
Tritium: Deals bonus damage to units with albedo .3 or lower, usually infinite range.<br />
<br />
===General Tips===<br />
*Don't attempt to conquer everything, only capture planets that have something important/you need, or have strategic value. A planet that has a Zenith Power Generator or a fleet, or worlds directly adjacent to your home world are good for example.<br />
*At certain AIP points, the AI "techs up" its units, so that the Warden Fleet, Hunter Fleet, and waves will be one level higher. This is a major buff to the AI's strength, so be careful about increasing the AIP too much too quickly. You can tell when those points are by clicking on the AIP icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen.<br />
*There is a cap to how strong the Warden Fleet can get. Once it reaches that cap, any resources devoted to the Warden Fleet instead adds to reinforcement budget. If you see planets spike up in strength over a short period of time and no/very little AIP has increased, it's probably because the Warden Fleet is at its maximum capacity. Start grinding down the Warden Fleet to reduce the reinforcement budget to normal strength.<br />
*Neutering planets refers to killing everything on an AI planet except for the Warpgate and Command Station. This makes the planet almost harmless to travel through. Don't just leave it. Note: The AI can rebuild turrets if they were originally around the Command Station on the planet. Be aware.<br />
*Cross Planet Attacks are best dealt with piecemeal. You don't want to have a sudden rush of AI units barge into your homeworld while you're dealing with something else on a different planet. Generally, the units from a cross planet attack will wait outside one of your planets, and once they have amassed enough units or feel confident enough to take on your planet they will charge all at once. While they are gathering, find the planet they are on and kill off as many as you can. While this will typically cause them to retreat and go to a different planet, it's better to deal with that threat a little bit at a time.<br />
*Find and hold (by default) both Major Data Centers for a HUGE AIP reduction.<br />
*Reconquest waves happen once you cross a certain AIP threshold. You can click on the AIP icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen to see what that point is.<br />
*Spending Science on ship upgrades is more useful early than on economics<br />
* ARSs and Tech Vaults are very strong early-game objectives<br />
*Strength does not consider unit counters. 500 pike corvettes have more strength than 300 v-wings, but since v-wings counter pike corvettes, they'll win, despite having an inferior strength value. Carefully consider if you can win against the AI even if your strength is higher than it's.<br />
*AI planets are either on alert, or not on alert. An AI planet that's on alert will very likely receive reinforcements, where non alert planets will almost never be reinforced. An AI planet will become alerted if it is adjacent to a neutral or Human planet, when it has hostile military forces on it (not necessarily Human), when an adjacent planet has hostile military forces on it.<br />
<br />
==== The Intel Menu ====<br />
The Intel Menu in the sidebar is invaluable for figuring out what targets to prioritize in game. There are a lot of different categories of things it tells you about, including where you can get resources, planets of yours you need to defend, where important capturables or destroyables are, etc....<br />
<br />
===Abbreviations===<br />
*MDC: Major Data Center<br />
*CPA: Cross Planet Attack<br />
*ZPG: Zenith Power Generator<br />
*ZMC: Zenith Matter Converter<br />
*ARS: Advanced Research Station<br />
*IGC: Intra-Galactic Coordinator<br />
*ZT: Zenith Trader<br />
*AIP: AI progress<br />
*ST: Super Terminal<br />
*SA: Spire Archive<br />
*DSVG/VG: Dark Spire Vengeance Generator/Vengeance Generator<br />
*DS: Dyson Sphere (Note: Dyson Sphere and Dark Spire both have the same abbreviation, DS, so read the surrounding text to see what which faction someone is talking about)<br />
<br />
== Veterans ==<br />
<br />
Welcome back to AI War. The AI has taken over the galaxy (again), but lots of things have changed.<br />
<br />
===Major Mechanic Changes===<br />
*In general, AI War 2 is not as micro intensive as classic, and many things have been removed due to redundancy, clutter, or making things easier to understand.<br />
*Fleetships are renamed to Strikecraft and Starships are renamed to Frigates.<br />
*Instead of producing Strikecraft and Frigates immediately, they are bound to a Flagship. You can't just, say for example, immediately build 150 Fighters, Bombers, missile frigates and a bonus ship. Instead, you must have a Flagship that has those units attached to it. Once built however, there is no limit to how far a Strikecraft or frigate can go across the galaxy, like AI War Classic.<br />
**Flagships are captured much like Golems from Classic and they are what lets you expand your military power. Flagships come in 3 varieties, strike (generic transport Flagship, but many Strikecraft and Frigates), officer (Flagship has a gimmick or is very powerful on it's own) and Lone Wolf fleets (no supporting Strikecraft or frigates, but the Flagship is INSANELY powerful).<br />
**Flagships cannot die. Instead, when they reach 10% health, they become crippled. While crippled, a Flagship cannot have Strikecraft or Frigates assigned to it built and if it has a weapon, can't shoot. The Flagship can still move however and be repaired back to full strength. While this means that you can't lose your Golems anymore, the AI still gets LOTS of salvage for reprisal.<br />
*Units now have shields, which is basically a second health bar. However, anything with a fusion attack such as Raider Frigates and Bombers will ignore a certain % of shields. (For example, a Raider Frigate has 90% fusion damage, so an attack that deals 1000 damage will decrease the target's health by 900 and shields by 100)<br />
*Scout Strikecraft no longer exist. Scouting as a whole has been reworked.<br />
**Planets have 4 states, unscouted, explored, watched and permanently watched.<br />
***Unscouted planets cannot be traveled to at all. Explored planets can be moved to but you have no vision on that planet. Info on explored planets are on a "last seen" basis. Watched planets are planets that you can see in real time because you have a unit there or something providing vision. Permanently watched is the same as watched but no unit is required to be there in order to see what's going on. You scout by destroying AI command stations, which causes 8 unscouted planets to become explored.<br />
*ARS no longer give their contents via capturing their planets, but by hacking them.<br />
**Also they no longer give science AND a ship, but only 1 of the 2. You can also reroll ARS contents.<br />
*Hull and ammo types are gone.<br />
**These have been replaced with the stats Armor, Albedo, Engine and Mass. More info can be found on [[AI War 2: Units of Measurement]]<br />
*You no longer spend knowledge on individual unit upgrades, but instead on categories divided into weapon types and hull types.<br />
**While you spend more knowledge short term, with multiple units upgraded at once, you save knowledge long term.<br />
**All ships are no longer built as individual marks. Instead they are upgraded all at once (For example: if you have MK2 V-Wings somewhere in the galaxy, and you upgrade the Generalist tech category, ALL V-Wings currently alive and built after this upgrade will become MK3.)<br />
**Units can now be upgraded to mk7<br />
*Hacking points are now earned per planet, rather per AIP.<br />
**Each planet has 30 Hacking points and you can only earn them by building a Command Station on that planet.<br />
**Hacking points can no longer go into the negative.<br />
*Colony ships no longer exist.<br />
**In order to build Command Stations on planets, you must have a Flagship on that planet as well as no AI Command station.<br />
*Supply mechanic no longer exists<br />
**So feel free to build whatever wherever.<br />
*Energy collectors do not exist anymore. Instead, Economic Command Stations produce 2 energy collectors' worth of energy, Logistical Command Stations produce 1 energy collector's worth of energy and Military Command Stations produce no energy at all.<br />
*Salvage no longer exists, so it's pointless to build a world designed specifically to collect it, but you can make a point of farming EXP to increase that Command station's Level to make it harder for the AI to remove.<br />
*Cloaking is no longer an "on/off" state, but rather each ship that has cloaking has a certain amount of cloaking points, and every time it shoots or gets detected, it loses cloak points by a set amount or certain rate respectively. Once cloak points reach 0, THEN, the ship is no longer cloaked. A ship cannot recharge cloak points until all its cloak points reach 0 and is not being detected or firing for 5 seconds.<br />
**Cloaking boosters have been removed, so a a sentry frigate can't cloak boost another one to be invisible to other detection sources.<br />
*AI strategic reserve has been reworked into the praetorian guard, so they are always "visible"<br />
*Engineers can no longer go through wormholes.<br />
**variants that CAN go through wormholes are called Combat Engineers.<br />
*Currently, no unit teleports<br />
*Science labs have been removed.<br />
**Command stations automatically collect science. You can still collect science from neutral planets by hacking.<br />
*Mercs have been removed so you can't just hire mk4 units right off the bat.<br />
**They have been reworked into Outguards, which work something like this. Hack an Outguard beacon to gain access to various Outguards. You can immediately call in 1 Outguard. for every 100 AIP you gain, you can summon another Outguard. Having 200 AIP and then hacking an Outguard beacon gives you 3 free calls. <br />
*Every fleet and command station can gain exp to level. Leveling up upgrades the flagship/command station and a few units attached to it. eventually you can spend skill points on stuff (this has yet to happen)<br />
*Neinzul (currently) no longer exist<br />
**Cries in Neinzul<br />
*Multi shot units will no longer shoot their excess shots at a single target.<br />
**While yes this means that MLRS will waste a ton of dps vs single targets, at least the AI superfortress can't focus all it's fire on one target.<br />
*You no longer get more of a turret by upgrading it's mark, instead you must capture and hold Global Command Augmenters, which will give you a set amount of turrets. Military stations get double the amount listed, Logistics and homeworld get the amount listed and Economic stations get half the listed amount<br />
*AIs no longer use carriers for massive amounts of free roaming threat. Instead, units of the same type will begin stacking. also applies to humans and other minor factions<br />
**Stacks have unique interactions, such as taking double damage from beam type weapons and AOE explosions,as well as splitting when affected by a status effect for to long. A unit stack multiplies the damage of the unit by the stack amount up to 5, and for every 5 ships inside the stack, another "shot" is added<br />
*NO DEEPSTRIKE PENALTY!<br />
**Deepstrike to your hearts content!<br />
*Human turrets are pretty much multiplied by 5 vs AI turrets.<br />
**They have 5 times the energy cost, 5 times the damage, .2 times the cap, 5 times the health.<br />
<br />
===Minor Changes===<br />
*Wormhole guardposts no longer exist.<br />
**Yay! No more annoying 2 damage attacks<br />
*The Devourer Golem is killable (Fun fact: In Classic, the Devourer Golem used to be killable, but had insane vampirism. But then the Fallen Spire ships got added, which allowed players to cheese and destroy it rather easily. It was quickly made truly invincible after that.)<br />
**He respawns though. For some reason he also likes to eat the Zenith Trader too.<br />
*Translocation isn't an instant teleport, but rather a burst knockback, which is essentially the same thing.<br />
*Harvester exoshield has been removed<br />
*Decloakers no longer exist. Their role has been given to scout/sentry frigates.<br />
*There is no reclaimation. Parasites and the like now cause zombification.<br />
*By default, music playing is AI War 2 exclusive. If you wanna enable Classic music, check out the options menu.<br />
*ALL forcefields reduce damage output of units being protected by them. Even AI units are not spared from this penalty.<br />
**Hardened forcefields have been removed.<br />
*Mobile builders have been removed<br />
**If you want to build beachheads, look for citadels and battle stations.<br />
*Science labs and Hackers have been removed<br />
**Science labs' job has been given to command stations and flagships commence hacks now.<br />
*Advanced factories, Core fabricators and Experimental fabricators have been removed<br />
*Missile silo and warheads have been removed<br />
**Goodbye Nuclear missile mk3 :(<br />
*Human warp gates have been removed<br />
*Mini forts, Fortresses, Super fortresses and Modular Fortresses have been removed.<br />
**The AI still gets fortresses and super fortresses.<br />
*Alarm posts now trigger automatically rather than activate when the AI command station is destroyed. However they no longer have a 50% chance of alerting other AI forces if destroyed manually or by hacking.<br />
*Ion cannons and OMDs are no longer captured by taking over the planet, but by hacking.<br />
*Most AI capturables (like Black hole machines) can no longer be converted to your side.<br />
*Super Terminal hack is now done via hack menu, not by capturing the planet. Super Terminal will also always spawn.<br />
*Beam weapons are now simplified into one type, rather than having human, spire and zenith variants. <br />
*The beam weapon damages a certain amount of targets in a line, and if that target amount is exceeded, then the max damage per target hit is lowered proportional to targets hit.<br />
*Co-Processors no longer prevent capturing neutral units/structures<br />
*Distribution nodes no longer give metal, instead they give science and hack points.<br />
*Scrapping units no longer gives back a metal refund.<br />
<br />
===List of Currently Removed Content From Classic===<br />
==== Human Exclusive====<br />
*Advance Warp Sensor<br />
*Human warp gate<br />
*Missile Silo and associated warheads<br />
*Harvester Exo shield<br />
*Hackers and their associated extensions<br />
*Science labs<br />
*Warp Jammer station<br />
*Neinzul as a whole, including hybrid hives and silos<br />
*Mobile builders<br />
*Transports and Assault transports (role taken by flaghips)<br />
<br />
====Capturables====<br />
*Radar Jammers<br />
*Armor Boosters<br />
*Counter Spy<br />
*Armor Booster/Inhibitor<br />
*Interplanetary Munitions Booster<br />
*Advanced Factory<br />
*Core and Experimental Fabricators<br />
*Human Rebel Colony<br />
*Captive Human settlment<br />
<br />
====AI Exclusive====<br />
*Counter Attack Guard Post<br />
*Core Shield<br />
*Carriers<br />
*All brutal guard posts<br />
*Several types of guardian<br />
*The avenger<br />
<br />
===Minor Faction Changes===<br />
<br />
====Dyson Sphere====<br />
The Dyson Sphere mechanic wise hasn't changed to much from it's incarnation in classic, however it has a whole slew of new interactions and units.<br />
<br />
*It's units are no longer restricted to being laser gatling guns in space. Divided into 4 units, Sentinel, defender, bulwark and bastion<br />
*Dyson Antagonizer is no longer a part of hybrid hives, but instead a part of the faction itself after being set to faction intensity 8.<br />
*You can now "hack" the Dyson Sphere for various results, be it increasing unit production or allowing you to produce dyson units yourself! Of course hacking the Dyson Sphere may make it a little bit miffed at you.<br />
*Multiple Dyson Spheres can exist at once now! But all it takes is just one antagonizer to make ALL of them mad...<br />
<br />
====Marauders====<br />
Marauders have changed pretty radically! They are now basically a more evil and simplified version of you!<br />
<br />
*They will no longer throw a few bombers and missile frigates at you or the ai, they will instead attempt to actually colonize planets!<br />
*They still spawn in like classic at the edge of a planet's gravity well.<br />
*Once all oposition has been removed, they will begin colonizing the planet by spawning in starbases and building defense turrets.<br />
**Starbasese mark up over time and once they reach mark III, they will begin to spawn raider frigates (not to be confused with the blazing fast raid frigates) that will attack the closest weakest planet available. A starbase cannot be mark III if there is a planetary controller already planetside (AI or Human command station); this is generally only pertinent for AI or Human allied marauders.<br />
*Starbases can have at max between 6 and 15 (depending on intensity of faction 6 being on int 1 and 15 being on int 10).<br />
*After raider frigates have cleared out human/AI forces, they then colonize that planet, starting the cycle again.<br />
<br />
====Dark Spire====<br />
Still the same grumpy xenophobic fellows from the first game, with a few new interactions.<br />
*You can obtain Dark Spire ships by hacking one of their vengeance genrerators.<br />
*You can also kill vengeance generators now by hacking them to render them vulnerable.<br />
*Vengeance strikes still occur, and you can cause them manually via hacking.<br />
*Hacking a vengeance generator causes it to accumulate energy over time, so make sure you know what your doing.<br />
*Dark Spire wards, used exclusively by the AI insta kills any Dark spire that roam onto planes with one.<br />
*If there is a VG on a planet without any other ships, and there is an adjacent planet without any ships, the Dark Spire can spawn a new VG on that adjacent planet.<br />
<br />
====Astro Trains====<br />
These guys are nowhere near as annoying as classic, so you don't have to worry about a nuclear train randomly blowing up one of your most important worlds. However they now all function as cargo trains. <br />
<br />
*Give knowledge on death, so you can "farm" them for tech upgrades.<br />
*Come in 3 varieties, Drone (spawns drones to distract you) Combat (focuses on killing your stuff directly) and Tank (has MUCH higher health but only has an anti structure weapon.)<br />
*Can spawn prototype guardians (heroic dire guardians) once a project is complete.<br />
*At max intensity, instead of spawning nuke trains, once an astro train project is complete a familiar ''shadow'' may appear...<br />
<br />
====Zenith Trader====<br />
This guy is still a "neutral" roamer who sells stuff to humans and AI. For some reason the Devourer Golem likes to munch on him. We don't know why, perhaps there's something sinister about the Zenith Trader? Don't worry though, if he dies he'll respawn.<br />
<br />
*to humans, he no longer sells the crap from classic. Instead he sells controllable macrophages, nanocaust aberration and abominations, Dark Spire eidolons, black hole generators and lesser Z.power generators.<br />
*to the AI he sells ion cannons, OMD, fortresses, black hole generators, troop accelerators and possibly more to be doccumented.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Grand_New_AI&diff=37590AI War 2:The Grand New AI2020-01-03T04:29:54Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* BETA Version 1.101 Ship Cap Reversions */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After lots of feedback, we're ready to take it to the next level! Major new functionality and improvements across the board are incoming to make games more interesting than ever, and we're also going to start building toward multiplayer.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.102 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.101 Ship Cap Reversions ==<br />
(Released January 2nd, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Fifteen new achievements have been added, to account for the new adaptive AI types. That brings us up to 154 achievements in total!<br />
* Added "Remove Unlock Variance in Capturables" option. This option removes the random ranges ships and turrets can be found with, fixing it at a constant average. Suggested by Flypaste, Fluffiest, CyberKun and many others on Discord. Thanks donblas.<br />
<br />
=== Fireteam and Minor Faction changes ===<br />
<br />
* Consolidate the Hunter Fleet and Marauder fireteam logic. This should make it quite easy to add fireteam logic to new minor factions, and allow for improved intelligence of fireteams going forward<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where marauder fireteams weren't always detecting that they had won a battle<br />
<br />
* Allied Marauders are back to killing command stations by default, but with a setting to disable it. This is a no-longer-basically-cheating version of "minor factions don't cause AIP increases". Allied Marauders always kill warp gates though. If this works then I'm going to deprecate "minor factions don't cause AIP increase" since that's too cheaty for my tastes<br />
<br />
=== Balance ===<br />
<br />
* In the prior release there was a thing with "growth versus stagnant" multipliers. Those are gone now, reverted to how they were before.<br />
<br />
* Also in the prior release, there were a lot of things that didn't get cap increases anymore, but now they work like strikecraft (and thus like they always did, although with some extra clarity because the cap scaling is still iterative as noted last release).<br />
** Frigates are unaffected by all this, as their scaling was essentially just evened out and they were still "growth style" units.<br />
<br />
* uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant has been removed, as the mechanic it was working with is now gone.<br />
<br />
* AI Great Turret health 3x instead of 5x. Tesla isn't mostly in hull anymore.<br />
<br />
* Tesla Turret bit more expensive for the AI too.<br />
<br />
* Put in some changes to how strikecraft reinforcements are placed, which makes them evenly fill all the available guard posts as much as they can. Previously the logic was really strange and also really slow, so now mapgen is a bit faster yet again (other changes in the prior build also made it faster).<br />
** So there should no longer be empty guard posts at the start of the game where you run into them and that's strange.<br />
<br />
* Also put in a change that allows more than 800 ships of a category (strikecraft, turrets, etc) to be reinforced at a planet at a time if need be, since that is a thing that can happen with strikecraft. It now allows for up to 8000.<br />
<br />
* Magnifiers and Troop Accelerators are now set to appear on the galaxy map on planets they are at, like most other "devious devices" the AI has.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes And Similar ===<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to mod out or deprecate ship lines in starting fleets or otherwise by setting their max cap to 0, which then takes them out completely.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for requesting this ability.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where display_name was being incorrectly blanked out on partial records when reading xml.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The Adaptive AI types now actually show their names as being easier, harder, moderate, brutal, full, etc, rather than just all showing "adaptive" in the interface. Now you can see what you're getting into!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a mysterious bug where sometimes guard posts would not be able to seed during a reconquest seeding. This may have been exclusively related to the adaptive AI type, it's hard to be sure. But at any rate, when it runs into a lack of data on what kinds of guard posts to use, it now chooses what to use properly so that it has something. <br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the actual Random AI type was being shown, instead of just "random"<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where draw_in_galaxy_view being true was not enough to make structures or ships properly show up in the galaxy map view.<br />
** This makes it so that things like black hole machines and so on are visible on the galaxy map for the first time. And ion cannons and mass drivers, etc.<br />
<br />
* If a quick start includes a faction that is not present in the installation of a player later trying to load the quickstart (mods, expansions, etc), it now blanks out the offending faction and continues as normal with all the other factions. Anyone who DOES have that faction will see it work as expected, while anyone else will just see it missing but all else well, which is really the best of both worlds.<br />
** This was affecting a lot of our quick starts in the prior beta build.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.1 So Much Stuff We Can't Even, But More Is Still Coming ==<br />
(Released January 1st, 2020)<br />
<br />
'''Hi there! To play this on Steam, please right-click the game, hit properties, and go to the betas tab. Then go to the current_beta option and it will download this. We could really use feedback from a variety of folks as we build in the remaining stuff that we have planned for the 1.3 build that we plan to officially call all this once we're sure it's stable. Please take a moment in particular to try the new parallel processing and see if you can run it and how much smarter all the factions are at high speeds if you play at those speeds.'''<br />
<br />
* Add the "Extreme" category of Quickstarts, with 2 default, 1 nearly default, and 2 bonus scenarios.<br />
** Thanks to CyberKun for suggesting the category.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers will now be automatically targeted by units again, but are set to a low priority.<br />
** They still seem to like shooting these first however, if they happen to be in the way.<br />
** This lets factions destroy these again rather than being shot to bits, ignoring them.<br />
** Feedback is appreciated - this is a fairly opinion heavy thing.<br />
*** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Updated the "Various Weapons" fleet name styling with DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY's latest changes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Random Any ai type could pick 'random easier'<br />
<br />
* The Tech History menu (viewable by clicking the Science icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen) now shows the total science you've spent.<br />
<br />
* The "Show Entity Strength When Hovering" tooltip has been removed, as we are now going to do this by default. It was strange not showing it.<br />
** Ships now say if they are showing their own strength or the strength of themselves as a stack when you hover over them.<br />
<br />
* Targeting behavior of ships that are freely moving around (pursuit mode, whether of the player or other factions) are now vastly smarter in how they deal with non-combatants in general (things without guns but that need to die).<br />
** They'll still shoot at them just as frequently as ever IN PASSING, if there's nothing else to shoot at or that thing is the most important priority to shoot at based on the various metrics. But they no longer will specifically pursue those sorts of things with an excess weight just because they happen to be close.<br />
** If there are non-combatants with a high priority, then ships should still beeline for those just as well as ever, it's worth noting. And if they're not in pursuit mode, then nothing is different at all.<br />
** The net effect of this is that ships will generally approach and destroy dangerous things like great-turrets before they start messing about with an unarmed guard post or a gravity generator or whatever else. Survivability goes way up.<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust construction centers and Marauder Outposts now warp in over time (a short time interval, like 30 seconds to a minute) rather than warping in instantly. This gives their enemies a bigger window to counter attack in.<br />
<br />
* The Tech Menu now tells you a very approximate strength increase for both defenses and ships after upgrading.<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to hack Global Command Augmenters to re-roll provided turrets. (Thanks donblas)<br />
<br />
<br />
=== Optional Advanced: Massively Parallel Faction Processing ===<br />
<br />
* New setting in the personal settings: "Advanced: Run Massively Parallel Faction Processing"<br />
** Only matters on the host in multiplayer. This lets the factions in the game be substantially smarter and faster in how they react to things, and is most notable at higher simulation speeds (10x, etc).<br />
** But all this may come at a cost that your CPU can't handle; we're still testing that and would love feedback on the difference you see in simulation speed (the percent under the game speed multiplier) if you turn this on and off.<br />
** You will have a much fiercer foe at 10x speed with this on, versus an almost braindead one without it. At regular speed it won't matter much between one or the other.<br />
** We're hoping to build toward this being the default for everyone, but for now we don't want to inflict slower framerates on everyone just so that 10x speed runs smarter. One step at a time.<br />
** Right now this is off by default, and needs a lot of testing, but amazingly with the current design it did not slow down at all in a relatively-small-number-of-factions game on Chris's i7-6700 HQ. Much more data is needed.<br />
<br />
* You may experience some strange and awful bugs by enabling this, at least at first, as the factions have never been parallel in quite this way before. This may tank performance or cause lots of strange errors, and in most cases we can find and fix them if you send us the errors or the savegame with the bad performance. In most cases it would be two threads from different factions trying to use the same list or other collection. To report: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/<br />
** Thank you!<br />
<br />
=== Fireteams ===<br />
<br />
* Fireteams are a concept developed by Badger to allow non-player factions to flexibly coordinate a variety of simultaneous actions. It's the smartest strategic AI mechanism in either AIWC or AIW2 (in theory at least). Fireteams were developed to power the Scourge, a feature for the first DLC, but we can use the same basic logic for other minor factions to give those factions a nice intelligence boost. We are backporting R&D done for an expansion-only feature to the base game because the base game isn't hard enough yet. Mwahahaha. <br />
* Allied ships using fireteams (just marauder raiders for now) will show you what that fireteam is planning on doing in the verbose hovertext, to make coordinating between you and your allies more possible.<br />
** The simplest description for how Fireteams work is like this. All units for a given minor faction are assigned to small fireteams of 1-4 strength, so there will be lots of fireteams. Each fireteam determines its own objectives independently. If multiple fireteams have the same objective then they will coordinate their attacks.<br />
** This is currently available for the Hunter Fleet (via the 'Assassin' type in the Game Lobby) or the Marauders (via choosing "Intelligence: Tactician" in the game lobby).<br />
*** The Fireteam implementation for Marauders and Hunter Fleets is brand new, so I expect some teething pains and would love feedback (with save games)<br />
<br />
=== All-New "Adaptive" AI Type ===<br />
<br />
* Add in a new Adaptive AI type, which alternates between available types every so often. They work similarly to Random, in that there is "Adaptive Easier", "Adaptive Brutal", "Adaptive Any", and so on.<br />
** Change interval is in XML, and is once per hour. It won't change any existing units, but reinforcements/wave composition and so on will change. <br />
** There are currently no Achievements for these AI types<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Orbital Mass Driver reload time 9s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Hack Ion Cannon and Mass Driver now takes 2 seconds, rather than 15.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers that the player either hacked or bought now die to remains.<br />
<br />
* Replaced Military Command Stations engine stun with paralysis.<br />
** Engine Stun on this thing could be fairly exploitable, allowing it to hold off incredible amounts of enemy strength.<br />
** However, that was only possible if the enemy could be slowed at all. If they couldn't, it tended to fall relatively easily.<br />
** Swapping it to paralysis should let it not be as strong in the old ideal case, but also improves it in the worst possible case.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian damage 4,000 -> 8,000, shots per salvo 6 -> 3.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of Tesla weapons very slightly (10% ish?) and bumped up the splash size by 15% ish.<br />
** What this means is they effectively act more or less the same, except will not waste their initial shots on the first singular ship to come into range, and will tend to hit more beyond.<br />
** This was split between both the range and splash size to avoid making the visual effect too much larger. Shouldn't have much impact on gameplay, however.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post now has the fortified effect on it.<br />
<br />
* Hydra heads and the like cost no energy.<br />
** This was the cause of mysterious brownouts.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Reworked the way that wave compositions are filled to be more efficient and ensure that absolutely as much of the budget is spent of a wave as possible.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for discovering that this was not happening.<br />
<br />
* In the normal non-stealth-planet themes, the stealth guard posts are now 1/50th as likely to appear as before. There were vastly too many of these showing up in the galaxy prior to now.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guardian damage 2,500 -> 5,000, now has the same durability as the other Dires.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range slightly of MLRS, Concussion and Nucleophilic Guard Posts.<br />
** The main contributors to the "small world problem".<br />
<br />
* Increased the cost of normal Guardians by 50%.<br />
** This is in preparation of the next update, in which these'll be getting buffs. It's done in two stages to avoid current saves suddenly getting much harder.<br />
** With this, old games will be similar, and new ones will have the correct Guardian count for when the buffs hit. So for a time, Guardians'll be a bit easier.<br />
** This is part of making Guardians scarier individually, as right now they can feel a bit flimsy and kind of just too close to Strikecraft overall.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so this is a kind of funny story... cough.<br />
** Essentially, various ships and turrets and whatever have modifiers to kill other specific types of ships or structures with certain characteristics, right?<br />
** So something is really good at killing structures in general, or high-energy-usage stuff, or items with thin hulls or whatever else. Easy enough.<br />
** The problem was, we had these ships getting BETTER at killing those same things at higher marks, while also getting a general damage buff.<br />
** Puffin's example, as he was the one to realize this:<br />
*** MK1 Pike Corvette does 45 damage, 3x to high armour, 2x to high hull remaining, for...270 damage.<br />
*** MK6 is 189 damage, 5.5x to high armour, 3.5x to high hull remaining, for...3,638.<br />
** As he put it, "I feel like I know where the "late game is easier than early" problem is."<br />
** We may need to rebalance some of these units to generally have higher specialized damage or higher damage in general, BUT, we've now removed the increase in damage multipliers from the following categories of stuff:<br />
*** Strikecraft (yours and enemy of course), Turrets (ditto), Frigates (mostly yours), Guardians (mostly enemy), and Guard Posts (mostly enemy).<br />
** We've LEFT this monstrosity of multiplication on a few specific things:<br />
*** The Rorqual Hegira Ark (yours), AI Fortresses (enemies), and any battlestations (yours) with weapons.<br />
*** This may be something we want to give to a few other special units of the AI or you, we'll see, but it would be specifically for Very Special Units.<br />
<br />
* Metabolizing Gangsaw armour 60 -> 90, reduced count found in ARS and Fleets.<br />
<br />
* Consumer Starting Fleet now uses normal Gangsaws instead of the Vicious variant.<br />
<br />
* All normal Turrets (i.e not Plasma or Beam) have armour of 80mm.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now uses Vanguard Hydras instead of the normal one. Also has 25 instead of 20. <br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian speed 600 -> 1,000.<br />
<br />
* The "singular freaky surprises" of AIs now will only appear on planets between marks 2 and up, rather than every planet owned by the AI. No surprises TOO early in the game, then, with golemite and similar.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* GCAs now have a higher chance of having an extra "OtherDefense" item at the end.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for a suggestion in this area.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cost a bit of Weaken Turret and Weaken Guard Post hacks.<br />
<br />
==== Ship Cap Calculation Refinements ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the caps for ships are calculated is now vastly different, and a bit more expensive on the CPU (but worth it).<br />
** Essentially before it was using a floating point number to get a result, and then rounding up. So very often this would lead to things not actually increasing in a manner that you'd expect, or frigate counts not increasing at all for several marks before finally increasing.<br />
** Now it applies each multiplier sequentially to the original number, and then rounds up each time in between, so you always get the expected result.<br />
** This means that, for example, the mark 3 frigates of things with cap 1 now have a cap 3 instead of 2. The end result is usually pretty much the same at mark 6 and 7, or close, but the intervening marks are now more accurate and we shouldn't have people with lots of confusion on their caps not increasing like they would expect.<br />
<br />
* There are now three different ship cap growth styles, rather than one:<br />
** Stikecraft (works about the same as it always has, although will give you slightly more now, working as expected because of iterative math).<br />
*** This was already pretty much working fine.<br />
** Frigates (much lower growth rate than before, but ends up in a similar place numbers-wise, however gives you what you'd expect rather than something surprising now).<br />
*** Numerically this was balanced fine, but people couldn't understand why it jumped around strangely because of rounding with fractions.<br />
** Everything else (does... not gain cap by leveling up).<br />
*** Wait, wut? Hold on a moment, though: one of the most annoying things ever is having to go back and put out more mines or turrets later on on all your planets because you just increased your caps. That still will happen from GCAs, but it's at least less common because general techs won't cause this to happen.<br />
*** Besides which, performance can be a real pain with turrets if there are just excessive numbers of those. How about we increase the strength without that? Same result, but game runs better and also less micro for you. For more about that, see below.<br />
<br />
* On the mark levels, rather than just having a multiplier for hull/shield points and attack, it now has a "growth" one and a "stagnant" one.<br />
** "Growth" are the same numbers as before, and apply to frigates and strikecraft. Aka nothing changes as these have both a power/hull increase AND a ship cap increase as they go up.<br />
** "Stagnant" are used for ships that used to get a mark level bonus to ship cap, but no longer do. So to keep them equal in power while smaller in number, it includes their hull or attack power multiplier multiplied by what their old ship cap multiplier would have been.<br />
*** The end power on these is absolutely identical to what it used to be, but it's for turrets and similar where they are now not something you need to go in and place extra every time you upgrade a tech that improves turrets. See the above notes.<br />
*** This obviously does also apply to things like tractor beam arrays and minefields and so forth, and given that AIs don't use the human-style caps for those that does mean that those are just plain stronger now on AI planets when they are (rarely) used.<br />
**** If we want to change that, we can make AI versions with the uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant flag from below, but that doesn't seem super important for anything but turrets.<br />
<br />
* Added a new uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant flag which, when set to true, causes something that would normally grow attack bonuses and hull bonuses per mark level as if unit cap was stagnant (thus larger bonuses) and change it to grow as if it had an increasing cap (thus smaller bonuses).<br />
** This is used for the Great-Turrets so that they don't get crazy stronger at higher mark levels, since the AI doesn't use normal human-style caps anyway.<br />
<br />
* Any fleet leaders (golems, arks, battlestations, citadels, etc) now act as though uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant is true. Thus they'll scale as they always have. Same with guardians, guard posts, command stations, king units, and drones. Also LargeShips and SmallShips that are used by third party facions.<br />
<br />
* All of the AI structures now explicitly have uses_growth_multipliers_even_if_stagnant on them to avoid them getting accidental crazy buffs of any sorts. This mainly benefits AI Fortresses and the like, which could have been very scary otherwise.<br />
<br />
* Fleet Capacity Extenders now only work for strikecraft, as their increasing a frigate could be absolutely crazy in terms of the impact to both your power (in a good way) and your economy (in a bad way).<br />
<br />
* Stationary planet-bound forcefields, tractor beam sources, gravity sources, and tachyon sources now upgrade in the same way that frigates do (aka they behave more or less like they always have, but with slightly more clarity -- they get more unit cap as they go, and the lower "growth" style stats increases instead of the higher "stagnant" ones).<br />
** People do love having more forcefields, that's for sure, and the ability to field more tractors and so forth are similarly not something we want to condense down like we would turrets.<br />
<br />
* Minefields now have their own special_entity_type and also a rollup for easy iteration over them. Some clever AI routines may need that sometime in the future.<br />
** Additionally, minefields now continue to get a larger ship cap at the strikecraft-style rate of addition, and regular growth stats. Got to have enough for coverage, of course!<br />
<br />
==== AI Great-Turrets ====<br />
<br />
* All of the AI turrets were already different from the player turrets in that they generally have half the range of the player counterparts. Now we're taking it even further.<br />
** Mainly because turrets can't stack, and thus will grind the game to a halt if the AI builds full caps of them at the sort of strength and costs that we had them at previously, we've condensed them to being essentially like stacks-in-one right from the start.<br />
** All of the AI turrets are called Great-Turrets instead of just turrets, and they have 5x the cost and firepower and health that the player versions do (while still having half the range).<br />
** This makes them truly terrifying even in small numbers, but it's something that is actually slightly in your favor compared to what it was when they were separate since they had more shots and thus were less likely to overkill your ships (just your framerate).<br />
** This shouldn't really affect existing games too much, because the AIs barely used turrets before -- mostly -- at least compared to what they do now.<br />
<br />
* For any games older than 1.026, it will now remove 4/5ths of the turrets from AI planets, since AI turrets are now a lot stronger and more condensed being great-turrets.<br />
<br />
==== Attack Ranges And The Small World Problem ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new galaxy option to the balance section: "All Ship Attack Ranges"<br />
** Lets you adjust the effective range of all of the ships in the galaxy -- yours and enemies. Does not affect 'infinite' sniper ranges, naturally. Also does impact tractor beams. The default is 0.8x in order to avoid the 'small world' problem where all the enemies are fighting you at once on a planet.<br />
** This does make it so that you need to be slightly more strategic with placements of your own turrets, of course. Your turrets naturally have 2x the range of their AI great-turret counterparts, though.<br />
** If you want to crank this as low as 0.1x (bad idea) you can, or you can crank it all the way up to 1.3x (also probably not the best thing).<br />
** Chris notes: This is a softer nerf than we originally thought of, just to play it safe for now. But if people are interested in trying smaller values, you now can.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Lance weapon of all variants (plus Laser Pulse weapon) 12,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Triple Lance variant damage 4,000 -> 1,800, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Other variants Lance damage 6,000 -> 2,650, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse damage 4,500 -> 3,500.<br />
<br />
==== AI Reinforcement Budget Caps And So Much More ====<br />
<br />
* The five "balance_initial_ai_defenses" xml entries in our central constants have been completely removed, and equivalents are now on the actual AI types instead.<br />
** This lets us completely balance the AI defenses around AI types if we ever want to tune that.<br />
** These are also per-reinforcement-point now, rather than per-planet, and they are also directly in AI cost units rather than "caps" which have to be converted to those units by a mysterious multiplier.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that we calculate what the defensive budget cap at a planet is has been rewritten from scratch. It was giving absurdly high numbers previously, such as 443 strength for the AI home planet's cap at the START of a game. That was just way too much for the start to be sitting at, cap-wise.<br />
** Now things are balanced completely around the number of reinforcement points, like the original game was, so if you go in and neuter a planet it will absolutely cripple their ability to reinforce. More power to you, the player! Yay!<br />
** The overall caps are also far lower than they ever were in the past, this is worth stressing before you read the next two bits.<br />
** But there remains a very tiny (laughably small, really) percentage bonus that the AI gets as the AIP rises. Eh.<br />
** There's also a NEW fairly small percentage bonus based on time spent in the campaign. The way it works out is a 48% increase in budget after TEN HOURS of playing at difficulty TEN. After 10 hours at difficulty 7, it's a much more modest 12% increase. This gives you some time pressure, but it's really nothing major and is still less than the AI could theoretically start out with prior to now. And with your new ability to absolutely cripple the AI by neutering guard posts at no AIP cost... we may need to make some of these multipliers higher, who knows. But probably now, we mainly have other plans.<br />
<br />
* Special Forces Ninja hideouts no longer count as reinforcement points. That was old AIWC-style thinking. Now it's just guard posts and the command station itself.<br />
<br />
* We've been experimentally tuning the numbers a bunch on these, too.<br />
<br />
* planet_dire_guardian_count has been changed to planet_dire_guardian_percentage.<br />
** This lets us be a little more flexible with the marks of planets getting percentages of dire guardians rather than explicit numbers,<br />
** The AI homeworlds are always full-dire, still.<br />
<br />
* The way that guardians are spawned on initial planet creation, and/or on reconquest, is now completely different and respects the budgets and budget caps.<br />
** Previously it was adding guardians kinda-sorta twice, and thus often making the really high-mark planets absurdly overpowered in general but in particular on AI types like Royal.<br />
** Not only was this logic doing the above, but it also was interpreting the budget caps entirely incorrectly, thus more or less ignoring them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section: Write AI Budget Info In Planet Tooltips<br />
** If something seems off with the planet strengths and reinforcements, then this is a way to see what is going on under the hood.<br />
<br />
* Improved the performance of how the game calculates tachyon, tractor, and gravity sources in the rollups. It's now substantially more precalculated than before, no longer having to iterate over any systems.<br />
** There's a small benefit to the strength counting code in this, too.<br />
** And actually, map generation in general seems notably faster with these changes in, despite the below change.<br />
<br />
* The GetAIToPurchaseCostPresentForBudgetType() method is now far slower, but much more accurate (not lumping strikecraft and guardians together, for instance) and always up to the instant accurrate (not having to wait for the strength counting code to run).<br />
** This should solve several issues with the budgets on reinforcements being ignored or improperly overly strict, as the case may be.<br />
<br />
* Found a place where it was seeding extra guardians per guard post, and took that out.<br />
<br />
* During reconquest seeding, the AI no longer gets a bunch of guardians to go with every guard post.<br />
** Guard posts in general are not expected to be tied to guardians, and guardians will eventually be vastly more powerful than they are now.<br />
** This was causing some planets, like AI homeworlds, to get VASTLY more guardians than they should, blowing way past their budget for guardians.<br />
<br />
* The way that AI reinforcement budgets are calculated is no longer based around the number of reinforcement points, but instead just a flat amount for the planet, which gets reduced (severely) by any lost reinforcement points.<br />
** Thus no matter how many reinforcement points there are, you don't have to suddenly worry about super high budgets on the AI planet, or strange spikes in budgets just because there are more guard posts.<br />
** Actually what this means, though, is two things: firstly, each reinforcement point is weaker on a planet with many of them (due to same number of units spread around more); but secondly, destroying a reinforcement point on a planet with fewer of them will do more (due to it reducing the cap of the planet by a larger percentage).<br />
<br />
* There is a new ignore_guardian_restrictions_in_waves that we use on the royal AI type, which lets it use its full capacity in sending waves of guardians at you.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for turrets and non-turret defenses, those will no longer increase based on the mark level of the planet or the fact that the planet is an AI homeworld.<br />
** This keeps them from having way too many of these things on high levels and next to nothing on lower ones.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for guardians, it's no longer doubled for the AI homeworlds.<br />
** This keeps THOSE from becoming so absurdly high.<br />
<br />
* There is a new multiplier_for_starting_guardian_budget_on_reconquest on AI types which makes it so that there CAN be some guardians added back onto planets, per-AI-type, during a reconquest of that planet.<br />
** For most AIs this will just be 0.015, which is an eighth of an eighth (the significance of that will be relevant in a bit).<br />
** This lets the AIs MAYBE get some of their guardians back right as they capture a planet, partialiarly moreso later in the campaign, but often it will be too paltry for them to get anything.<br />
** For the Royal AI, it is set to 0.001 since it has such a higher budget of guardians in general. This may mean they practically get nothing, ever, in those circumstances; but better than too much and we can always tune later.<br />
<br />
* There are then other new multipliers on AI types: multiplier_for_game_starting_guardians_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_turrets_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_non_turret_defenses_from_total_budget, and multiplier_for_game_starting_strikecraft_from_total_budget.<br />
** These all affect how much of the AI's budget for each planet they start with when the game is at the very zeroth second still in mapgen.<br />
** In the past, we always gave -- for some reason -- fully HALF of the budget cap to each planet, which did not give much room for them to expand and get really huge if you ignore them for too long. ;) Most any planet could do would be to double in power, aside from things like the Hunter or other third parties coming in and making it temporarily stronger.<br />
** Now we've got this set to 0.125, which is an eighth of the full budget or a quarter of what the old starting strength was. This lets us multiply the final budget by 4x to still have the same starting strength (and we have done that), but now the starting strength can get 8x stronger if you leave them alone for THAT long. And that's before you get into the (very small, as noted in prior notes) increases based on time elapsed and AIP. <br />
** So the AI has more growth potential, BUT this is measured against the fact that your neutering of them is incredibly powerful.<br />
*** If they had 4 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/5th of whatever its max would have been.<br />
*** If they had 10 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/11th of whatever its max would have been. Wowzers.<br />
*** In both cases this keeps you from neutering things to be TOO absolutely weak, but also gives an incentive for popping guard posts when you can that are not related to your main objectives but might threaten you in the future. Aka a lot like the first game.<br />
<br />
* Added the fields always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point and always_is_ai_non_turret_defense_spawn_point, both bools, to game entities (ships only).<br />
** This lets us override the logic that says "only primary keys of modulus 6 get turrets around them" and things of that nature.<br />
** This is now used for the AI overlord, to always let it be surrounded by both types of things (phase 1 only).<br />
** Note that these fields only work for ships that are already a spawn point (mainly guard posts and command stations).<br />
<br />
* The Turtle AI type now has 4x the turret budget of other AI types.<br />
** Fortress Baron has 3x the turret budget.<br />
** Peacemaker has 2x the turret budget.<br />
** These heavier-turret variants are certainly interesting to run into and give the game a very different feel. These are the more defensive-oriented AIs, after all.<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_reinforcement_location bool field. This lets us make things other than command stations and guard posts into reinforcement points.<br />
** Now that reinforcement points don't actually cause the AI to get more budget, but rather just have it spread out more, it's far more interesting to have this.<br />
** Plus it makes it so you can do even harder neutering to certain planets, since the total number of reinforcement points will be higher by definition, which is good for you as a player.<br />
** But it also makes it so that isolated units with this flag on it will now be more protected than before, possibly with turrets around them, which is in itself quite interesting.<br />
** BUT that still means that forces are being spread more thin around the planet, potentially, so there are pros and cons to you strategically in general with this.<br />
** AI structures that thus now act as reinforcement points:<br />
*** Warden Fleet Base (again -- back to the same as the prior version that was last public anyway).<br />
*** Data Center<br />
*** Fortified Data Center<br />
*** Major Data Center<br />
*** Plasma Eye<br />
*** Ion Eye<br />
*** Troop Accelerator<br />
*** AI Fortress<br />
*** Raid Engine<br />
*** Alarm Post<br />
*** Magnifier<br />
*** Instigator Base<br />
*** Astro Train Depot<br />
*** Risk Analyzer<br />
*** All of those new ones above also now have always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point="true" on them. Yet more texture in the planets, as well as giving them more inherent defenses.<br />
<br />
* Guardians, as well as anything marked as a reinforcement location, can no longer be transported or put inside a guard post.<br />
** Older savegames may have some of them in there.<br />
** This causes FAR more guardians to be out and patrolling around now than were before. Some of them were just sitting inside guard posts in a very boring fashion before, rather than doing their patrol thing from what we can tell.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for planets on the galaxy map now show you how many reinforcement points the AI has there out of how many total there have ever been there if it's an AI planet.<br />
<br />
* Added modulus_for_turrets_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 6) and modulus_for_non_turret_defenses_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 3) as fields to the AI type. Previously these values were hardcoded in, but now they can be changed for various AI types. This will make turrets appear around more structures for those AI types, or non-turret-defenses do the same.<br />
** Turtle now uses 1 and 2 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Fortress Baron now uses 2 and 3 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Peace Maker now uses 2 and 3 instead of 3 and 3.<br />
** This makes it so that their turrets are more spread out on their planets rather than being clumped in super-crazy places on just some locations.<br />
<br />
* Added a variety of new levers that determine now how budgets are distributed intra faction or inter faction, nor what the caps or starting amounts are... but instead affect how bonuses (or penalties) work to various AI types. These can be regular floating point numbers with three decimal points of precision (0.001)<br />
** multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement, multiplier_for_budget_wave, multiplier_for_budget_cpa, multiplier_for_budget_warden_fleet, multiplier_for_budget_reconquest, multiplier_for_budget_hunter_fleet.<br />
** These don't have any effect on other parts of these AIs -- there are other mechanisms for choosing how much budget goes where, but this lets us set general scales on a per-AI basis on certain types of budget. This is pretty importance for us to be able to balance things reasonably so that there are things like appropriate growth rates of AI budget without you feeling like it starts out with too much, or has too low of a final cap, etc.<br />
** Most of these are just set to 1 for now, but multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 2 for almost all AIs. multiplier_for_budget_wave is 2.2 for the Vicious Raider, and multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 4 on the Turtle.<br />
** We'll undoubtably balance things more using this in the future, but for now this is a nice new lever for us to be able to use to give AIs their own unique characters as well as simply making them not have anemic defenses 30 minutes in even if their defenses 1 second in are smaller now.<br />
<br />
* The way that the AI tries to spend its funds on reinforcements DURING gameplay is absolutely reworked from scratch. <br />
** It was doing a strange thing where it would kind of roll a die and depending on the results try to reinforce certain things with more or less priority, and this often led to some funky results. Potentially it resulted in under-spending at times, and sometimes it may have meant a larger portion of the budget went to non-turret defenses than was at all warranted. And sometimes there were no turrets being put in at all. The reasoning was sound, really, but it was old and didn't fit with the modern economy of the AIs in the game.<br />
** Now it instead goes through a complicated set of calculations of percentages of what goes where, within random tolerances, dividing out budgets in a certain priority between strikecraft, turrets, non-turret defenses (NTDs), and guardians. If something will get lower amounts of funding, then other things naturally will pick up the slack in a pretty sensible order of priority. It then tries to spend its money more wisely once it has sub-budgets allocated, and rolls any excesses into guardians first (to give more of a chance of buying one), and then into strikecraft (to try to fully deplete the budget if at all possible.<br />
<br />
* Changed multiplier_for_starting_guardian_budget_on_reconquest to be 0.125 instead of 0.015.<br />
** This will substantially hurt. The AI is kind of taking a beating on some of the econ changes lately, so this seems warranted.<br />
<br />
* Changed all the various multiplier_for_game_starting_whatever_from_total_budget to be twice what they were before, or therefore a quarter of the max starting budget in most cases rather than an eighth.<br />
** This should eliminate the sense that you're able to just bumrush planets in the early game before they can reinforce. We could have upped the actual caps of the AIs, but then the late game would have swung too much in their favor if the game runs really long.<br />
** We'll see what happens; if the starts are still too easy, then we'll be upping the starting caps instead of the percentage again. More than a quarter of the cap at the start seems like planets will just be far too cramped.<br />
<br />
* The "defensive budget multiplier" that comes from the AI difficulty is now split into ongoing and initial. This lets us make the lower-difficulty starting amounts not SO anemic that they are pathetic, and then as we get into difficulties higher than 7 not have them be so ludicrously overpowered right at the start. Difficulty 7 is also toned down to 90% of its ongoing defensive budget when it comes to initial seeding, now.<br />
<br />
==== Completely Revised Way Of Seeding Guard Posts and Command Stations ====<br />
<br />
* There's a new AIGuardPostAndCommandPlacer set of xml data that lets us define a lot of different ways that guard posts and command stations can be arranged on planets beyond what has been the basic prior to now (one one each metal generation point).<br />
** These can be varied by mark level ranges of planets, and have different sets for the homeworlds of AIs. They can easily be modded in or added to like map types or whatnot.<br />
<br />
* The way that human homeworlds have their home command station seeded is now a bit more randomized than before, but also does a better job of keeping itself away from wormholes.<br />
** This should make your starts slightly less predictable.<br />
<br />
* The AI Homeworld was set to always put its command station dead center. That's no longer the case. This will make some games easier, others harder, and is fine with Chris.<br />
<br />
* Over the years, the concept of what a "guard post" is has changed quite a lot. Originally in the first AI War, they were literally just a gathering point for other ships. Then in 4.0+ of that game we started making them scary weapons in their own right.<br />
** This sequel has always had the armed variant, but that causes some problems in balance with them sometimes overshadowing the actual ships that are at their location, and in many cases making it impossible for you to fight just a single guard post or two at a time with the way that their weapon ranges were so large that they could pick you off.<br />
** Thus we've hybridized the old and new concepts, making a new "Unarmed Guard Post" type (and Ghost and Swarmer variants), and then adding in a chance per post for it to be armed versus not armed now.<br />
** We've split it out so that normal and home AI planets each have their own chance, per AI type: chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_normal_planet and chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_home_planet.<br />
** Bear in mind that, prior to this build, it was always 100 for each one, essentially.<br />
** Old numbers: Now for most AIs it is 15 and 60, turtle is 60 and 90, Fortress Baron 50 and 80, Peace Maker 30 and 60.<br />
** Please note that these are not the pure percentages of guard posts on a planet that will be armed: rather, at each guard post it essentially rolls a 100-sided die and if the number is lower than what is stated there, it will be armed.<br />
*** So you'll see all sorts of funky distributions, ranging from completely unarmed guard post planets to completely armed ones.<br />
** This DOES make things easier for the player, but mainly it gives other units a chance to shine and makes the armed guard posts more interesting in that they are more rare.<br />
*** Ideally we'll be able to make guardians scarier in their stead, but one thing at a time right now. This release has a lot of changes already!<br />
<br />
* The way that unarmed guard posts were seeding has been changed yet again. There's now a 100% chance of armed guard posts on mark 7 worlds and homeworlds, and then a per-AI setting for what the percentage chance is for every mark level below that. The percentages are generally much higher than they were before, making for far fewer unarmed guard posts as the game progresses and in general fewer overall.<br />
<br />
* The "initial reinforcements" that get seeded into/around reinforcement points now happens as the absolutely last thing, which means that things that should have turrets or whatever around them from the very start, or which are not guard posts but act kind of like them and are added normally during the "special entity seeding" period of mapgen will now get their initial followers properly.<br />
<br />
* Usurpers now have to be on the target planet for 10 seconds before they can reclaim it, otherwise you never even see the usurper if you don't have a defending force.<br />
<br />
* When a reconquest of a planet happens by the AI, it now uses only armed guard posts regardless of the ratio of armed and unarmed it would have previously used.<br />
<br />
* Previously there was mostly just the AI seeding guard posts one metal deposit spots, which is boooring. Now that we have the ability to do more, we have a variety of new types:<br />
** Guarding Wormholes Generally: this can start at mark 1 and go all the way to mark 7 (not homeworlds, though).<br />
*** These are highly aggressive stances that make it hard to get into the planets, and on very high marks they wind up putting 2-3 guard posts PER wormhole. Talk about ow. If there are too few spots for their posts at just wormholes, the rest are spread out very ambiently.<br />
** Guarding Wormholes Harshly: this can start at mark 3 and go all the way to mark 7 (not homeworlds, though). They should be VERY infrequent based on their weight. These are deathtrap worlds.<br />
*** These start out with 2 guard posts per wormhole, and only go up from there -- by mark 7, it's freaking 5 guard posts per wormhole. Just entering the planet is leaping into death, more or less. But that's part of the fun of having a rare extra difficult guard post design, and bear in mind that it doesn't make for more reinforcements and so the total firepower of the planet doesn't get a boost per se (well, guard post firepower itself aside -- which can be huge on higher marks, admittedly, but... well, have fun with those!).<br />
** One Single Mass: this is another super rare one, and can start at mark 2 and up, but not homeworlds.<br />
*** This puts all of the guard posts pretty much in one big clump somewhere on the planet. Depending on randomness, the clump can be kind of strung out, or more circular, or very tight. In many ways this makes them into one super-guard-post, which is potentially like trying to crack an old-school fortress in AIWC. These have randomized ranges of guard posts per mark level of planet, with 2 on mark 2 to, from 3-4 on mark 3 up to 9-12 on mark 7. This is another intense one.<br />
** Spread Out Guard Posts<br />
** This is a variety of ones that are much more lightweight and which get seeded much more commonly: basically just randomly putting guard posts around the whole planet, but pretty far away from one another to make them easier to approach. The numbers vary a lot, and most planets will use one of these.<br />
** Guarding Metal Deposits: moderately low chance of coming in on any mark 3 and up, but not homeworlds.<br />
*** Places one guard post on every metal deposit, and then no more. This is similar to old behavior, except that it doesn't try to add more if there are fewer metal spots than an "ideal" for the mark level. Consequently the difficulty of these will vary a lot, but stealth guard posts remain easy to find because they're just on the metal spots (that was a big giveaway in the past, cough).<br />
** Spread Out Guard Posts And Two By Command<br />
*** These ones start kicking in on mark 4 worlds and up, and one of the two homeworld variants has this, too.<br />
*** This basically puts two VERY close to the command station, guarding it in a ferocious fashion, but then the rest spread very far around.<br />
** We can always code more of these as we think of them, and these are easy to add in as part of mods or expansions or whatever as well.<br />
*** Extra logic could be added to seed specific extra structures at certain guard posts if we really wanted to, although that's not my favorite and it's not by default possible in the moment. But the possibilities for future additions are pretty endless if we have sufficiently interesting ideas. A lot of the other things are better off being a bit random is the current feeling, though, as it plays into these nicely.<br />
<br />
* Added the ability to have certain guard post layouts only be for certain AI difficulty ranges (based on the max AI difficulty, not the difficulty of the AI at that planet).<br />
** Additionally, based on the max AI difficulty, the ability to have a certain added weight to guard post layouts per difficulty above some cap. For now we're using that in the following ways:<br />
*** (Standard weight for something appearing neutrally frequently is 100, please note.)<br />
*** GuardingMetalDeposits (bit hard) base weight was 20, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=25,7=30,10=50 etc).<br />
*** GuardingWormholesGenerally (quite hard) base weight was 10, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=15,7=25,10=45 etc).<br />
*** GuardingWormholesHarshly (super hard) base weight was 2, but it now gets +3 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=5,7=8,10=17 etc).<br />
*** OneSingleMasss (super hard) base weight was 2, but it now gets +3 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=5,7=8,10=17 etc).<br />
*** ThreeSpreadOutGuardPosts (super easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=90,7=70,10=40 etc).<br />
*** FourSpreadOutGuardPosts (super easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 5 and above. (5=90,7=70,10=40 etc).<br />
*** SixSpreadOutGuardPosts (easy) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=90,7=80,10=50 etc).<br />
*** SixSpreadOutGuardPosts_AndTwoByCommand (moderate) base weight was 50, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 6 and above. (6=55,7=60,10=80 etc).<br />
*** EightSpreadOutGuardPosts (moderate) base weight was 100, but it now gets -10 for every difficulty 7 and above. (7=90,10=60 etc).<br />
*** EightSpreadOutGuardPosts_AndTwoByCommand (hard) base weight was 50, but it now gets +5 for every difficulty 7 and above. (7=55,10=75 etc).<br />
*** TenSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears on difficulty 5 and up.<br />
*** TwelveSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears on difficulty 6 and up.<br />
*** AIHome_TwelveSpreadOutGuardPosts now only appears up to difficulty 8.<br />
*** AIHome_TenSpreadOutGuardPostsAndTwoByCommand now only appears on difficulty 6 and up.<br />
** All of this combines to give a much more richly-textured scary landscape for the higher difficulties, while keeping things notably simpler at easier difficulties even at the level of a cursory glance.<br />
*** Looking at a difficulty 5, 7, and 10 game, you can see that this is NOT a subtle effect. As we theoretically add more types of seeding patterns, or other people think up seeding patterns, we can make an even richer tapestry.<br />
<br />
* If you have map gen logging on, you can now see entries for "Guard post style for planet" that shows what mark the planet is and what kind of thing it is seeding.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the "BUG: Ship is on burningAndDying list but has not exploded" message to instead just mark the ship as exploded, as there are too many ways to get to that state.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in DetachVisObjectFromSim on ship squads.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in StartReconquestDefenseSeeding for AIs types that do not use non-dire guardians for some reason.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in BattlefieldVisualSingleton.HandleSquadAndShipUpdates, and made it so that it self-repairs when it can or self-reports when it can't. Either way it continues to draw things and update them properly rather than having the display get all strange if such an exception occurs.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for the report.<br />
<br />
* Improved the "find a safe space to be" code for ships so that they are now more likely to find a CLOSE space to be.<br />
<br />
* For guard posts in particular, it does an extra good job of trying to keep it close to the intended point (whatever that is in the given schema).<br />
<br />
* Finally fixed a really annoying bug wherein command stations that got shot to remains and then rebuilt did not count properly (thus not letting anything else be built or rebuilt at their planet) until you saved and loaded the game.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, ArnaudB, Asteroid, KDR_11k, Puffin, Sigma7, Ryulong, Core, and GrimerX for reporting and helping to find it.<br />
** Special thanks to Ryulong for the recent savegame that let us reliably reproduce this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where some achievements relating to killing specific AIs was not triggering because it was trying to match the internal name to the display name. Now it checks both display name and internal name to be doubly sure.<br />
** This makes Full Ensemble in particular now properly trigger when you beat them.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If you have existing saves where you already beat the game, loading those savegames will now trigger the achievements for you that you properly earned (just load them, unpause, and wait at least 2 seconds).<br />
** It's much better this way, versus having to dig up a savegame from right before you won, etc, if you're going back to get achievements that you earned but didn't log because you were offline, or there was a bug, or whatever factor.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hover planet text<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of some Instigator base hovertexts<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for reporting<br />
<br />
* Since it is now possible for non-combatant ships to contain lots of combatant ships (unarmed guard posts on the AI side, but frankly also your own transports), the game now takes great pains to make sure that it isn't overlooking the combatant-nature of ships contained within non-combatant ships when checking things like strength.<br />
** Compared to prior versions of the game (where all guard posts were combatants) this doesn't fix or change anything, but it might make player combat strength more accurate in the case of transports if there was some issue there (though there's no sure evidence that was a problem).<br />
<br />
* When ships are dying, you no longer get a bunch of red "null fleet" messages hovering over them, unless you have debug info turned on for tooltips.<br />
<br />
* The game should now say "release" to show a more or less detailed tooltip on the various screens if you're already holding down the button to make it do whatever it's doing (you can invert the behavior, so which is held and released should match that).<br />
** Thanks to Admiral for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the tooltip for Risk Analyzer Notifications<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Completely reworked how the long range planning threads keep track of how long it has been since they have run, so that they should probably run at appropriate intervals when the game is running faster than 1x speed now. Previously these were running slower the faster the game ran, which made the AI stupider at 10x speed than 1x speed.<br />
<br />
==== Fixes For XML Modding ====<br />
<br />
Example tiny mods and discussion are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22433<br />
<br />
* Several different things were not staying properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them:<br />
** exp_to_grant_on_death<br />
** watch_planets_at_X_hops<br />
** tags (ow this would cause many problems)<br />
** capturable_seed_weight (again very problematic)<br />
** capturable_max_per_galaxy<br />
** capturable_can_seed_at_all<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of things that would complain they could not be found properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them (but in reality these were carrying over fine from the base version being modded):<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_sfx<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_if_on_other_planet_sfx<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If outgoing_damage_modifier or incoming_damage_modifier entries are duplicated in the list of rows for a system or entity (respectively), whether that be through mods or just in the original definition, it now only uses the last-to-apply version. This last-to-apply one is always going to be a mod version if there is a mod version.<br />
** This makes it so that you can't have two different modifiers on the same weapon that both are based off of the hull health of a ship, for example, but I don't think we're doing that anywhere and it would be messy in the UI if we were, anyway.<br />
** This then fixes the issue with various weapon bonuses and the like duplicating themselves when you are using an is_partial_record entry to mod a weapon.<br />
** It's worth noting at this point that xml modding is inherently slightly fraught in terms of minor bugs or oversights like this which can have major repercussions. Please just let us know on a case by case basis what you find, ideally with the xml you're using and a savegame that shows the wrong behavior, and we can likely fix it up pretty fast.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Both ai_ship_group_membership and fleet_membership now properly adjust the existing membership when there is a duplicate entry entered for them (from a mod or whatever else) linking a given ship type to a given template or group. It now adjusts the weight and so on in the template or group, rather than adding a duplicate entry.<br />
** Note that if you change the category for a template, it will assume you mean it to be a duplicate and will add that accordingly. There really should never be any valid reason to mod the category of a ship, but if you must then you can just 0 out the min and max of the old one maybe?<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting something next to this, although not exactly this.<br />
<br />
* Creating a mod to replace or redefine parts of the fleet design templates (like the starting fleets) now works properly rather than creating duplicate entries or extra counts or both.<br />
** For an example of a mod that works with this new function, the raw xml bits are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22136<br />
** Note that if you choose to change the category of ships from HERE, that will work fine. You just can't change categories of fleet template items from within the game entity side.<br />
** Also please note that this change now prevents you from having duplicate lines of the exact same type of ship in a starting fleet. So something with two lines of fusion bombers would not work anymore, for instance, even with no mods in play, and would just take the count of the last fusion bomber entry and use that.<br />
*** This doesn't stop you from using multiple duplicate ship lines in-game of course, but it does stop it in the starting fleet designs, none of which (that are still active) were using that function anyhow.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:Avenger&diff=37541AI War:Avenger2020-01-01T03:52:52Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* How to counter when in the AI fleet */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[Category:AIWar]]<br />
[[Category:AIWarBase]]<br />
{{8.024}}<br />
{|<br />
|[[File:AIWarAvenger.png|200px|left|Avenger]] || valign="top" | A massive, moon-sized space station created by the AI as the final defense against the human onslaught.<br/>If the AI Home Command Station to which it is assigned is destroyed, the Avenger will live up to its name.<br/>The Avenger mounts an Avenger Shield Module, a Heavy Beam Cannon Module Mark IV, 3x Heavy Beam Cannon Module Mark III, and 8x Riot Control Shotgun Modules Mk II.<br/>This ship spawns to avenge the death of an AI Home Command station if the Avenger plot is enabled at game setup.<br/>When it spawns it has the combined stats of 6,000,000 health and 52,240 DPS.<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
== Base Hull Stats ==<br />
----<br />
{{AIWarTableSSAvenger}} <br/><br />
<br />
== Avenger Shield Stats ==<br />
----<br />
{{AIWarTableMdlAvengerShield}}<br/><br />
== Turret Mounts ==<br />
=== Heavy Beam Cannon Module (Mk III & IV) ===<br />
{{AIWarTableMdlHeavyBeamCannonModuleAvenger}}<br/><br />
=== "'Ave It!!" Riot Control Shotgun ===<br />
----<br />
{{AIWarTableMdlRiotControlShotgunAvenger}} <br/><br />
<br />
== How to use in your fleet ==<br />
This is an AI only unit, and if you spawn it with the "Gimme Absolutely Positively Everything" cheat, it will have no shotguns, the Avenger Shield, only one MK III Heavy Beam, and the MK IV Heavy Beam.<br />
<br />
== How to counter when in the AI fleet ==<br />
Avengers are one of the MOST dangerous and powerful weapons in the AI's possession. They're armed to the teeth and they're extremely hard to kill. When an Avenger is destroyed, it explodes with the force of a Mk I Nuclear Warhead, destroying everything in the system it's in that is not immune to Nuclear Explosions, including all resources. Normally, Avengers only appear if the Avenger AI Plot is enabled and the AI's Home Command Stations die. If the AI decides to deploy an Avenger against you, there WILL be suffering.<br />
<br />
However, Avengers can also appear in other circumstances. Enraging the AI to the point it goes berserk is the best way to encounter an Avenger (usually several at once). An example would be hacking the AI to the point the Hacking Points go very deeply into the negative, like -100,000. It can be easily done by hacking several Data Design Backups at once. The AI will become so angry it will throw over a hundred Avengers at you.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, the aftermath of an Avenger's assault (or several) should make it undesirable to piss off the AI to the point that it decides to start lobbing them at the player even if the Avenger plot is off.<br />
<br />
If you encounter one of these, they are not immune to the Spire Gravity Ripper's shots, which will greatly slow them down. Weapons that deal Artillery Damage like the Artillery Golem and the Orbital Mass Driver will also severely damage it.<br />
<br />
{{AIWarShips}}<br />
{{AIWarRefNav}}</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Pre-And-Post_Launch_Polish&diff=37506AI War 2:Pre-And-Post Launch Polish2019-12-31T00:29:40Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Bugfixes */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
The game is solid at this point and something we're really proud of and that players are having fun with. But inevitably, the more people we have playing it, the more things get brought to our attention to refine and make as smooth and fun as possible. This is basically a period we've set aside for doing that sort of thing, rather than focusing on any major new content drops or other major new features.<br />
<br />
There may still be the odd major new thing, who knows -- sometimes the volunteers or modders wind up creating something and we're certainly not going to turn that down! But by the start of this phase the game was mature and really huge already, so focusing on polish seems like the way to best serve the largest group of people.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.026 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* Add the "Extreme" category of Quickstarts, with 2 default, 1 nearly default, and 2 bonus scenarios.<br />
** Thanks to CyberKun for suggesting the category.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers will now be automatically targeted by units again, but are set to a low priority.<br />
** They still seem to like shooting these first however, if they happen to be in the way.<br />
** This lets factions destroy these again rather than being shot to bits, ignoring them.<br />
** Feedback is appreciated - this is a fairly opinion heavy thing.<br />
*** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Updated the "Various Weapons" fleet name styling with DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY's latest changes.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Orbital Mass Driver reload time 9s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Hack Ion Cannon and Mass Driver now takes 2 seconds, rather than 15.<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers that the player either hacked or bought now die to remains.<br />
<br />
* Replaced Military Command Stations engine stun with paralysis.<br />
** Engine Stun on this thing could be fairly exploitable, allowing it to hold off incredible amounts of enemy strength.<br />
** However, that was only possible if the enemy could be slowed at all. If they couldn't, it tended to fall relatively easily.<br />
** Swapping it to paralysis should let it not be as strong in the old ideal case, but also improves it in the worst possible case.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian damage 4,000 -> 8,000, shots per salvo 6 -> 3.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of Tesla weapons very slightly (10% ish?) and bumped up the splash size by 15% ish.<br />
** What this means is they effectively act more or less the same, except will not waste their initial shots on the first singular ship to come into range, and will tend to hit more beyond.<br />
** This was split between both the range and splash size to avoid making the visual effect too much larger. Shouldn't have much impact on gameplay, however.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post now has the fortified effect on it.<br />
<br />
* Hydra heads and the like cost no energy.<br />
** This was the cause of mysterious brownouts.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Reworked the way that wave compositions are filled to be more efficient and ensure that absolutely as much of the budget is spent of a wave as possible.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for discovering that this was not happening.<br />
<br />
* In the normal non-stealth-planet themes, the stealth guard posts are now 1/50th as likely to appear as before. There were vastly too many of these showing up in the galaxy prior to now.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guardian damage 2,500 -> 5,000, now has the same durability as the other Dires.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range slightly of MLRS, Concussion and Nucleophilic Guard Posts.<br />
** The main contributors to the "small world problem".<br />
<br />
==== AI Great-Turrets ====<br />
<br />
* All of the AI turrets were already different from the player turrets in that they generally have half the range of the player counterparts. Now we're taking it even further.<br />
** Mainly because turrets can't stack, and thus will grind the game to a halt if the AI builds full caps of them at the sort of strength and costs that we had them at previously, we've condensed them to being essentially like stacks-in-one right from the start.<br />
** All of the AI turrets are called Great-Turrets instead of just turrets, and they have 5x the cost and firepower and health that the player versions do (while still having half the range).<br />
** This makes them truly terrifying even in small numbers, but it's something that is actually slightly in your favor compared to what it was when they were separate since they had more shots and thus were less likely to overkill your ships (just your framerate).<br />
** This shouldn't really affect existing games too much, because the AIs barely used turrets before -- mostly -- at least compared to what they do now.<br />
<br />
* For any games older than 1.026, it will now remove 4/5ths of the turrets from AI planets, since AI turrets are now a lot stronger and more condensed being great-turrets.<br />
<br />
==== Attack Ranges And The Small World Problem ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new galaxy option to the balance section: "All Ship Attack Ranges"<br />
** Lets you adjust the effective range of all of the ships in the galaxy -- yours and enemies. Does not affect 'infinite' sniper ranges, naturally. Also does impact tractor beams. The default is 0.8x in order to avoid the 'small world' problem where all the enemies are fighting you at once on a planet.<br />
** This does make it so that you need to be slightly more strategic with placements of your own turrets, of course. Your turrets naturally have 2x the range of their AI great-turret counterparts, though.<br />
** If you want to crank this as low as 0.1x (bad idea) you can, or you can crank it all the way up to 1.3x (also probably not the best thing).<br />
** Chris notes: This is a softer nerf than we originally thought of, just to play it safe for now. But if people are interested in trying smaller values, you now can.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Lance weapon of all variants (plus Laser Pulse weapon) 12,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Triple Lance variant damage 4,000 -> 1,800, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Other variants Lance damage 6,000 -> 2,650, now hits 15 targets instead of 10.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse damage 4,500 -> 3,500.<br />
<br />
==== AI Reinforcement Budget Caps And So Much More ====<br />
<br />
* The five "balance_initial_ai_defenses" xml entries in our central constants have been completely removed, and equivalents are now on the actual AI types instead.<br />
** This lets us completely balance the AI defenses around AI types if we ever want to tune that.<br />
** These are also per-reinforcement-point now, rather than per-planet, and they are also directly in AI cost units rather than "caps" which have to be converted to those units by a mysterious multiplier.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that we calculate what the defensive budget cap at a planet is has been rewritten from scratch. It was giving absurdly high numbers previously, such as 443 strength for the AI home planet's cap at the START of a game. That was just way too much for the start to be sitting at, cap-wise.<br />
** Now things are balanced completely around the number of reinforcement points, like the original game was, so if you go in and neuter a planet it will absolutely cripple their ability to reinforce. More power to you, the player! Yay!<br />
** The overall caps are also far lower than they ever were in the past, this is worth stressing before you read the next two bits.<br />
** But there remains a very tiny (laughably small, really) percentage bonus that the AI gets as the AIP rises. Eh.<br />
** There's also a NEW fairly small percentage bonus based on time spent in the campaign. The way it works out is a 48% increase in budget after TEN HOURS of playing at difficulty TEN. After 10 hours at difficulty 7, it's a much more modest 12% increase. This gives you some time pressure, but it's really nothing major and is still less than the AI could theoretically start out with prior to now. And with your new ability to absolutely cripple the AI by neutering guard posts at no AIP cost... we may need to make some of these multipliers higher, who knows. But probably now, we mainly have other plans.<br />
<br />
* Special Forces Ninja hideouts no longer count as reinforcement points. That was old AIWC-style thinking. Now it's just guard posts and the command station itself.<br />
<br />
* We've been experimentally tuning the numbers a bunch on these, too.<br />
<br />
* planet_dire_guardian_count has been changed to planet_dire_guardian_percentage.<br />
** This lets us be a little more flexible with the marks of planets getting percentages of dire guardians rather than explicit numbers,<br />
** The AI homeworlds are always full-dire, still.<br />
<br />
* The way that guardians are spawned on initial planet creation, and/or on reconquest, is now completely different and respects the budgets and budget caps.<br />
** Previously it was adding guardians kinda-sorta twice, and thus often making the really high-mark planets absurdly overpowered in general but in particular on AI types like Royal.<br />
** Not only was this logic doing the above, but it also was interpreting the budget caps entirely incorrectly, thus more or less ignoring them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section: Write AI Budget Info In Planet Tooltips<br />
** If something seems off with the planet strengths and reinforcements, then this is a way to see what is going on under the hood.<br />
<br />
* Improved the performance of how the game calculates tachyon, tractor, and gravity sources in the rollups. It's now substantially more precalculated than before, no longer having to iterate over any systems.<br />
** There's a small benefit to the strength counting code in this, too.<br />
** And actually, map generation in general seems notably faster with these changes in, despite the below change.<br />
<br />
* The GetAIToPurchaseCostPresentForBudgetType() method is now far slower, but much more accurate (not lumping strikecraft and guardians together, for instance) and always up to the instant accurrate (not having to wait for the strength counting code to run).<br />
** This should solve several issues with the budgets on reinforcements being ignored or improperly overly strict, as the case may be.<br />
<br />
* Found a place where it was seeding extra guardians per guard post, and took that out.<br />
<br />
* During reconquest seeding, the AI no longer gets a bunch of guardians to go with every guard post.<br />
** Guard posts in general are not expected to be tied to guardians, and guardians will eventually be vastly more powerful than they are now.<br />
** This was causing some planets, like AI homeworlds, to get VASTLY more guardians than they should, blowing way past their budget for guardians.<br />
<br />
* The way that AI reinforcement budgets are calculated is no longer based around the number of reinforcement points, but instead just a flat amount for the planet, which gets reduced (severely) by any lost reinforcement points.<br />
** Thus no matter how many reinforcement points there are, you don't have to suddenly worry about super high budgets on the AI planet, or strange spikes in budgets just because there are more guard posts.<br />
** Actually what this means, though, is two things: firstly, each reinforcement point is weaker on a planet with many of them (due to same number of units spread around more); but secondly, destroying a reinforcement point on a planet with fewer of them will do more (due to it reducing the cap of the planet by a larger percentage).<br />
<br />
* There is a new ignore_guardian_restrictions_in_waves that we use on the royal AI type, which lets it use its full capacity in sending waves of guardians at you.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for turrets and non-turret defenses, those will no longer increase based on the mark level of the planet or the fact that the planet is an AI homeworld.<br />
** This keeps them from having way too many of these things on high levels and next to nothing on lower ones.<br />
<br />
* When creating the budget for guardians, it's no longer doubled for the AI homeworlds.<br />
** This keeps THOSE from becoming so absurdly high.<br />
<br />
* There is a new multiplier_for_starting_guardian_budget_on_reconquest on AI types which makes it so that there CAN be some guardians added back onto planets, per-AI-type, during a reconquest of that planet.<br />
** For most AIs this will just be 0.015, which is an eighth of an eighth (the significance of that will be relevant in a bit).<br />
** This lets the AIs MAYBE get some of their guardians back right as they capture a planet, partialiarly moreso later in the campaign, but often it will be too paltry for them to get anything.<br />
** For the Royal AI, it is set to 0.001 since it has such a higher budget of guardians in general. This may mean they practically get nothing, ever, in those circumstances; but better than too much and we can always tune later.<br />
<br />
* There are then other new multipliers on AI types: multiplier_for_game_starting_guardians_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_turrets_from_total_budget, multiplier_for_game_starting_non_turret_defenses_from_total_budget, and multiplier_for_game_starting_strikecraft_from_total_budget.<br />
** These all affect how much of the AI's budget for each planet they start with when the game is at the very zeroth second still in mapgen.<br />
** In the past, we always gave -- for some reason -- fully HALF of the budget cap to each planet, which did not give much room for them to expand and get really huge if you ignore them for too long. ;) Most any planet could do would be to double in power, aside from things like the Hunter or other third parties coming in and making it temporarily stronger.<br />
** Now we've got this set to 0.125, which is an eighth of the full budget or a quarter of what the old starting strength was. This lets us multiply the final budget by 4x to still have the same starting strength (and we have done that), but now the starting strength can get 8x stronger if you leave them alone for THAT long. And that's before you get into the (very small, as noted in prior notes) increases based on time elapsed and AIP. <br />
** So the AI has more growth potential, BUT this is measured against the fact that your neutering of them is incredibly powerful.<br />
*** If they had 4 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/5th of whatever its max would have been.<br />
*** If they had 10 guard posts and a command station, and you kill the guard posts for 0 AIP cost, you'll reduce their max cap to 1/11th of whatever its max would have been. Wowzers.<br />
*** In both cases this keeps you from neutering things to be TOO absolutely weak, but also gives an incentive for popping guard posts when you can that are not related to your main objectives but might threaten you in the future. Aka a lot like the first game.<br />
<br />
* Added the fields always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point and always_is_ai_non_turret_defense_spawn_point, both bools, to game entities (ships only).<br />
** This lets us override the logic that says "only primary keys of modulus 6 get turrets around them" and things of that nature.<br />
** This is now used for the AI overlord, to always let it be surrounded by both types of things (phase 1 only).<br />
** Note that these fields only work for ships that are already a spawn point (mainly guard posts and command stations).<br />
<br />
* The Turtle AI type now has 4x the turret budget of other AI types.<br />
** Fortress Baron has 3x the turret budget.<br />
** Peacemaker has 2x the turret budget.<br />
** These heavier-turret variants are certainly interesting to run into and give the game a very different feel. These are the more defensive-oriented AIs, after all.<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_reinforcement_location bool field. This lets us make things other than command stations and guard posts into reinforcement points.<br />
** Now that reinforcement points don't actually cause the AI to get more budget, but rather just have it spread out more, it's far more interesting to have this.<br />
** Plus it makes it so you can do even harder neutering to certain planets, since the total number of reinforcement points will be higher by definition, which is good for you as a player.<br />
** But it also makes it so that isolated units with this flag on it will now be more protected than before, possibly with turrets around them, which is in itself quite interesting.<br />
** BUT that still means that forces are being spread more thin around the planet, potentially, so there are pros and cons to you strategically in general with this.<br />
** AI structures that thus now act as reinforcement points:<br />
*** Warden Fleet Base (again -- back to the same as the prior version that was last public anyway).<br />
*** Data Center<br />
*** Fortified Data Center<br />
*** Major Data Center<br />
*** Plasma Eye<br />
*** Ion Eye<br />
*** Troop Accelerator<br />
*** AI Fortress<br />
*** Raid Engine<br />
*** Alarm Post<br />
*** Magnifier<br />
*** Instigator Base<br />
*** Astro Train Depot<br />
*** Risk Analyzer<br />
*** All of those new ones above also now have always_is_ai_turret_spawn_point="true" on them. Yet more texture in the planets, as well as giving them more inherent defenses.<br />
<br />
* Guardians, as well as anything marked as a reinforcement location, can no longer be transported or put inside a guard post.<br />
** Older savegames may have some of them in there.<br />
** This causes FAR more guardians to be out and patrolling around now than were before. Some of them were just sitting inside guard posts in a very boring fashion before, rather than doing their patrol thing from what we can tell.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for planets on the galaxy map now show you how many reinforcement points the AI has there out of how many total there have ever been there if it's an AI planet.<br />
<br />
* Added modulus_for_turrets_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 6) and modulus_for_non_turret_defenses_at_reinforcement_location_lower_is_more_frequent (default 3) as fields to the AI type. Previously these values were hardcoded in, but now they can be changed for various AI types. This will make turrets appear around more structures for those AI types, or non-turret-defenses do the same.<br />
** Turtle now uses 1 and 2 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Fortress Baron now uses 2 and 3 instead of 6 and 3.<br />
** Peace Maker now uses 2 and 3 instead of 3 and 3.<br />
** This makes it so that their turrets are more spread out on their planets rather than being clumped in super-crazy places on just some locations.<br />
<br />
* Added a variety of new levers that determine now how budgets are distributed intra faction or inter faction, nor what the caps or starting amounts are... but instead affect how bonuses (or penalties) work to various AI types. These can be regular floating point numbers with three decimal points of precision (0.001)<br />
** multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement, multiplier_for_budget_wave, multiplier_for_budget_cpa, multiplier_for_budget_warden_fleet, multiplier_for_budget_reconquest, multiplier_for_budget_hunter_fleet.<br />
** These don't have any effect on other parts of these AIs -- there are other mechanisms for choosing how much budget goes where, but this lets us set general scales on a per-AI basis on certain types of budget. This is pretty importance for us to be able to balance things reasonably so that there are things like appropriate growth rates of AI budget without you feeling like it starts out with too much, or has too low of a final cap, etc.<br />
** Most of these are just set to 1 for now, but multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 2 for almost all AIs. multiplier_for_budget_wave is 2.2 for the Vicious Raider, and multiplier_for_budget_reinforcement is 4 on the Turtle.<br />
** We'll undoubtably balance things more using this in the future, but for now this is a nice new lever for us to be able to use to give AIs their own unique characters as well as simply making them not have anemic defenses 30 minutes in even if their defenses 1 second in are smaller now.<br />
<br />
==== Completely Revised Way Of Seeding Guard Posts and Command Stations ====<br />
<br />
* There's a new AIGuardPostAndCommandPlacer set of xml data that lets us define a lot of different ways that guard posts and command stations can be arranged on planets beyond what has been the basic prior to now (one one each metal generation point).<br />
** These can be varied by mark level ranges of planets, and have different sets for the homeworlds of AIs. They can easily be modded in or added to like map types or whatnot.<br />
<br />
* The way that human homeworlds have their home command station seeded is now a bit more randomized than before, but also does a better job of keeping itself away from wormholes.<br />
** This should make your starts slightly less predictable.<br />
<br />
* The AI Homeworld was set to always put its command station dead center. That's no longer the case. This will make some games easier, others harder, and is fine with Chris.<br />
<br />
* Over the years, the concept of what a "guard post" is has changed quite a lot. Originally in the first AI War, they were literally just a gathering point for other ships. Then in 4.0+ of that game we started making them scary weapons in their own right.<br />
** This sequel has always had the armed variant, but that causes some problems in balance with them sometimes overshadowing the actual ships that are at their location, and in many cases making it impossible for you to fight just a single guard post or two at a time with the way that their weapon ranges were so large that they could pick you off.<br />
** Thus we've hybridized the old and new concepts, making a new "Unarmed Guard Post" type (and Ghost and Swarmer variants), and then adding in a chance per post for it to be armed versus not armed now.<br />
** We've split it out so that normal and home AI planets each have their own chance, per AI type: chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_normal_planet and chance_out_of_100_for_armed_guard_post_home_planet.<br />
** Bear in mind that, prior to this build, it was always 100 for each one, essentially.<br />
** Now for most AIs it is 15 and 60, turtle is 60 and 90, Fortress Baron 50 and 80, Peace Maker 30 and 60.<br />
** Please note that these are not the pure percentages of guard posts on a planet that will be armed: rather, at each guard post it essentially rolls a 100-sided die and if the number is lower than what is stated there, it will be armed.<br />
*** So you'll see all sorts of funky distributions, ranging from completely unarmed guard post planets to completely armed ones.<br />
** This DOES make things easier for the player, but mainly it gives other units a chance to shine and makes the armed guard posts more interesting in that they are more rare.<br />
*** Ideally we'll be able to make guardians scarier in their stead, but one thing at a time right now. This release has a lot of changes already!<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the "BUG: Ship is on burningAndDying list but has not exploded" message to instead just mark the ship as exploded, as there are too many ways to get to that state.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in DetachVisObjectFromSim on ship squads.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in StartReconquestDefenseSeeding for AIs types that do not use non-dire guardians for some reason.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception that could happen in BattlefieldVisualSingleton.HandleSquadAndShipUpdates, and made it so that it self-repairs when it can or self-reports when it can't. Either way it continues to draw things and update them properly rather than having the display get all strange if such an exception occurs.<br />
** Thanks to Daniexpert for the report.<br />
<br />
* Improved the "find a safe space to be" code for ships so that they are now more likely to find a CLOSE space to be.<br />
<br />
* For guard posts in particular, it does an extra good job of trying to keep it close to the intended point (whatever that is in the given schema).<br />
<br />
* Finally fixed a really annoying bug wherein command stations that got shot to remains and then rebuilt did not count properly (thus not letting anything else be built or rebuilt at their planet) until you saved and loaded the game.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, ArnaudB, Asteroid, KDR_11k, Puffin, Sigma7, Ryulong, Core, and GrimerX for reporting and helping to find it.<br />
** Special thanks to Ryulong for the recent savegame that let us reliably reproduce this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where some achievements relating to killing specific AIs was not triggering because it was trying to match the internal name to the display name. Now it checks both display name and internal name to be doubly sure.<br />
** This makes Full Ensemble in particular now properly trigger when you beat them.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If you have existing saves where you already beat the game, loading those savegames will now trigger the achievements for you that you properly earned (just load them, unpause, and wait at least 2 seconds).<br />
** It's much better this way, versus having to dig up a savegame from right before you won, etc, if you're going back to get achievements that you earned but didn't log because you were offline, or there was a bug, or whatever factor.<br />
<br />
==== Fixes For XML Modding ====<br />
<br />
Example tiny mods and discussion are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22433<br />
<br />
* Several different things were not staying properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them:<br />
** exp_to_grant_on_death<br />
** watch_planets_at_X_hops<br />
** tags (ow this would cause many problems)<br />
** capturable_seed_weight (again very problematic)<br />
** capturable_max_per_galaxy<br />
** capturable_can_seed_at_all<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of things that would complain they could not be found properly on ships when using an is_partial_record="true" to mod them (but in reality these were carrying over fine from the base version being modded):<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_sfx<br />
** ship_or_structure_explosion_if_on_other_planet_sfx<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo and ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If outgoing_damage_modifier or incoming_damage_modifier entries are duplicated in the list of rows for a system or entity (respectively), whether that be through mods or just in the original definition, it now only uses the last-to-apply version. This last-to-apply one is always going to be a mod version if there is a mod version.<br />
** This makes it so that you can't have two different modifiers on the same weapon that both are based off of the hull health of a ship, for example, but I don't think we're doing that anywhere and it would be messy in the UI if we were, anyway.<br />
** This then fixes the issue with various weapon bonuses and the like duplicating themselves when you are using an is_partial_record entry to mod a weapon.<br />
** It's worth noting at this point that xml modding is inherently slightly fraught in terms of minor bugs or oversights like this which can have major repercussions. Please just let us know on a case by case basis what you find, ideally with the xml you're using and a savegame that shows the wrong behavior, and we can likely fix it up pretty fast.<br />
** Thanks to ArnaudB for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Both ai_ship_group_membership and fleet_membership now properly adjust the existing membership when there is a duplicate entry entered for them (from a mod or whatever else) linking a given ship type to a given template or group. It now adjusts the weight and so on in the template or group, rather than adding a duplicate entry.<br />
** Note that if you change the category for a template, it will assume you mean it to be a duplicate and will add that accordingly. There really should never be any valid reason to mod the category of a ship, but if you must then you can just 0 out the min and max of the old one maybe?<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting something next to this, although not exactly this.<br />
<br />
* Creating a mod to replace or redefine parts of the fleet design templates (like the starting fleets) now works properly rather than creating duplicate entries or extra counts or both.<br />
** For an example of a mod that works with this new function, the raw xml bits are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22136<br />
** Note that if you choose to change the category of ships from HERE, that will work fine. You just can't change categories of fleet template items from within the game entity side.<br />
** Also please note that this change now prevents you from having duplicate lines of the exact same type of ship in a starting fleet. So something with two lines of fusion bombers would not work anymore, for instance, even with no mods in play, and would just take the count of the last fusion bomber entry and use that.<br />
*** This doesn't stop you from using multiple duplicate ship lines in-game of course, but it does stop it in the starting fleet designs, none of which (that are still active) were using that function anyhow.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.025 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released December 24th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed two (harmless) error messages that would show up on ship tooltips on the galaxy map view since the prior build. This was just some of our debugging code for detecting wrong ship info, but it only applies in planetary view.<br />
** Thanks to Chthon, GrimerX, NoMoreBlender, and Admiral for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where DoOnDestructionLogic() was being called when just part of a stack died, which led to some strange things happening. It could cause HasDoneOnDeathSinceLastClaimed to be true when it should not have been, and somehow or other it seemed to be causing hydra heads to reanimate themselves. Or at least it was contributing to that.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If a stack is self-attritioning by some rate (say, 2%), it now multiplies that amount by the number of ships in the stack, maximum 20 (so 2% would lead to 40% in a stack of 20 or more).<br />
** This does mean that stacks of 21 and up still attrition slower than their non-stacked peers, but in general stacks are no longer so resistant to attrition.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One and Puffin for figuring out that hydra heads and various types of drones were problematic in the extreme without this.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.024 After Death ==<br />
(Released December 23rd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* On any of the debug menu things that mark the game as being in "cheat" mode, it now shows a "cheat: whatever the cheat was" message. This way you know if you activated cheat mode, which disables achievements later in that same campaign.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for reporting a mysterious case where he seemed to have cheated but never opened the debug menu. If some other function is using one of the cheat methods (we didn't find any in a code review), then this would also reveal that for us.<br />
<br />
=== Balance ===<br />
<br />
* Majorly reworked how the ondeath logic triggers for ships that die off the top of a stack without killing the entire stack. This has the following implications:<br />
** For each thing in a stack that dies that would spawn something, it now will spawn something. Previously it would only spawn it when the whole stack dies.<br />
*** So this will be a major buff to hydras, for instance, as they will create vastly more hydra heads than before if they are stacked.<br />
** For each thing in a stack that would be zombified, it now creates zombies.<br />
*** So this is a major buff to the botnet golem and nanocaust, as if they kill something like 20 ships out of a stack of 80, they'll now get a stack of 20 zombies rather than nothing. Previously they only got something when the whole stack died.<br />
*** On the OTHER hand, it now makes sure that you have inflicted enough "zombification or nanocaustation damage" to afford each stacked item. So before if you killed a full stack of 15 ships with zombification and had enough zombification damage to afford 1, you got all 15. Now you would just get 1. The reality is that you've probably dealt 15 worth of damage if you killed 15 ships, but it's possible that you only dealt, say, 12 ships' worth. In that case you'd get 12 ships out of the stack of 15 you killed, not 15, and that's not a bug.<br />
** Metabolism works the same as zombification and nanocaustation now do, also, with all the above caveats and notes.<br />
** The game now properly tracks the number of total ships killed with the stacked ships counting as any other ship would (since they could be separate or in a stack, they are the same).<br />
*** This does mean that counterattacks are going to count up much faster now, probably, because all of that would previously only count however many ships were in the final death of a ship. For instance, if the AI had a stack of 80 ships, and you killed 20, 20, 20, and then 20 ships in bursts like that... you'd get 0, 0, 0, and then 20 worth of counterattack points applied. Now it will give you the proper 20, 20, 20, 20. So depending on the size of stacks at AI planets and how much damage your ships were inflicting to entire stacks this might be a big difference or no difference at all. The inconsistency was in past versions, not this one, though.<br />
*** This also all applies to EXP gains for your ships, which means that things like your botnet golem or other golems will level up way faster for what that's worth. Fleets in general will.<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Doubled the EXP amount required for each level, due to the above.<br />
** This definitely needs more data.<br />
<br />
* Also decreased the AIs counter-attack multiplier a bit for each Difficulty due to the above.<br />
** This also needs more data.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the warning time of waves...a lot.<br />
** From old notes the default was apparently meant to be somewhat like Classics warning of around 3 minutes, but was instead notably higher.<br />
** This drastically reduces the time you have to respond to an incoming wave. This feels a little extreme, but in testing it was still fairly easy to rally Fleets in time. One time even a Citadel managed to move 5 hops and arrive just before the wave hit.<br />
<br />
* Removed the temporary speed boost Transports got when entering a planet.<br />
** Meant you could seriously zip around everywhere extremely quickly, responding to any threat in your territory with the majority of your force before it could really do anything.<br />
** Combined with the much lower wave warnings, the ability to go all in on offense yet defend with your mobile fleets should be notably reduced.<br />
<br />
* If the Warden Fleet is at maximum capacity, the excess budget is given to Reinforcements, rather than Waves.<br />
** This was probably the cause of numerous complaints of "out of nowhere enormous waves".<br />
** It was also the cause of the amusing scenario where the Special Forces Master would donate so much to Waves that it would out-wave Tsunami (the wave focused AI type).<br />
** Reinforcements was chosen as the destination budget, as it makes some sense for a defensive budget to be donated to another one, rather than dumped into offense.<br />
** You could suppose it be given to something like CPA or Hunter, but that can feel like a penalty for avoiding the Warden rather than trying to blow it up all the time.<br />
<br />
* Increased effect of Instigators on higher difficulties.<br />
<br />
* Doubled the damage of Fortified Tesla Turrets.<br />
<br />
==== Outguard Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Outguard hacking response adjusted to be notably easier, but should still require a full fleet and a large investment of metal for rebuilding to succeed.<br />
** Due to its existing AIP cost, this should be fine? Moderate payment and large military investment should be enough.<br />
** Difficult to balance for multiple difficulties, but this change made it pretty simple on 5, somewhat difficult on 7 (50, 110, 360 AIP tested), and juuuust possible on Democracy's save of 500aip, difficulty 9.<br />
** Outguard Tertiary response wave removed.<br />
** Outguard response wave strength stops scaling up after 75 seconds.<br />
** Outguard final response buffed by 50%.<br />
*** Done in response to just how painful the hack felt on higher difficulties and higher AIP, they will now stop scaling up halfway through their base duration.<br />
*** Tertiary waves were removed as well due to them being a problematic burst of units that, if allowed to trigger again due to extended timers, vastly messed with the hack's difficulty.<br />
*** To make up for this, the number of units spit out at the end of the hack has been buffed.<br />
** Huge thanks to DEMOCRACY? DEMOCRACY! for his save that allowed in-depth testing.<br />
<br />
* Outguard Group Buffs<br />
** Prufrock's Partisans now spawns Decoy Drones, and comes with Decoy Drone spawning carriers.<br />
** Spire Archivist Beam and Shield base count increased by 100%. (AIP Scaling unchanged.)<br />
** Hydran Hobbyist now spawns with a few of its lesser parts which increase in count with AIP.<br />
** Democratic Demolitionists turret strength increased by ~33%.<br />
** Groups that previous lacked any sort of scaling should feel somewhat better over the course of the game, Spire Archivist now feels as impactful as its reduced duration implies, and Demo Demo should be more potent to make up for its pitiful range.<br />
<br />
* Also included is a small change to Outguard code that has it ignore drones for the purpose of unit processing. Drones die seconds after their carrier does, so there is no reason to keep track of them.<br />
<br />
* War Harvesters and War Siegers now have a 10 minute cooldown between uses, and always give you a static count of 5 ships.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixes a few Ghost Wormhole Sentinels appearing in the normal group.<br />
<br />
* Possible fix to a problem with getting drones back into their source.<br />
** It was suspected that this might be a race condition, but from code analysis it seems that the only things that increment this are on the same thread. We've renamed some methods to be clear what thread they need to happen on or what thread they do happen on, and made sure that nothing is calling something from a thread that can be a race condition.<br />
** If this doesn't work, then there are a couple of other things we can do, such as using a lock on the counter or changing it to a list structure or similar. The fact that this never happens with transported units but only drone units makes some sense given that they are completely different code paths and data structure types, but it's not clear why the drones were having a problem.<br />
** The most likely thing with the drones having a problem is what we fixed in this build, which is that we were incrementing their value AFTER despawning them, and that may have been causing some problems. If that's not it (this is hard enough to reproduce that we can't be sure), then we'll take more extreme measures.<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting.<br />
<br />
* One other change has been made to drones being put back into their parent. Essentially it was checking the number of stored drones against the effective squad cap... which you would think would be okay, but might have been missing some multipliers, we're not sure. At any rate, making a change to that we now just go ahead and increment the number means that for a frame or two there is a slight chance (somehow?) that there are too many drones stored in a drone carrier, but the game already checks for that and fixes drone overages, so it's probably safer to trust to that for the moment.<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for the report.<br />
<br />
* When hovering over a ship, it now shows an error if the entity doesn't actually properly belong to the fleet membership it thinks it is in.<br />
** This is a cheap check for just the ship that we're actually hovering over, and should help us to find those "phantom ships" that are showing up at times. Or at least some info about them.<br />
<br />
* If you're hovering over an entity that considers itself dead for some reason but it is still there (invisibly or not) for you to hover over, it now will show that in the tooltip for that entity when hover over it. This should give us a lot of insight into the "phantom ships" or "stuck ships" problem that people were running into in long games or at 10x speed.<br />
<br />
* If you're hovering over an entity that is on a different planet than the one you are viewing -- which should be impossible to do -- then it now shows as an error in the tooltip. This actually does happen with stuck ships, at least.<br />
<br />
* If there are visual lines emanating from a ship and you have debugging turned on for the tooltips, it now says how many lines are coming out of the entity.<br />
<br />
* Lots of debugging has verified that in some cases it was possible to have a stale gimbal for an entity that was no longer related to the entity at all.<br />
** This is something that was more likely at 10x speed, but potentially could happen at slower speeds as well.<br />
<br />
* Our in-game time-based pools now use realtime only, and never are based around the speed of the game simulation. This keeps things from churning a bunch in an inappropriate way when the simulation is running at something like 10x speed.<br />
** This in turn prevents things like ships being reallocated out of the pool buffers before it has a proper amount of time for teardown. It doesn't fully solve the "phantom ships and lines" problem, but it certainly cleans it up a bit and makes it able to self-correct if needed (a 15-second window is an eternity for error-correction in computer terms; we really only need a few hundred ms at most).<br />
<br />
* In the end, the solution to the "stuck ships" and the "phantom lines" was a self-repair situation, paired with the time-based pools creating enough of a window for self-repair to happen.<br />
** If we had the game running a bit slower (based on heavy debug logging, for instance), then this problem would disappear in the first place. It's some sort of crazy order of operations situation that is probably related to ships visually exploding even when the entire stack is not yet dead. Though it may predate that; honestly it's super hard to tell.<br />
** At any rate, these ships all wind up in a consistent style of state that we can detect very cheaply on the CPU within a few ms of them being "dead and invisible," and the lines were associated with that. So we now just detect those states and have those objects clean themselves up. It's a safety valve we'd want to have anyway, just in case mistakes are in place elsewhere in the code.<br />
** Probably most people didn't run into this, except with a few rare cases where their processor was very very fast, or where they were running at something like 10x speed. Those sorts of circumstances brought it out, but on 1x speed on a normal processor it was likely to almost never -- if never at all -- happen. Given fast-forwarding is a pretty key part of the game (Chris spends most of his time on 4x speed anyway), this was important to get resolved.<br />
** Thanks to Phenomphear, BadgerBadger, Chthon, donblas, ArnaudB, Ranakastrasz, Astilious, and Daniexpert for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that was causing all xml mods to throw a "does not have data for the following rows, which were referenced somewhere" error when trying to load them. This is new in the last few versions since we reworked how mod loading worked.<br />
** As part of this, then added a new ExampleMod2 mod that adds a useless galaxy map options setting under a category called My Mod. It is disabled at present, but removing the ModIsDisabled.txt folder from its location will fix that.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in a code change to make absolutely sure that sound clips never loop when they play back. This probably won't really fix the issue, but it's worth a shot. Apparently astro train and instigator base warnings play multiple times in succession, sometimes delayed. This may be due to multiple of them showing up at once, or some other esoteric issue. A cruise through the code doesn't reveal anything obviously wrong, so we'll ideally need a savegame or some other mechanism to let us trigger the effect after we load it and thus chase it down.<br />
** Thanks to GrimerX for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exception that could occur during tooltip generation when the number of factories on a planet changed at just the wrong time and you were hovering over them.<br />
** Thanks to bluthru for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.023 Cloaking Variagation ==<br />
(Released December 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where hovering over an AI unit would still tell you the AI type even if you requested a random ai type<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting<br />
<br />
* Continued improvements to the FRD/overkill detection code<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where save games were still showing the name of the AI type even if the player had picked "Random". Save games will now correctly show "random"<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where shortly after game load macrophages might spontaneously Enrage and attack you<br />
<br />
=== Further Cloaking Adjustments ===<br />
<br />
* Cloaked units now recover all their cloaking points once they have been out of combat for a while<br />
** A number of people have complained about this over the years, most recently Mayheim on steam<br />
<br />
* balance_current_cloaking_percent_loss_from_firing, which was previously 0.2 (so allowing 5 shots from every ship) has been removed from being a global variable.<br />
** cloaking_percent_loss_from_firing is now a field on entity systems, and it defaults to 1 on every ship weapon unless they define it to be something else.<br />
** This prevents some exploits that we found in our own internal testing in the new version with decloaking-regen being possible while still cloaked, but also lets us make allowances for extra-stealthy units that can fire while cloaked like before, or even more than before.<br />
<br />
* All of the cloaking ships now lose their cloaking in one shot (as opposed to the 5 it used to take) except for the following ones:<br />
** Penumbra Echo Drone take 10 shots now.<br />
** Eyebots take 2 shots now.<br />
** Stealth Guardians still take 5 shots.<br />
** All of the guard posts now take 10 shots (mainly this means if they are the Ghost versions of themselves, for the Ghost AI).<br />
*** Ditto for the dire guard posts, except those now take 20 shots, holy cow.<br />
** Mugger Frigate takes 2 shots.<br />
** Raid Frigate now takes 10 shots, wow. Maybe overpowered.<br />
** Warbird Frigates still take 5 shots.<br />
** All of the turrets now take 10 shots (mainly this means if they are the Ghost versions of themselves, for the Ghost AI).<br />
*** The one exception is the Ambush Turret, which is always cloaked for everyone and is now much better at firing off shots before it reveals itself.<br />
** All of the minefields now take 20 before they are revealed, which means that to reveal them you really need to have decloaking along. This feels sooo much more appropriate for the mines.<br />
** This will probably need more balance over time -- in fact it almost defintiely will -- but this provides us with a starting point where the obviously OP strategies aren't going to work with the new cloaking changes, and yet some cloaked units are now even more powerful than before.<br />
<br />
=== Achievements Adjustments ===<br />
<br />
* GOG Galaxy Client SDK 1.139.2 (October 29, 2019 11:58) has been integrated.<br />
** This does not support linux, it's worth noting. This is what we'll be using for networking on the GOG side, and for achievements on the GOG side. <br />
** The lack of linux support is why we still will have to use Forge Networking for people who want to have LAN play on non-Steam copies of the game that are running linux.<br />
<br />
* When there is an error in finding an achievement on Steam, it now shows that in the log and in the chat messages to the side, rather than having a big scary game-interrupting error popup.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the formatting of all the "API Keys" that we use on Steam, so that they will not be ambiguous between unicode encodings and also so that they can be imported to GOG validly. Turns out their restrictions on formatting were a lot more severe.<br />
** For purposes of anyone creating achievements in our xml, the rules we're going by are: all caps, no diacritic marks or accents, no punctuation, no spaces, underscores where spaces would be, keep it to maybe 15 characters or less -- that last one is more tricky to know for sure.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the "kill a specific unit" achievements were granting when you killed ANY unit.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a nullref exception in the code for "how many of a specific unit have I killed" if the answer was zero.<br />
<br />
* Improved the performance of the per-second achievement checks for players, to not bother re-checking stuff that is already completed.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.022 Slaying The Asymptote ==<br />
(Released December 19th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when hovering a command station when it finished building<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== After-Victory Adjustments ===<br />
<br />
* If the player has won the game, all AI ships stop doing much. The AI will no longer get any income, send waves, etc... If you attack AI planets they will fight back, but they won't be able to do much of anything else.<br />
** From a discussion on steam with Error, but something like this has been requested for a while in aiw2 (and also AIWC)<br />
<br />
=== Achievements Fully Up ===<br />
<br />
* All 139 achievements are now live on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/573410/achievements<br />
** Still coming soon to GOG, and the local display of them.<br />
<br />
* The following AI types are considered "Hard" category, and so we now have their achievements as silver/gold/platinum rather than bronze/silver/gold:<br />
** Zombifyier<br />
** Vicious Raider<br />
** Tsunami<br />
** Special Forces Master<br />
<br />
* The following AI types are considered "Brutal" category, and so we now have their achievements as gold/gold/platinum rather than bronze/silver/gold:<br />
** Swarmer<br />
** Royal<br />
** Golemite<br />
<br />
=== Fleet Building Speed Revisions ===<br />
<br />
* First off, the prior version was very busted in the logic where we had it building slower at higher marks. Yes it built slower, but it was WAY slower -- on the order of 7x slower at mark 7, we think. Basically we had some math that was causing it to become slower and slower the closer a ship came to completion. So it would vary the slowdown based on how much the ship cost and how much was assisting it. At any rate, it caused asymptotic style delays in building ships far beyond what we ever intended.<br />
** This was met with much dislike, which we totally get. The debugging info was telling us the numbers were right, but the reality on testing more thoroughly just with a stopwatch was far different.<br />
** This bug has been fixed, but also more changes have been made to make this even more tame, as detailed below. Hopefully this is something that folks find to their liking now.<br />
<br />
* Fleets now build at Full Speed if their units are all on Friendly Planets<br />
<br />
* Marks 1-3 for fleets not on friendly planets build at full speed. Slowdown is 1.25x at mark 4, 1.5 at mark 5, 1.75 at mark 6 and 2.0 at mark 7. On the previous patch it was something like a 7x slowdown.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.018-1.021 Methodical Achievement ==<br />
(Released December 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* If your allies are off fighting without you, you don't get galaxy map information about their battles unless you are Watching the planet<br />
<br />
* Units deprioritize targets they dramatically overkill<br />
** Hopefully a slight buff to Artillery Golems and the like. Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for a bug report<br />
<br />
* Very firmly prevent exogalactic wormholes from wormhole invasions from being used to send regular waves<br />
** This isn't a great solution, but it will work for now. Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Both the campaign-world itself, and all of the factions within it, can now store "historical data" in the form of arbitrary strings, integers, and booleans that have getters/setters that take a string parameter to find them.<br />
** This lets us elegantly and simply and centrally track... whatever needs tracking. This can be used by mods, DLC stuff, the core game, achievements, and everything in between. It can be working data for the UI that needs to be serialized for whatever reason (so NumARSsHacked_ForUI could have been used in this if this had existed, for example), and so on.<br />
** The nice thing is that all of the code that can use this can absolutely be ignorant of each other, but it also allows for cross-mod reading of data if need be, without any sort of serialization problems that we might normally run into.<br />
** This also neatly solves the problem of "we need to store some data for a new achievement or whatever other purpose, but to do so would require incrementing the game version number and messing with serialization in a potentially dangerous way when there are many cooks in the kitchen." Now no version number incrementing is required, and the serialization of this sort of thing will "just work."<br />
** A word to the wise: absolutely filling this with huge amounts of data or with really long string descriptors will have an adverse effect on savegame size, so please use responsibly. ;)<br />
<br />
* All of the cheat-style helper things in the debug menu should now block achievements from being logged, although this is not tested.<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip explaining that selecting units and right-clicking on an enemy unit will make your selected units prefer to kill the unit type you clicked on<br />
** Thanks to overzot for a bug report <br />
<br />
* The game now has capabilities of noticing the steam overlay is open (though we don't do anything with that yet -- do we need to with the way focus is handled, can anyone confirm?).<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where 'Random Any' AI Difficulty could return the Tutorial difficulty<br />
** Reported by Ampersand on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a crash with Marauders<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo, Endovior, and Rigellian for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where if code tried to look for a setting by name, and that setting did not exist, it would look instead to a "null setting" value that would be of an indeterminate value.<br />
** For instance, in some cases it could set a bool null setting to true during some set operation, and then other times it would try to read that back out and get true as the response for something that should be defaulting to false because the setting only existed in (for example) DLC files that are not present.<br />
** It's possible that for missing settings that code checks for we should be more aggressive and outright throw an error, but for now it just is always doing nothing on sets or returns the system-default values per type on gets (bool=false, int/float/fint=0).<br />
** Thanks to a Badger for helping us accidentally discover this with players and a DLC-only fireteam setting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some debug logging for when it's trying to log achievements on game victory.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where some Objective Importance flags weren't being cleared when the objective was completed, leading to galaxy map clutter<br />
** Thanks for alocritani for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The number of seconds played (in game time) is now properly logged to the statistic sets.<br />
<br />
=== Methodical Pursuit Mode ===<br />
<br />
* The default targeting mode for Pursuit Mode (FRD) now does a better job of choosing targets that aren't being overkilled (so each shot can be more effective), and also de-prioritizes units that can't shoot it.<br />
* The practical upshot of this is that your units will prefer to Methodically take out a planet piece by piece, instead of spreading out and trying to hit a lot of targets simultaneously. This is particularly valuable when attacking AI planets with lots of Guard Posts with ranges that don't support each other.<br />
** This new approach will make your forces win some close battles they were losing before when attacking the AI, but also will make them win a fight more slowly if you have a significant advantage. I think the "winning close battles" should be the default <br />
** The player, minor factions and AI difficulty >= 7 have access to this.<br />
* Methodical Pursuit Mode can be disabled (for all factions) via a Galaxy Setting<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Player units start to take longer to build as their Mark increases. Not an increase in cost, just in production time.<br />
** Currently this is linked directly to their health multiplier. Mark 2 is 1.25x, so it takes 125% of normal time to build. Mark 7 is 4x, so it's 400% of normal time.<br />
** Why? Well, thanks to units not increasing their cost as they Mark up, your units get more efficient in terms of "how long it takes to build" and "how much health it has". Essentially, the "health per second" you can input into a fight increases a lot as you improve your ships.<br />
** Eventually this could lead to things like a single Military world worth of Factories, plus a Combat Factory building Mark 7 units fast enough that the "health per second" was notably greater than the Overlord Phase 2 could DPS!<br />
*** Some numbers. A single Factory would produce a Vanguard every 2 seconds. Said Vanguard at Mark 1 has 24k health, so this Factory is inputting 12k health per second into a battle.<br />
*** If that Vanguard was Mark 7, that factory would be outputting 48k health per second. Then add in the other Factories on your planets, the Combat Factories, and the Engineers in the above example with the Overlord, and you would have 384k health-per-second. This is not including shield regeneration, repairs, drones, zombification, etc.<br />
**** This is fairly experimental, but is also a large nerf to the players ability to "throw wads of cash" to solve every problem, so will be keeping an eye on it, particularly in case it brings back the "Netflix Time" problem of Classic, although the build times here are already far shorter, and the increase less, plus the metal costs don't change.<br />
<br />
* Increased most Frigate durability 50%.<br />
<br />
==== Cloaking ====<br />
<br />
* It now takes 10 seconds for cloaking to return after being depleted.<br />
** This is so it plays nicer with the below changes, else some units will constantly recloak while attacking, due to their reload time being longer than the recloak time.<br />
** As the below changes make it so cloaked units do far more damage before the cloak wears off, hopefully the micro requirement will be drastically reduced so that this added delay isn't a problem.<br />
<br />
* Increased the damage and reload time of most cloaked units by a fair bit.<br />
** This means they do much more damage before the cloak wears off, generally making them better at assassination and opening volleys.<br />
<br />
* Revealer Battlestation tachyon range now covers the entire planet.<br />
** A benefit to it over other decloaking sources.<br />
** From a mention sometime ago in Discord, forget who.<br />
<br />
* Tachyon Array range increased 25%, now decloaks twice as fast.<br />
** Gives a reason to use these over Sentry Frigates (beyond just cost), which have enormous range and in general were just superior.<br />
<br />
* Doubled the cloaking points at Mark 1, and amount gained per Mark for most units.<br />
** This means there is a notable delay before something is revealed, meaning there's some benefit to having higher Mark decloakers.<br />
** This also makes it easier for the player to do stealth ops, even if there's a bit of detection around.<br />
<br />
* All 5 starting Battlestation designs have 5 Tachyon Arrays.<br />
** So early on you have some extra decloakers to hand around, particularly for any early economic worlds and against the Ghost AI type.<br />
** Thanks to Donblas for suggesting sometime recently.<br />
<br />
* Increased the cost for the AI to purchase most cloaked units.<br />
** With the above changes these will probably have an enormous jump in power (which is seemingly needed, based on comments on cloaking in general). So, there will be less of them. If you can reveal them in time, great, less to kill! If you can't...<br />
<br />
=== Achievements! ===<br />
<br />
'''TLDR: These are presently Steam-only, and we're still entering the data for them. But you can earn them even before they can be logged to Steam or GOG and it will log them later. We'll have the data for these up shortly, but it's a manual data-entry process to do these. You'll be able to see the list of achievements as they are added, and later on can see them in a list in-game (but cannot yet). Next build, probably.'''<br />
<br />
* The game now properly logs achievements to Steam, and also locally. It's possible to use the debug menu to clear your local achievements to redo them if you want to, but that won't clear them on Steam.<br />
<br />
* If you have achievements locally-earned but not on Steam for some reason, then starting up the game program while logged into Steam will sync those achievements onto there. So you don't lose an achievement that you got while in offline mode or similar.<br />
<br />
* There are a bunch of achievements (uh... 139 of them??), but the data for those haven't been fully put into Steam yet. Anything you earn prior to it being on Steam or GOG will sync up with those platforms when they have the data in question.<br />
<br />
* Note that GOG achievements are coming soon. The data from them gets imported from Steam, which is handy, so we want to get the data in first. But we also need some code updates to integrate with their things prior to that.<br />
<br />
* Achievements now immediately log themselves to disk after you achieve them, so that if you don't get to a saving point or exit gracefully you don't lose that having been logged. This applies whether or not it logs to Steam or GOG or what have you, for your own personal records. This does so in an intelligent way with minimal disk calls even if you have a bunch of achievements all tripping at once and getting logged.<br />
<br />
==== Cheating Is Perfectly Ok But Doesn't Give Achievements ====<br />
<br />
'''Bear in mind, though, that tons of this game is open source and easy to compile. If someone wants to make a button that literally just gives them an achievement, the code is right there to do it. Kind of a spoilsport thing to do, but people have ways of granting themselves achievements directly via the Steam API anyway, when it comes to that. So even if we encrypted our game and did no open source work, Steam is already vulnerable to anything that supports client-side achievements. Some people will cheat, that's unfortunate, but without using an external Steam-targeted tool or recompiling parts of the game you can't do it with ease. So there's that.'''<br />
<br />
* If you use the cheat-style debug menu items, then it will skip granting you achievements in the campaign in which you did that. It will note that you would have gotten an achievement but that that was skipped at the time-of, because otherwise we'd have confused bug reports.<br />
** The non-cheaty debug menu options (or ones that make it harder for YOU, like increasing AIP) don't cause achievements to not work in the campaign in question.<br />
<br />
* If you use the debug menu to change the AI difficulty up or down after 60 seconds of gametime have elapsed, then that counts as a cheat for achievement purposes. If you do it in the first 60 seconds (plenty of time if you're paused, and have just loaded a quick start, for instance), then it will not consider it a cheat and let you go about your tweaking.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.017 Random AI Types ==<br />
(Released December 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where cancelling a wave when fighting AIs in Civil War Mode could softlock the game<br />
** In Civil War Mode, the AI is allowed to send waves at other AIs planets that are neutral but still have turrets. This was done to prevent the case where the AIs were just sniping eachothers command stations but not actually destroying all the defenses with waves. This was not playing nicely with the code that was trying to silently reroute waves to new targets if the old target had died. So the game was queueing a Civil-War style wave, then immediately trying to re-route it each time.<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Improve the Notification for Raid Engines to remove some weirdly long text<br />
** Thanks to a save game from Sigma7 for making me notice this<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Dyson ships were getting stuck on cloaked units, or units inside guard posts<br />
* Fix a bug where Dyson ships were killing warp gates, increasing AIP<br />
** Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Various Weapons" fleet name styling to the game.<br />
** Description: Weapons from other games. Can you recognize the references? (Created by DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY)<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for providing these!<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Wormhole Invasions weren't actually sending any ships<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste and Peter Ebbessen for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Random AI Types And Nicer AI Type Lobby Display ===<br />
<br />
* Add Random AI Types to the game. There is a "Totally Random", and also Random based on how hard the AI Type is, so "Random Easy", "Random Hard", "Random Brutal", etc...<br />
** When hitting "Esc" to bring up that menu in game, a randomly chosen AI Type, just will say "Random". There's a setting to actually reveal the random AI type if you'd like<br />
** This has been requested by a lot of people across mantis, discord and steam. This basically matches AIWC behaviour, which I think people liked.<br />
<br />
* The dropdown in the lobby for the AI difficulties now shows what difficulty category each one belongs to, nicely-colorized.<br />
** It also sorts by difficulty category and then by name of the difficulty (with the default showing up first in its respective category as the one difference there), and with the random option for each difficulty type preceding it.<br />
** Big thanks to Badger for suggesting that we implement in such a much nicer way like the first game had it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Outguard hacking response nerfed by ~25%, and final response by 50%.<br />
* Outguard tertiary wave now fires every 75 seconds instead of every 50 seconds.<br />
<br />
* Some AI Reserves units will now join the Hunter Fleet instead of warping out. Higher AI Difficulties mean more units join the hunter.<br />
** Thanks to VengefulWight for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Reduced Impactor Citadel range to levels similar to the other Citadels (excluding Interceptor).<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for reporting a case of this thing wiping an entire AI planet of Posts almost immediately.<br />
<br />
* Reduced target priority of Citadels.<br />
** Hopefully this'll help reduce the potential for them to be the top priority of the AI over everything else.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the counterattack multipliers of Golems/Arks and Lone Wolves.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting an ow case.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigates, Arks and Golems (excluding Rorqual Hegira) now use a 2/1 hull/shield ratio.<br />
<br />
* Buffed the Dyson a little.<br />
<br />
* Astro Train projects that are only enabled at > Intensity 5 no longer require their Trains to go near the player.<br />
** Led to Trains never really completing projects and being infinite resources instead.<br />
<br />
* AI Homeworlds should now always have 8 Posts, instead of ranging from 5 to 8.<br />
** This could cause wide swings in how difficult they were, across all difficulties. This allows some standardisation, while keeping most of the variance in the AI difficulty values.<br />
<br />
* The wormholes on AI homeworlds are all on the edge, similar to the player ones.<br />
<br />
* Replaced the NastyPick set up that was used to seed things like Ion Cannons, Eyes, so on.<br />
** Instead, now there are 4 different things that work similarly:<br />
** BigGunNastyPick (Mass Drivers, Ion Cannons)<br />
** EyeNastyPick<br />
** SupportStructureNastyPick (Magnifiers, Troop Accelerators, etc)<br />
** WildCardNastyPick (Mass Drivers, Ion Cannons, Fortresses)<br />
** This means there can be more variance in what a planet has, plus some potential nasty combinations.<br />
** It also means certain things can be flat out turned off for certain difficulties (like Eyes at low ones), and per-difficulty tuning of each thing.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.016 Back From Beta ==<br />
(Released December 13th, 2019)<br />
<br />
'''There were a number of fixes that we also pushed directly into the 1.015 build without updating the version number, while that was in beta. So some of the things that would have been part of this build already went out and were tested because they were game-breaking in some fashion. All is well now, that we can tell from our testing and player feedback so far. Knock on wood!'''<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units pulled through a wormhole by a tractor beam could wind up outside the gravwell.<br />
** Reported by zeusalmighty and chthon<br />
<br />
* Add voice lines for Dark Spire Vengeance Strikes, and when a Dark Spire Locus spawns<br />
<br />
* Add a tip giving a very brief explanation of wave compositions<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbessen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Status debuffs like paralysis, engine stunning and weapon reload time increases will decay faster on stacked squads <br />
** Intuitively this makes sense, since the effect is in theory split across multiple units)<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.015 Testing The Outguard Waters ==<br />
(Released December 12th, 2019)<br />
<br />
'''To play this version, you need to go into Steam's properties for the game, and then the betas tab, and enable the 'current_beta' branch. If you're not worried about potential bugs or broken balance, then please do so -- we could use lots of eyes on the new Outguard changes, but we don't want to inflict those on everyone without more testing first. If we can get enough people testing this out, we can promote this out of beta tomorrow, which would be ideal since there are some important bugfixes in here in other areas of the game.'''<br />
<br />
* You can prevent your ships from pathing through specific planets by right-clicking the planet name in the resource bar (at the top left of the screen)<br />
** This is intended for cases like "I don't want my fleets to travel through that scary Eye planet by mistake"<br />
** The primary UI feedback for this is to hover a given planet and it will tell you if you've asked to not path through it. It would be nice to have a planet icon flair or something someday?<br />
*** This is a longstanding request from many people, including Astilious and Democracy. As a piece of trivia, this is actually the second time badger has done the UI portion of this feature.<br />
<br />
* Removed the limit of 1 Non-Turret Defense per Guard Post, and replaced it with a limit for each individual unit type it could pick (i.e only 2 Forcefields, but can have 3 Gravity Generators) for the entire planet.<br />
<br />
* Added a new way of writing timespans that writes minutes and seconds if it's less than 1 hour, and hours and minutes if above that. This keeps them a consistent length, and is particularly useful for the journal listing so that really old things just show the hours and minutes ago they were, rather than bothering you with being down to the second.<br />
<br />
* Hacking response decreased for AI difficulty 8-10<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Make Anti-AI Zombies less likely to get stuck by small groups of cloaked enemy units<br />
** Thanks to Dunno for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a concerning and nonsensical bug where the same ship was attempting to be added to a fleet more than once on creation, but then not winding up in the fleet at all from its own point of view, thus spewing errors.<br />
** This may ultimately be part of some much larger issue with pooling of units -- potentially one that happens specifically when the simulation is running agonizingly slowly for whatever reason.<br />
** Thanks to razgrizh for the report.<br />
<br />
* It is possible to get ships trying to set a pursuit target for a higher weapon system index than they actually have, mainly if the ship somehow changes type while maintaining its ID between the autotargeting and the finalized logic. This again shouldn't be possible, but seems to happen now in the same savegame where the other concerning bug just was. Now it won't complain about these, but will just ignore the bad data.<br />
<br />
* Put in some new counts in the escape menu's performance section that show the number of drones deployed and recalled, and the number of ships added into fleets and taken back out of them, as well as the number of failures of each.<br />
** As it turns out, in the strange savegame with bad performance of marauders, there are TONs of ships that are failing to be re-added properly, and drones popping in and out constantly. So this gives us something to work with on why it's so slow.* Put in some new counts in the escape menu's performance section that show the number of drones deployed and recalled, and the number of ships added into fleets and taken back out of them, as well as the number of failures of each.<br />
** As it turns out, in the strange savegame with bad performance of marauders, there are TONs of ships that are failing to be re-added properly, and drones popping in and out constantly. So this gives us something to work with on why it's so slow.<br />
<br />
* Removed the always_deploy_drones tag, since there is logic that causes drones to auto-recall if there are no enemies nearby. This was causing drones of marauder outposts to go in and out of the outposts constantly and rapidly, tanking performance previously. Anyone else who used the same logic was going to run into the same thing.<br />
** The savegame that previously ran SUPER slowly, aka about 2% of normal, now runs at 70-80% of normal instead.<br />
** This fixes a number of reported "Very Slow" saves, including reports from razgrizh,deo and NRSirLimbo <br />
** Thanks to Badger for finding and fixing this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed the AI never building Non-Turret Defenses.<br />
<br />
* AI types such as the One Way Doormaster and Turtle, which spawn more of certain structures, will no longer spawn the Trader versions of them.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where most of the planets in the galaxy could be named Murdoch<br />
** Thanks to Orelius for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make sure the AI taunt for "wave arrived" only plays when the wave is hitting a player planet<br />
** Thanks to deo for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Voice Line Work Continued ===<br />
<br />
* Instigator Bases now play a voice line when they spawn<br />
* "Homeworld Under Attack" now has its own line. This fixes a bug report from DevoutHaruhiist<br />
** There's now a line that plays when a bubble shield protecting your Home Command Station is under attack. If the AI actually takes down the shields and hits your Command Station itself then it plays a Taunt at you.<br />
* "Critical Planet under attack" is played if a planet with some Critical Infrastructure (like a GCA) is attacked<br />
* There's now a line for "Regular Player Planet Is Under Attack"<br />
* "Combat on Border World" now plays if you are in combat on a planet owned by an allied faction (allied human? allied faction?)<br />
* When a notification for "Wave targeting home planet" appears, you now get a voice line to make sure you don't miss it<br />
* When a notification for "Wave targeting planet with Critical Infrastructure" appears, you now get a voice line to make sure you don't miss it<br />
* Add voice lines for Macrophages Enraging and new Telia spawning<br />
<br />
=== Outguard Rework ===<br />
<br />
* Outguard Rework - Reworked to be cooldown based, more customization options in xml, and added in 3 more groups.<br />
** Huge thanks to StarKelp for designing and implementing this whole piece!<br />
<br />
* Gameplay Changes<br />
** Each Outguard now comes with a number of summons.<br />
** These summons scale with the total amount of earnt AIP.<br />
** After use, you must wait a period of time before summoning the same one again.<br />
** In addition, as long as it is under capacity, it will slowly rebuild its used fleets, giving you further uses in the future.<br />
** Base values are as follows;<br />
*** Offensive/Utility: 5 minute cooldown, 15 minute recharge, 10 minute duration<br />
*** Defense/Stationary: 5 minute cooldown, 20 minute recharge, 10 minute duration<br />
*** Donated To Player: 5 minute cooldown, 30 minute recharge, infinite duration<br />
** Outguard units now inherit techs properly.<br />
** Turret spawning mercs are now spawned between your command station and a hostile wormhole on a friendly planet.<br />
** Turret spawning mercs are now spawned near the center of the planet on a hostile planet.<br />
** Turrets will now spawn around each other instead of on each other.<br />
** Hacking the Beacon must again be done by a Fleet on the same planet. It also lasts 150 seconds, and costs 10 Hacking Points and 10 AIP (upon completion). These hacks will result in brutal AI response, far higher than most other hacks, so be prepared.<br />
<br />
* Code Changes<br />
** Unit tags will now attempt to search by tag first, and internal name second as a backup.<br />
** A multitude of new xml tags to configure nearly all of the changes.<br />
** (Many older Outguard units retain some older, no longer used values, for compatibility's sake.)<br />
<br />
==== New Outguard ==== <br />
<br />
* Spire Archivist, potent forcefields and beams<br />
<br />
* Democratic Demolitionists, grenade launcher turrets and ships<br />
<br />
* Hydran Hobbyist, an extremely redundant hydra starship with low damage and high disabling capabilities<br />
<br />
== Version 1.014 High AIP Playstyle Viability ==<br />
(Released December 10th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Continued work on voice lines:<br />
** Human Resistance Fighters warping in and out has voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Marauders attacking have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Risk Analyzers firing have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Astro Train depot spawn/train spawn have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Low on Metal, Metal Exhausted, Low on Power, Brownout (no power) are in<br />
<br />
* Improve readability of unit hovertext by suppressing the Exp section unless the player wants detailed tooltips<br />
** I for one almost never care about this information. Suggested by Dekar on discord<br />
<br />
* Tweak the prompt when exiting the game to make it harder to confuse the Exit to Desktop button with the Quit to Main Screen.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "Delete or Keep Campaign" prompt so it doesn't run off the edge of the button<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Hopefully fix a bug where waves were still spawning after being disabled<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI Reserves would never spawn on difficulty 10<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting<br />
<br />
* Hovering a planet in verbose mode will tell you whether the AI Reserves can respond to a deepstrike there<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference in fleets code<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the having multiple AIs meant that the game wasn't properly sending anti-MDC exo waves<br />
**Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the report<br />
<br />
* Waves sent against minor factions now make an effort to become threat against that minor faction, instead of just going for you after spawning<br />
** I think this has been reported by several people but I don't know who (if you'd like credit for bug reports, putting them on Mantis is the best way to make sure you are attributed)<br />
<br />
* Add the ability to hold down a button to suppress the 'Are you sure?' tech upgrade prompt. Having the prompt on in case of mistakes, but an easily done override is a nice little QoL improvement.<br />
** Suggested by ParadoxSong on mantis.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Beam Cannons could fail to hit fast moving ships.<br />
<br />
* Improve the beginner science/engineering objectives.<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for contributing the text<br />
<br />
* Allow the player and minor factions to target AI defensive structures build from the Zenith Trader<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the bug report<br />
<br />
* If the AI has planned to send a wave against a target, but between the wave planning and the time you are alerted something happens to the target, the AI will silently reroute the wave to a new target<br />
** The practical upshot of this is that when a wave notification appears, it will always be for a reasonable target<br />
** Thanks to zoutzakje<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Altered the AI Mark Level AIP Requirements.<br />
** For Difficulty 7, it was: 100, 220, 340, 470, 580, 700.<br />
** For Difficulty 7, is now: 100, 275, 450, 650, 880, 1,100.<br />
** For Difficulty 8, remove 10 from each level, Difficulty 9 remove 20, and Difficulty 10 remove 30.<br />
** For each Difficulty below 7, add an extra 10 as you go down.<br />
*** Response to some conversations with Peter Ebbesen about high AIP styles in this game in general.<br />
*** Still keeps some values low for lower AIP play, while freeing up the middle and higher ones, for people who prefer and can manage that type of gameplay.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate beam range 15,000 -> 12,000. Triple Beam variant damage 7,500 -> 4,000. Other variant beam damage 7,500 -> 6,000. Reduced shields of all slightly.<br />
<br />
==== Player Defenses ====<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Turret reload time 12s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Focused Gravity Generator durability, and increased the range of the effect from 6,000 to 7,100.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Tractor Array durability.<br />
<br />
* Minefields are no longer one use, and are back to firing 5 times before being destroyed.<br />
** However, this is a cleaner version, where there are no weird effects from how many targets are being hit, how much damage it did, is there a Military Command, Mark level, etc.<br />
** Instead they take 20% of their maximum health in damage with every attack, regardless of anything else.<br />
** Mine effects and damage have been reduced to 25% of old values, but as they detonate 5 times, it's in the end a boost to their maximum potential, and of course no more Mines being wasted on a single unit.<br />
** As a last note, normal Minefields are probably actually viable now!<br />
<br />
* Increased minimum count of normal Turrets in Global Command Augmenters by 1 (so from min 2 to min 3).<br />
** This puts the spread of min and max to the same as most Strikecraft in Fleets (i.e the max is 1.6x the min).<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 4,000, 5,500, 7,000, 8,500<br />
** Now: 2,000, 3,750, 3,750, 4,250<br />
*** The scaling here uses only the Stations damage, and ignores everything else for now, as the cap doesn't increase for these.<br />
*** The damage bonus is pretty much considered "free", as you have already paid some costs for even having a Military Station (no nearby vision, no economy, so on).<br />
*** In-case someone wonders why two costs are the same, that's due to the damage gained for each of those Marks being identical. This doesn't appear in things that take cap into account.<br />
*** That's actually the same reason the Hull Techs cost the same - they're priced for a unit going from MK5 to MK6, then to MK7. Just so happens the benefit is identical for each step.<br />
<br />
* Citadel Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 2,000, 3,000, 4,000<br />
** Now: 1,500, 2,625, 2,625, 3,000<br />
*** Same thing for above, just uses the damage.<br />
<br />
* Deprecated the Tractor Beams Tech. Tractor Arrays are now included in Sentries.<br />
** These are both a bit...too niche. Sentries was just detection and Gravity Generators, Tractors was...well, Tractors. It makes some sense to just combine the two, as they both fill defensive utility roles, and neither were really bought.<br />
<br />
* Sentries Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 500 ,750, 1000, 1250<br />
** Now: 750, 1500, 3250, 3500<br />
*** Note that since Tractor Beams are included in this now, the cost is up from the previous one, but is cheaper than the Tractor Beam Tech was originally anyhow, which just followed the same scaling that Weapon Techs do, so now you get both for cheaper than the old price of Tractors.<br />
*** Changed the scaling to be one based on health and cap, rather than damage and cap, because naturally nothing here actually attacks.<br />
<br />
* Minefield Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 1,500, 2,750, 5,000, 6,750<br />
** Now: 1,000, 1,850, 3,250, 4,500<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 3,000, 5,500, 10,000, 13,500<br />
** Now: 2,500, 4,750, 10,500, 11,500<br />
*** Mostly bringing it in line with the same scaling used for Sentries. Was surprisingly close.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station shots per salvo 8 -> 12, now gains 4 extra shots per Mark. Damage increased 50%.<br />
** The extra shots is an experimental thing, and newly added with this Station primarily in mind.<br />
** Like the damage bonus, the Tech Cost for these completely ignores it - the cost is paid already in choosing to use a Military.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon damage and reload time halved.<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen.<br />
** It appears the changes from StarKelp to beams have greatly improved their performance, but there's still some consistency issues. Doing this should, like the Spire Frigates, help to counteract some of the bad shots.<br />
** When it's decided they're in a more reliable place, can then investigate their power.<br />
<br />
* Doubled durability of Battlestations. They now also have guns.<br />
<br />
* Citadels damage consoldiated into fewer shots per salvo, now gain 25% more shots per salvo per Mark.<br />
<br />
==== Economy ====<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvester Techs cost the same amount (4,000) for each Mark.<br />
** The benefit of these is purely linear, so the cost should probably be linear too, else an odd case results in which there just becomes a point it's not worth ever getting, so why have that level?<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations now increase energy by 100k per Mark, instead of 50k.<br />
** 50k is kind of pitiful if you only have a few. 100k should hopefully make it worth the investment, combined with below.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station Techs cost the same amount (4,000) for each Mark.<br />
** Same reasoning as the Metal Harvesters. They gain some durability, but it's so little it's not included.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Stations now increase energy by 50k per Mark, instead of 25k.<br />
** Yep, a buff to Logisticals! Mainly to provide some benefit to upgrading these. Economicals are still the top producer, and are more efficient to upgrade for Energy, out of the two.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Station Techs cost the same amount (3,000) for each Mark.<br />
** Same as above.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.013 Menacing Messages From The Machine ==<br />
(Released December 6th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Make Major Data Center exos a bit less frequent<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* When you have marked intel entries as high priority or low priority, it now shows H1, H2, etc, on the left for however many high priority objectives are at a planet on the galaxy map. For all the low-priority ones, it shows L1, L2, etc.<br />
** Potentially the formatting could use some work in the future, but for now this really seems to get the job done in terms of making the importance of the intel items translate onto the galaxy map and not just on the intel sidebar.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* A new "skip_adding_to_seed_lists" tag has been added to fleet designs, which lets us keep them around for existing savegames but prevent them from showing up in the lobby or in seeding in new galaxies.<br />
** This has now been applied to the "Bomber Fleet" starting fleet for players, as that was supremely overpowered and let some players cheese things on the highest difficulty levels.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for inspiring this change, and Badger and Puffin for figuring out the actual conundrum here.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The planet Murdoch will still appear in all games as an Easter Egg, but it is no longer your default starting planet<br />
** Badger prefers some variety, and a number of people have been making muttered complaints about this for a while<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we were showing the wrong colour for tech level upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting<br />
<br />
* Exiting and reopening the load game menu will now abort any selecting game to delete state, to prevent accidental deletes.<br />
** Thanks to StarKeep for reporting and donblas for fixing.<br />
<br />
* On battlestation fleet leaders, it had a duplicated-feeling "battlestation" bit of text in the tooltip, which just felt off. That's been removed.<br />
<br />
* Setting the border colors for sub-factions of the AI (warden, hunter, and praetorian guard) now actually works properly.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for figuring out what the problem was. Thanks to Zoreiss, Ryulong, and NB_FlankStrike for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a super-longstanding bug where if you were hovering over an item in a dropdown list and getting a tooltip for it, then closing the dropdown would sometimes leave that item "stuck" on. Now it detects this case and auto-fixes itself before you can really notice it.<br />
** Thanks to lots of people reporting the stuck tooltips that could happen in the factions tab in particular. Including but not limited to Ovalcircle (most recent repro), AnnoyingOrange, ParadoxSong, vinco, and donblas.<br />
<br />
* Showing the debug info for ship types now shows the fleet category on them of what fleet they're in.<br />
<br />
* On load of a savegame, the game now detects player ships that are in the "loose" fleet (which is bad), and tries to correct them.<br />
** At the moment it can only correct ships that should be part of the planetary fleet.<br />
<br />
* Fixed metal harvesters to properly have a fleet membership of planetary so that they can take advantage of this auto-correction.<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_scrapping_by_player_to_turn_unclaimed xml tag that, when turned to true, lets you override something that is non-scrappable and have it be killed.<br />
** At the moment this lets us scrap metal harvesters but keeps them from just disappearing completely, and thus lets us test for them going into the unconnected fleet improperly.<br />
<br />
* When ships are claimed, if they are not a flagship they are now properly added to the planetary command fleet at the local planet.<br />
** This lets things like metal harvesters properly be added back into the planet's fleet (and thus get related upgrades, if any) after being destroyed.<br />
** There's a mild chance that this might have some strange secondary consequences on some ship that SHOULD have been in the "loose player fleet," but I can't think of any specific examples. All those sorts of things are typically flagships with their own fleet and use a different code path. Worst case is that they'll appear as a member of that planet's fleet and get bonuses from it if there are science upgrades at that planet.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the onload process can't fix whatever ships that are in PlayerLoose for some reason, it now also gives a list of which ships those are.<br />
<br />
* Any ships that did not have fleet_membership="Planetary", but ARE immobile now automatically get set to be a membership of planetary unless they are also a fleet leader (aka things like the AI Overlord Phase 1).<br />
** This makes it so that capturing such buildings puts them into the fleet of the planet and not the "player loose fleet," and also allows for them to be properly re-linked if need be from the onload fixing process.<br />
** This is affecting things like IGCs, MDCs, and so on. It remains to be seen if things of this sort will still properly come back to the planet fleet without a savegame load if they die to remains and then get recaptured (for anything of this sort where that's even a possibility), but fingers crossed.<br />
** Thanks to deo for the report that let us find this one.<br />
<br />
* Also with some of these changes, it's possible that things that were turrets for a specific battlestation or citadel might incorrectly go to the planet fleet after they get shot up and rebuild. Please let us know with a savegame repro if you find that happening.<br />
<br />
=== Audio And Journal Work ===<br />
<br />
* The audio setting "Music: Play Tracks from AI War Classic" now defaults to on instead of off.<br />
** While it's nice to hear the new music from the sequel, there's four and a half hours of music that was gated-off in here that made things repetitive at times without it on.<br />
** A lot of people weren't even aware this setting existed, so thought there was far less music than there was (1 hour rather than 5.5 hours, roughly).<br />
<br />
* Added a new audio setting: "Allow Funny Voice Clips" (defaults to off)<br />
** Humor is subjective, and for some folks can even be a mood-killer in a game like this about galactic stakes. Some of the AI voice taunts err on the possibly-mood-breaking side, and those are disabled by default. If you're in a lighter mood and would like to have those included, feel free to turn this on.<br />
<br />
* When AI taunts play, they now also drop a chat-style message for you to see them.<br />
** If you have voices turned off, then these won't show up at all. If you have just turned the volume way down on the voice channel or AI taunts channel, then you WILL still see these.<br />
** It is colorized and identifies itself as either being from the overlord, hunter, or warden as the case requires.<br />
** We had been planning on this, but thanks to a lot of people for requesting it, including Apthorpe, Asteroid, Thotimx, and Orelius.<br />
<br />
* Added a new JournalMessages object on the world, which lets us store a history of messages from chat, AI taunts, and other sources. It can also be used to store story-specific things in campaigns.<br />
** To save space, it will only save the 50 most recent entries in the journal when you save your game. BUT it first discards normal-priority stuff, then keep-longer stuff if it has to, and then there's always-keep stuff that it will never remove no matter what and so can make it store more than 50. That last category is good for campaign-specific instructions, hopefully of which we won't be having too many things.<br />
** These are temporarily just shown at the bottom of the escape menu, but later will be in their own interface that you can get to via the bottom left corner of the screen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where a variety of AI taunts were imported as ambisonic, and thus threw a harmless warning when we tried to play them back in a standard fashion.<br />
<br />
* 171 new Chief of Staff voice lines (51 categories) have been integrated into the game files, although they're not being triggered yet. <br />
** This is in addition to the 89 lines (14 categories) that were previously in the game from this actress, Alicia Harris.<br />
** A lot of these have to do with alerts for situations relating to the various factions, or other specialized situations that had no voice prompt previously.<br />
<br />
* New voice lines that are actually wired up to trigger:<br />
** Brownouts.<br />
<br />
=== Fleet Naming ===<br />
<br />
* You now select name lists for fleets just like planets (Added by donblas)<br />
* You can add custom name lists of your own as well!<br />
* Create a new folder in GameData\Configuration\FleetNames in the AI War directory<br />
* Add a file with preferrably at least 50 entries, one on each line.<br />
* Edit AIWar2\GameData\Configuration\FleetNameType\CMP_FleetNameTypes.xml and add an entry for your new pack<br />
* Consider opening a bug (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/) with your list if you want to share<br />
<br />
== Version 1.012 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released December 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* If the game fails to load the InstancedRenderer for some reason, it will now tell you which ship it's failing on and what the error was.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units trying to split stacks was causing lots of nasty errors and game slowdown<br />
** Reported by Everyone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where some flagships could have no units in them<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AIs in civil war mode were sending waves against undefended planets<br />
** Thanks to ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed up some of the resource icon alignment and sizing in the top bar of the game.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.011 SuperCat Swats Back ==<br />
(Released December 3rd, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Polish and Gameplay Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of the "List of remote ships you might destroy" list in the Fleets popup<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Allow citadels with engineers to autobuild those engineers<br />
** Requested by deo<br />
<br />
* All new code for group-move thanks to new volunteer Eagleheart. His notes:<br />
** Reworked the speed group / group move system.<br />
** Rather than all units in the group just moving at the speed of the slowest unit in the group, each unit now has its own individual speed limit based on its starting location and the target location of a move command.<br />
** The speed limit will be set to make that unit arrive as close as it can to the arrival time of the unit that will arrive at the destination last. This means that if a unit is far away from the other units in the group while those units are near the destination, the far-away unit will now move at its max speed to catch up.<br />
** Speed groups are now recreated on move orders in addition to when the button is clicked in order to adjust these distance calculations / speeds. This has the added benefit of behavior more closely matching what you would expect. If issuing individual unit or subgroup orders to units of a larger group, they will now be broken out into their own speed group and won't move slowly just because of the previous group limit.<br />
** Similarly, original groups will now move faster if all the slower units of the group have been given a new move command. As an additional side-effect, you can now no longer issue move commands to an overall selection of units that contains units not in a group and have them not have any speed limit enforced. That behavior was a bit confusing.<br />
** For now, units will still not move any slower than the speed of the slowest unit so that they never move imperceptibly slow. This is also necessary at the moment to not make group/pursuit combo mode any worse since ships can only move faster.<br />
** Units will also be removed from their speed group if tractored or stunned so they don't slow the rest of the group down.<br />
** This resolves part of this bug: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=20658<br />
** I hope to implement the second part of group target calculations, so that units move and fight as a group when both group and pursuit mode is enabled. But that will be a bit more tricky.<br />
** Thanks to Eagleheart for coming up with the idea as well as implementing it!<br />
<br />
* Re-order the Intel Menu a bit (including putting Beginner objectives near the top). Note that you can hide/unhide the beginner objectives through the UI. <br />
** Add new Beginner objectives to remind the player to capture their first Flagship, GCA and ARS<br />
*** From some comments on one of the podcasts Chris appeared on (I think the SGJ podcast)<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to disable repairing allied units<br />
** Note that this will need to be revisited for multiplayer for a proper implementation<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty (and others) for requesting<br />
<br />
* Attempt to make crippled flagships more desirable repair targets. I'm not sure if it's enough, so if people continue to see problems then a save game to help me reproduce the issue is needed.<br />
** Thanks to deo for suggesting<br />
<br />
* When choosing an Instigator Base planet, make a good faith effort to choose an explored planet. Instigators will only use an unexplored planet if they can't find a good explored planet.<br />
** Thanks to a discussion on Steam started by KDR_11k<br />
<br />
* When a bunch of drones have been produced for combat, they are reabsorbed into their flagship when all the enemies are dead.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for requesting this originally, and thanks to ArnaudB for pointing out the performance issues that were happening without a feature like this<br />
<br />
* Things such as Coordinators and Augmenters are now considered critical infrastructure for the purposes of the "planet under attack" notifications.<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for pointing out.<br />
<br />
* Eyes now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Puffin was reluctant to add things like this in, because it could kind of be a bit crowded already and it was purely a local thing to him, while galaxy icons should be for things with strategic impact.<br />
** Then the realisation occurred that they impact deepstriking choices, and so they now fit strategic impact.<br />
** Things like Mass Drivers will remain as is however, because of how many of these things can be on a single planet potentially (Peacemaker AI), even though they do kind of affect deepstriking.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Zenith Power Generators and Matter Converters now properly die if Perma-Death is enabled for them.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong and Venger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Stored Hive Golem Wasps now persist across save/reload<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* The player can no longer murder the antagonized dyson sphere<br />
** Reported by Ovalcircle <br />
<br />
* Fix several bugs with potentially capturable units not being shown in the tech menu<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference in debug-mode entity display code <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where killing a reconquest command station might incorrectly charge you AIP<br />
** Thanks to deo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Non-Allied Marauders no longer announce they have conquered planets that you can't see. Allied Marauders are more chatty.<br />
<br />
* You will no longer rebuild remains if they would put you into brownout<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now correctly alert nearby AI ships. They also print a message saying "Alarm Post has been triggered"<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Planet text boxes weren't being appropriately suppressed even when the "suppress text" button was held<br />
** Thanks to Astilious for finding the bug and also for coding the fix!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the Linked Rings generator that was causing the math to essentially infinite-loop until the game ran out of planet names (or similar) and generate *thousands* of planets instead of the desired number.<br />
** Also fixed the "moon" rings from disappearing on larger map sizes.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for finding a repro case.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked Swirl and Bubbles maps to have a bit more spacing between planets.<br />
** Primarily done by placing fewer planets on each orbit/loop/ring (<code>radius * Pi * 2 / desired_space_between_planets</code>). Swirl is always going to be tight, though. More space just makes the map larger, which then gets scaled down due to zooming, resulting in no appreciable difference.<br />
** Swirl's generator rewritten to operate outside-in instead of inside-out. So the central area is less likely to be cramped and the total number of planets ends up being more accurate (the number is always going to be more of a suggestion, than exact, simply due to how each ellipse is generated and how much room is left).<br />
*** Before if you asked for 150 planets and it got up to 149, it would add another ellipse around the outside, adding 20, 30, or 60 more planets. Now it will be adding a ring of only 5 or 7. If there isn't room, but is currently under the desired amount, it will generate a single planet in the exact center.<br />
** Boosted Swirl's connectivity slightly<br />
** Added a random call that changes the Swirl direction<br />
** Added a random call to slightly adjust the number of planets in each ellipse to prevent same-y-ness (and it also helps prevent near-collisions between planets in separate ellipses).<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fix battlestation/planet confirmation dialog showing the wrong science cost (was correctly charged however).<br />
** Thanks to donblas for his first fix.<br />
* Fix multiple locations showing wrong turret counts (showing 5x too many).<br />
** Thanks Volatar for the report<br />
* Fix multi-beam description typo<br />
** Thanks donblas for the report and fix.<br />
<br />
* Fix to the bug where hitting the escape key while in certain windows (like the fleet management window, hack choices, fleet ship line swapping, etc) was not just closing the window, but was also opening the escape menu.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting, for finding the fix, and for fixing it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Give the higher-difficulty AIs some stronger defenses and a bit more income<br />
<br />
* Increase the strength of the AI anti-marauder and anti-nanocaust waves<br />
** Suggested by zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Tripper now has an engine_gx bonus similar to the Agravic Pod. This replaces the secondary speed related bonus it had.<br />
** Said bonus was meant to replace the original, but apparently isn't now, leading to stupidly high damage values as they multiplied each other.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigates (and their variants) are now found in higher numbers whenever they appear. Also increased cloaking points (starting and amount gained) by 50%.<br />
** The basic one also shows up in ARS' now, and there are 3 in the Raid Starting Fleet instead of 2.<br />
*** Prompted by an unfavourable mention on Steam, and some discussion with zeusalmighty.<br />
<br />
* Added "Greater Metabolism" and applied it to Bounty Hunters.<br />
** This lets them be the specialist in getting large amounts of metal (max 50% or 50,000) off single targets, while things like Gangsaws and Yellow Jackets are good at swarms.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tanks "Bunker Buster" bonus is applicable for 12 seconds, rather than 5.<br />
** This hopefully lets you shuttle them in a Transport to something, unload, wait for the firing delay to elapse then still get the bonus.<br />
** Preferable to having them ignore the unload firing delay, as that would somewhat bring back the problem the delay was meant to solve (unload, fire, and load at every single Guard Post, avoiding all damage).<br />
** The cost of these for the AI is increased slightly, to offset the fact they're much more likely to get the bonus against you in a wave, though thankfully you can stop these being sent.<br />
** Prompted by a few unfavourable mentions on Steam.<br />
<br />
* Added a Turret Hull Tech.<br />
** Using the old cost of the other Hull Techs (7,500) for now. This lets you get Turrets to MK6 and 7 without needing the local Command Station upgrades, and is a way to just upgrade most of your defenses everywhere, rather than doing it purely through Weapon Techs (some of which don't have Turrets in them).<br />
<br />
* Battlestations/citadels can now be upgraded by spending science, like planetary fleets can.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin and a variety of other players for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Replaced Eyebots damage bonus. They now gain more damage based on how much energy the target uses. The higher the energy consumption, the more damage.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira Ark range 5,600 -> 8,000.<br />
** Apparently the bubble on this thing would get so large it couldn't attack something without pushing it away.<br />
** Thanks to Hyde on Discord for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Halved Marauder Drone Frigate drone count and build rate.<br />
<br />
* AI Grenade Launcher Turret and Fortified Tesla Turret range is now 75% and 100% of normal player Turrets respectively.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for bugging Puffin repeatedly.<br />
<br />
* Stalker durability increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Assault Frigate shield bypass no longer increases with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Added the "Suppressor" Frigate to help shore up Disruptive Tech.<br />
<br />
* Medic Gunboats repair rate now increases with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Increased Ion Disruptor durability by 30%.<br />
<br />
* Strikecraft, Frigates and normal Guardians have had their hull/shield ratios standardised, to a 2/1 ratio. There are occasional exceptions where it's desirable for a unit to be very shield heavy, such as the Vanguards, which are 1/2.<br />
** This is part of a change to fixing the problem with Fusion Bombers basically being really good against everything by skipping most of their durability, rather than mostly structures and things specified to be weak to them.<br />
** There aren't any changes to Bombers yet - anything will be done slow and this is a notable change in some areas. However, as noted above, Assault Frigates (and Muggers by extension) no longer gain improved bypass per Mark, as they would result in having the same problem inspiring this change.<br />
** This'll likely be extended to other areas, such as Dire Guardians and faction units, but for now the majority of the player/AI units are done.<br />
<br />
* Combed through all the Fleet Design stuff, and made some fairly wide changes.<br />
** Added several new Designs, such as the SniperMix and DisruptiveMix.<br />
** Everything *should* be in ARS' now, rather than a few being totally missed for whatever reason.<br />
** The rare/odd units, such as Daggers or Medic Gunboats, are now set to a lower chance in ARS than normal units, because over time a lot of the rare finds were creeping up to be too common in ARS'. A good number of them show up in the new designs, and of course the ones that weren't in ARS at all now show up, so this shouldn't be too bad.<br />
** Altered the general distribution and chances of all the unit types to make each Tech far more equal (Fusion was notably far above the others). This was something Puffin hadn't thought about until recently, and oof, there was a problem. They're still not perfect, but at this point the options available of what to tune are really running low without making some very strange changes.<br />
** Fixed some random values being out of place as well, particularly with the FrigatesWithSupport Strikecraft options.<br />
** Lastly, fixed some units being in strange Designs, such as the new Eyebots being in AntiSmaller, despite their new bonus not being relevant at all versus that type of target.<br />
*** Prompted by some grumbling in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Implemented some code changes from StarKelp that improve performance of the lance weapons be 12-15% in heavy usage based on his tests, and they now hit all targets in a line. This may have some balance implications based on a code review, so please let us know what folks think about this change. It's a small enough change that it's easy to revert or alter if need be, and the performance boost is certainly welcome when it's a big battle of these sorts of ships.<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for investigating and implementing this.<br />
<br />
==== Major Data Center Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Since AIP reduction is now so strong with the Major Data Centers, the AI will now generate Exogalactic Strikeforces against players who own Major Data Centers<br />
** Only happens if there are AIs at difficulty >= 7<br />
** This can be disabled via an in-game Setting, so players who are mid-game can disable it if it's too much of a balance swing.<br />
** Thanks to everyone who is still beating the game at difficulty 10, in particular Astilious<br />
<br />
==== Wormhole Invasion Nerfs ====<br />
* Wormhole invasions get less budget<br />
* You will have more warning before they start sending troops through<br />
* Exogalactic Wormholes can no longer be used to send regular waves<br />
** From a discussion on discord led by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* If the AI would send a wormhole invasion but it has no valid targets, it will continue to retry every few minutes, instead of only checking again in another couple hours.<br />
** This should reduce the number of times when players have giant wormhole invasions "Out of nowhere"<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report and save game to test the fix<br />
<br />
== Version 1.010 Extracting Those Archives ==<br />
(Released November 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Modding Support ===<br />
<br />
* If someone were to mod nanocausting guns onto the Devourer, the nanocausted ships will now wander the galaxy if their current planet has no real threats, instead of always staying on the same planet<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Add a Notification for brownouts<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The Metal Flow Planning popup window now consolidates essentially identical flows. So if there are 3 engineers doing something it will now show as a single line saying '3 engineers are doing ....' instead of 3 separate lines. <br />
** The list is now sorted by planet from "Most metal spent on a planet" to "Least", and gives a nice header line with the total spent per planet before the details<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the excellent suggestion and ongoing critique<br />
<br />
* Allow for the energy consumed screen to show data sorted by 'overall usage' or by Planetary Fleets and Mobile fleets sorted separately<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for a hacking notification now reminds the player that the hack can be cancelled by clicking<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* Hacking information from the top bar when hovered over now explains only hacking structures owned by that AI count.<br />
** Suggested by VengefulWight.<br />
<br />
* Fix a whitespace problem with the planet hovertext<br />
** Reported by alocritani<br />
<br />
* Fixed typo in the Devourer beacon, and one with some Astro Train text.<br />
** Reported by Ryulong and VengefulWight respectively. <br />
<br />
* Improve some tooltips<br />
** Reported by Histidine<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Hopefully this actually fixes the "AI Reserves spawning outside of gravwell" problem<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the base-oriented Warden Fleet wasn't properly constrained to camping at bases<br />
<br />
* Fix a couple hacks that weren't correctly setting the Hacking History<br />
** Thanks to alocritani for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive Extraction hack now only takes 5 minutes at base, rather than 15.<br />
** With higher difficulties getting longer durations, this could lead to...well, on Diff 10, an hour long hack. Yeah.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty and donblas for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Units under construction take bonus damage from being shot. This should alleviate the frustrating case where the AI is distracted trying to kill Under Construction Frigates/Turrets instead of things that are actually shooting back<br />
** Note that this makes long-build-time things from the zenith trader very fragile before they are finished.<br />
** Mentioned by ussdefiant60 on discord<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian damage 1,500 -> 500, reload time 6s -> 4s, swapped outdated damage bonus to match the Fusion Bombers.<br />
** The 6s reload time was allowing these to recloak while still firing. The outdated bonus had weird Mark interactions and was missed.<br />
** Damage in general was a bit high for a unit that bypassed 90% of shields, so a large drop, both for that and to account for the new bonus.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Black Widow Golem Ark hull into shields.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some Guardian costs.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.009 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the last patch where sometimes threat wasn't being correctly counted.<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists and others for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.008 Golems And Arks Come Marching In ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart from Nuc Temeron<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Science icon in the resource bar now shows the history of the Techs you have unlocked. Note that this only applies to techs unlocked after this patch is applied.<br />
** This is mostly to have behariour that matches with the AIP and Hacking histories, but also allows for a new player to look at a save from an experienced player and learn from what they did with science.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug option to increase or decrease the difficulty of all the AIs in the game<br />
** It occurs to me that people sometimes start games and think "Man, this isn't challenging enough" or "I'm getting crushed". Well, now you can adjust the AI difficulty on the fly! Yet another feature for improved sandboxing.<br />
** This code includes a framework to allow other settings on other factions to be changed.<br />
<br />
* Add a tip explaining that unit stats have no inherent mechanical impact, they only matter insofar as their numbers relate to weapons systems<br />
** This caused some confusion<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
* Fix a typo in the metal popup<br />
** Thanks to alocritani for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI Reserves to spawn a bit further from the gravwell edge; they were getting stuck sometimes<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where sometimes minor factions would incorrectly cause AIP increases when killing warp gates. <br />
** Thanks to MasterGeese for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with Global Command Augmenters where they used the Turret type count for how many OtherDefense types they had.<br />
** Normally, a GCA has 1 Turret type, with 25% chance for a second. It then has a 33% chance for a single "OtherDefense" type (things like Minefields). If it has only 1 unit type after this, it gets a second Turret type, so in general they're pretty likely to get 2 Turret types.<br />
** Because of the OtherDefense logic actually using the Turret count, it meant since it always has at least 1 Turret, it would also always have 1 OtherDefense, regardless of the 33% chance.<br />
** This meant the "add a second Turret type so we have at least 2 types total" logic never occurred, making it so most GCAs had just 1 Turret type, when in fact the majority were meant to have 2.<br />
** It seems like this has changed it from around 25% of GCAs having 2 Turret types, to 75% (!) of GCAs having 2 Turret types.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Dark Spire Ward description<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste on discord for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Strikecraft and Turret Coordinators were both increasing Strikecraft and Turret caps once you had both effects.<br />
** If you had only one, it would work completely fine. Once you had two, it would combine the effects, leading to a 1.7x cap multiplier for both, instead of 1.3x.<br />
** This probably leads to some late game nerfs as a consequence.<br />
*** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting an oddity with some MLRS Turrets, leading to this discovery.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer was causing all the ships to rush out of the AI Guard Posts and get eaten<br />
** I hope this also alleviates a bug where some minor factions could still stir up AI units to attack you<br />
<br />
* The Tech Menu now shows ships in ARSs under the set of things that you can upgrade, not just the things in Fleets on the map that you haven't captured yet<br />
** I think a number of people have wanted this but I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* The Tech menu now shows entries for techs that you could unlock from ARSs but don't have in a fleet (either owned or capturable)<br />
** I think this confused some people on Steam who could see something in an ARS but couldn't see the Tech for it<br />
<br />
* Fixed several possible but rare index out of range exceptions that could happen in the vis layer simulation due to cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif, KazeSasso, and Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the ReevaluateUnitOrders code that would sometimes have background-coarse planets not run the logic for their ships at all. Now those ships only use the secondary "SimCycleGroup_Slow" logic if this is on a "tier 1" planet that gets processed every frame.<br />
** The intent of the sim frame processing was to split it out across multiple frames, which works great on those tier 1 planets, but for planets that are already being split across multiple frames it could mean that their ships might not get new orders ever until the player visited the planet. This could greatly nerf engineers, for example.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this!<br />
<br />
* The forcefield protection planning was being run only intermittently on tier 2 planets, which include player forces that are not being monitored right now. Now it ONLY runs those intermittently on tier 3 planets (no players), and runs them continuously otherwise, so as to never run into cases where enemies could get off a few shots at something of a player that was being protected by a forcefield.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this, and Chthon and folks on discord for reporting it.<br />
<br />
* Silenced some harmless errors about trying to render a ship when its RelatedEntity became null during the process, via cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare nullref exception that could happen in the target list planning because of cross-threading stuff.<br />
** Thanks to vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tentatively prevent the Devourer from shooting force field generators (the ones you can build at your planets)<br />
** A number of people have complained about it. I'm not sure if I caught all the cases, so please let me know if there are any issues.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Hacking Difficulty Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* The goal of this is to make hacking easier early and harder late.<br />
<br />
* Increase up the Hacking Points Spent required to trigger new hacking difficulty levels.<br />
** Some larger hacks could move you up 2 levels of difficulty under the wrong circumstances, which was quite excessive <br />
<br />
* Add some new tiers of hacking difficulty to allow us to make late game hacking scarier. The hacking difficulty now goes<br />
** Very Easy<br />
** Easy<br />
** Indifferent (old Moderate)<br />
** Slothful (old Hard)<br />
** Moderate (old Extreme)<br />
** Hard (old Terrifying)<br />
** Extreme (new, and harder)<br />
** Terrifying (new, and harder)<br />
***From a conversation on discord where people wanted higher difficulty tiers<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hacking difficulty levels used were one tier harder than they should have been<br />
** A number of people noted this<br />
<br />
=== Other Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Tractor Arrays in Global Command Augmenters a bit.<br />
<br />
* Added Raiders and Daggers to ARS'.<br />
<br />
* AI Sentry Frigate now decloaks much slower (from 2s for MK1 vs MK1 cloaked units, to 8s), damage 600 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Added an AI Ship Group consisting of the Classic Trio Strikecraft (V-Wing, Fusion Bomber, Concussion Corvette).<br />
<br />
* Added the V-Wing into a few groups.<br />
<br />
* Weaken Turret and Weaken Guard Post hacks are slightly cheaper. Can also be done remotely (i.e without a Flagship present).<br />
** The remote hack is an experiment.<br />
<br />
* The logic for officer fleets (those with Arks and Golems) used to be that they couldn't be more than a certain number of hops away from an AI homeworld. Now it doesn't care how far away they are, except that they must ideally be at least 3 from the AI homeworld and (same as before) 6 from player homeworlds. This makes it a lot more likely for you to actually see officer fleets in the mid-game (or at all, depending on how far you're getting).<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for inspiring this change while doing a podcast with Chris (https://explorminate.co/chris-park-of-arcen-games-podcast-interview/), and Badger for suggesting the specifics.<br />
** Note that Lone Wolf flagships have also had their seeding locations updated in an analagous but not identical fashion<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette damage 340 -> 280, stack damage multiplier 3x - > 2x.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tank augmented weapon range 8,000 -> 10,100, base damage multiplier 2x -> 3x, visual changed to a red laser pulse.<br />
<br />
* Removed Fusion Bombers damage bonus improving with Mark.<br />
** The bonus was only meant for them to automatically target anything with enough shields to be worth bypassing.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette damage 96 -> 130.<br />
<br />
* Kite now uses the same damage as the Concussion Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod damage 100 -> 125.<br />
<br />
==== Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Ripper reload time 3s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate damage 20,000 -> 24,000.<br />
<br />
==== Outguard ====<br />
<br />
* Removed Hacking cost of hiring Outguard.<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased base values of Outguard strength.<br />
<br />
* Those Outguard groups that did not have a Flagship now do.<br />
<br />
* Some Outguard groups can be hired twice rather than once.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate beams max targets 30 -> 10, damage 5,000 -> 7,500, reload time 2s -> 1s.<br />
** Same DPS as before, but more likely to hit enough targets to get all of it. Fire rate offsets the occasional beam that mostly misses.<br />
** This appears to be a somewhat decent improvement.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed 600 -> 1,000, AIP cost 20 -> 15, hull 750,000 -> 1,250,000.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse weapon damage 2,500 -> 4,500.<br />
<br />
* Railcannon weapon damage 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Golems ====<br />
<br />
* Note: AI Golems are currently untouched. There is very little data on them currently - most feedback is about the player ones, which the below concern.<br />
<br />
* AIP cost (for non Lone Wolves) 20 -> 15.<br />
<br />
* Golem Speed 600 -> 1,000, Black Widow Golem speed 1,000 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem main weapon damage 2,000 -> 5,000, Sabot damage 3,000 -> 8,000, total durability 2,500,000 -> 4,000,000.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem reload time 9s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Regenerator Golem shots per salvo 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem shots per salvo 20 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 2,000 -> 3,000, hull 1,000,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem hull 1,800,000 -> 2,800,000, damage 350 -> 800, range of both weapon and tractor beams 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Hive Golem has 300 Yellow Jackets, up from 250.<br />
<br />
==== Arks ====<br />
<br />
* AIP cost 15 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos range 5,600 -> 9,000, Parasite Bolt damage 900 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira forcefield size increased 25%, damage 7,000 -> 15,000, shields 1,250,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Ark One shots per salvo 20 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Gryn now launches Saboteur, Decoy and Scrap drones. Also produces some energy.<br />
<br />
=== Expansion and Mod Loading Work ===<br />
<br />
* XMLLoadingOrder.txt, which lets you specify the loading order of mods that you choose to install, has been updated with some notes on exactly how that's intended to work.<br />
** They read: <br />
*** //note that this is for determining the order that mods are loaded.<br />
*** //any mods not specified in here will be loaded in alphabetical order according to the OS.<br />
*** //the base game content, and then the expansions in numerical order, are ALWAYS loaded first.<br />
*** //to add an mod to your mod order list, just place them each on a single line here.<br />
*** //unless a mod depends on another mod, you don't even need to do that, though. Usually mods don't touch each other.<br />
<br />
* The game now handles mod loading slightly differently, in that it makes a central table of all the mods that it finds in the XmlMods folder and allows for other parts of the game to reference them as-needed later.<br />
** Overall we're not doing TOO much with this yet, but it does make things faster.<br />
** As part of this, the actual xml mod loading order is now handled far better, and doesn't require loading the same file over and over again dozens of times.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoPostInitializationAndSortingLogic method onto ArcenDynamicTable, which allows us to do things like export the list of installed mods.<br />
<br />
* As part of the boot sequence for the game, it now logs which mods are installed, and in what order. This is pretty useful for any debugging that anyone might need to do.<br />
** It also lists all of the expansions that it's aware of, and if they are installed or not.<br />
<br />
* Under the hood since the start of the project, we've had the ability to have expansions that are enabled or disabled in worlds. This has now been fleshed out with our modern requirements for it, though.<br />
<br />
* Some various old parts of the code under the hood were still assuming that we could sometimes reload some of the xml after initial game load (that's never been true in this game, what a mess that always was when we tried it).<br />
** Some also assumed that we would use the old-style Language localization files, which gave false hope for localization to anyone poring through the code and also had a mild waste of time in there.<br />
** All of this has been cleaned out.<br />
<br />
* When there are exceptions in processing in the xml from the base game, an expansion, or a mod, it's now a lot clearer what the file is and some other bits of data about it.<br />
<br />
* In the folder for any expansion, there is an "ExpansionInstallation.txt" file. Removing that will cause the game to act as if the expansion isn't there, which is useful for testing.<br />
** In past games, we called that Version.txt, but this is a less confusing name. <br />
<br />
* Mods are now automatically loaded -- in whatever order -- simply by existing in the XmlMods folder. You can override their order by using the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file as noted above, but they'll automatically load in alpha order without that requirement.<br />
** However, there is also now a new file called "ModIsDisabled.txt" that can be placed in the folder of each mod. If it is there, then the mod will not load EVEN IF it is in the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file. This is basically a way to make really super sure that the example mods don't load without someone wanting them to.<br />
** The fact that mods are auto-loaded makes them a lot easier to install just by dragging and dropping them.<br />
<br />
* Several example mods had really outdated bits that made them unable to load. Those have now been cleaned up a bit.<br />
<br />
* A lot of subtle changes have been made in the code to how expansions and mods are loaded, which gives them more capabilities than before in things like overwriting core constants or adding to them, etc.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.007 The Player/AI Arms Race Intensifies ==<br />
(Released November 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* You can now see the number of empty slots in your fleet in the fleet management screen, and you can swap other things IN to the empty slot of a fleet, rather than having to go to the other location and swap them OUT only.<br />
** This is the more natural workflow in a lot of cases, and now both workflows are possible at any rate.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== AI Reserves: Anti-Deepstriking ====<br />
<br />
* Add new AI Reserves, basically an HRF for the AI against deepstriking players. The response strength is greater at higher difficulties and the further away from one of your planets you are. Will not trigger unless you are more than 3 hops from your planets.<br />
** Once arrived, AI Reserves are limited to that planet and will hang out for a few minutes, then vanish again.<br />
** It shouldn't trigger easily on Flagships in transport mode, only once you deploy the units.<br />
*** As with all new code, there will probably be a need for some QoL improvements once people have figured out what's fun/frustrating about them<br />
<br />
* Added a new "auto_add_one_of_faction_if_missing_on_save_load" xml tag on factions that allows us to automatically add the AI Reserve into existing quick starts if they weren't already there.<br />
** We definitely don't want to be in a position for constantly recreating the quick starts every time we add a new under-the-hood-always-there faction.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Tweak the logic that calculates the hacking cost increase for a number of hacking types to make the increase less aggressive<br />
** This had already been done for the science extraction hacking, but I hadn't also updated the generic cost increase function because we weren't using it until very recently<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The following hacks no longer get more expensive (in hacking points) based on repeated attempts:<br />
** Neutral Planet Science Extraction<br />
** Grant Technology<br />
** Convert Tech Vault to Science<br />
** Grant Ship Line<br />
** Convert ARS to Science<br />
** Double Ship Line Cap<br />
** At this point, most of the things that increase with repeat usages are things that are hackinng something that you can also get the benefit of via capturing, or covert science extraction, etc.<br />
** It's useful to have some things increase with repeat usages, but for a lot of the main goodies that are on the map that you can ONLY get via hacking, having them increase that way felt punitive.<br />
<br />
* Most of the very common hacks have had their durations reduced from 120-300 seconds to more like 30-120 seconds instead.<br />
** Given things happen once-per-second as hacking progresses, this was a bit on the punishing side for sure.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of players on Steam for pointing out how much harder this had made things, not in a fun way.<br />
<br />
* There is now an increase in hacking times required based on the highest difficulty of any AI faction in the game you're playing (living or dead).<br />
** This only applies to hacks that take more than 5 seconds to begin with.<br />
** On difficulty 5 and down, it's the same as it always has been (with the new nerfs in placing making it far less than it used to be, actually).<br />
** On diff 6, it's now multiplied by 1.25x.<br />
** Diff 7 is 1.5x (so an ARS hack is 45 seconds here instead of the new 30, still better than the older 120 of the last two builds).<br />
** Diff 8 is 2x, diff 9 is 3x, diff 10 is 4x.<br />
** This should help put in some nice gradation for people who feel like hacking should be on the harder side with people on other difficulties not getting absolutely stomped by them.<br />
** Thanks to various discussions on the steam forums making it clear that different people expected/wanted a different amount of hassle out of these, and this led to us feeling like it needed to vary by AI difficulty. A harder-to-hack higher-difficulty AI is super thematically appropriate, anyway.<br />
<br />
==== Economy ====<br />
<br />
* Cheapened the metal cost of Transport Flagships to around 27% of previous.<br />
** An unwelcome penalty for constructing empty Flagships for unit groups, as well as repairing them.<br />
<br />
* 25% increase in Engineer repair rate.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of rare exceptions that could happen based on copying orders from one entity to another after it had already been returned to the pool or otherwise been made invalid. Was something that could happen during stack splits, evidently.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting; it seems he has ridiculously bad luck in getting more exceptions than anyone.<br />
<br />
* The save and load menus now have better sized and spaced text, so long names no longer overlap the stats about them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of cross-threading exceptions that could be hit if the waves composition changed while you were iterating over them.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The "Danger! CurrentFrameNumber changed" error message has been removed from the game and won't bother people anymore.<br />
** This was exceedingly rare for most people, but common for a few specific people. The best theory on this is that these people had exceedingly fast CPU cores, because on inspection of this code it was actually able to detect an "improper" state change that was really just "unlikely but fine." All of the improper cases would have been a lot more common to see, and seen across many clients. In this case it seems to have been a race condition between "work's done" and "make sure the frame didn't change," which were happening on a nanosecond scale.<br />
** The worst case with someone having this change in an actual problematic way would be a multiplayer desync of some varying severity, but given that we already have network desync repair planned as a core key feature this isn't exactly a big deal. Originally this was also code that was defensively checking to see about single-player cross-threading issues, but those are all long-since fixed (2+ years ago).<br />
** Basically this was a case of some false positive popping up in interrupting you for no good reason if your processor was fast enough.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exceptionally rare error that could happen with multiple ships pulling the same order out of the pool if your machine is just really too excellent at multithreading for some reason. Now instead of complaining at you, it just fixes itself. Originally the complain-at-you code was in case we made some code mistakes that would cause this, but the rarity of this error pretty much shows we don't have any such errors. But man, cross-threading stuff on a few particular machines really is popping out some interesting cases.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where astro train depots weren't tracking the number of trains that arrived between save/reload. Whoops.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* When you load a quick start, it now sets the first player name to be whatever your local profile's name is, and then the ones after that (if any) become "Player 2," "Player 3," etc.<br />
** This solves a lot of the underlying names still being "Puffin" or various people who contributed quick starts.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.006 Freedom Of Fleet Line Combination ==<br />
(Released November 7th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== The Ability To Have Duplicate Ship Lines In One Fleet ===<br />
<br />
* The game now allows for duplicate ship lines in a single fleet. This was something that people REALLY wanted, and we get why, but it was a tricky technical thing. Our first idea for this today wasn't valid for multiplayer it turned out, but thankfully we came up with something that is.<br />
** This also includes the ability for initial fleet designs to add more than one copy of a fleet line to itself, whereas before it would just combine them. So you could have two bomber lines in a single fleet design now, for example.<br />
** Note that this will NOT work for drones in fleets at the moment. Those can't be swapped around by players anyway, and there didn't seem to be any reason to make this part work. It could be extended later if we really need to, but it seemed pointless.<br />
** Only the player mobile fleets have this new ability. Command stations, NPC fleets, battlestations/citadels, and so forth all still combine their fleet lines if the type matches. Those can't be swapped around, and it makes much more sense for them to work like they always have.<br />
** It's possible there may be some bugs with this (mainly of the sort of something not building when it's a secondary ship line in a fleet, or things not being able to swap properly when there are duplicate lines), but if so please do report those to us and bear with us.<br />
** Thanks to nas1m, Asteroid, and many others for requesting this -- rather forcefully at times in the case of some steam reviewers or folks on discord, but we got the message. This was tricky as heck to implement, and may cause a few bugs for a bit, but it's clear how important this is to people.<br />
<br />
* When hacking for dark spire ships, it now always puts each new ship you get in its own ship line rather than ever adding to an existing line.<br />
** Additionally, it checks to make sure you have enough empty slots before it will work.<br />
<br />
* Dyson hacks seem to have been assuming that you'll increase the ship cap on existing lines, so for now we've left that working as it always has.<br />
<br />
* ARSes now CAN grant duplicate ship lines to a fleet, and instead of merging they now stay as separate ship lines.<br />
<br />
* Doing a hack to double the cap of a ship line SHOULD work properly in cases where you have multiple ship lines inside a single fleet, only doubling one of them and then allowing the other one to be doubled later if you want.<br />
** This needs testing, though, as it was kind of complicated.<br />
<br />
==== New Bomber Starting Fleet ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Bomber Fleet as a starting option, which includes two different identical lines of Fusion Bombers, plus also Parasitic Bombers. This helps to highlight the fact that you can have very-thematic fleets for anyone just perusing these things from the lobby, so that hopefully this is a teaching moment.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the tooltip showing the number of ships an ARS granted didn't factor in Mark Level increases. Note it still doesn't factor in any additional multipliers like ICGs<br />
<br />
* Fixed some more Frigates being seeded as Strike options in ARS.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an ArgumentOutOfRangeException that could happen in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations P2 because of a race condition. It's harmless and no longer puts up an error message in your face.<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a pretty nasty memory leak that could happen around planned metal flows, particularly given that they were being used from a single pool but for two different threading areas.<br />
** This was something that would affect things even when the metal flows UI wasn't open, because of race conditions between two threads. It was also causing some errors and other race conditions in general, all of which are now fixed.<br />
** It was a very unusual sort of situation with a very special-case data structure (the time-based pool), and that was just... really an edge case thing. It also was not really causing errors or a memory leak in all cases, even though it was in some. Why it would be particularly severe for the one player who reported it, while nobody else had crashes related to this, is mildly baffling. But that's the nature of race conditions for you, honestly.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of memory leaks and other things that caused excessive memory churn while actively viewing the metal flows interface. These were things that would be given back to the player and thus not truly a memory leak in general; it was leaking on the heap and then coming back later.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The last of the memory-leaky-type things related to metal flows is now fixed. This one was introduced possibly as far back as September 2018 by Chris, or possibly more recently when changing another bit of code to make a copy per list instead of having a reference in another list. At any rate, we were creating a metric ton of extra metal flow data that was then getting churned out of the memory pool by the garbage collector, and generally wasting some CPU time and efficiency. Now things properly get returned to the pool.<br />
** On the metal flows screen, there is still some climbing RAM that you see for a while, but then it stabilizes and eventually drops. That seems to be mostly related to temporarily cached sprite quads being used by TextMeshPro, and with such large amounts of text that changes frequently that's probably unavoidable. It's not a true memory leak anymore, and doesn't spike more than something like 60mb at peak in our current tests, where it was hundreds of mb in the same tests previously.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the Threat tooltip to say that the Visible Threat reported is only from Watched planets<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx of reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a couple of changes that may fix custom flagships being placed at a higher mark level than their base should be if the planet they are on is a higher mark.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an invisible nullref exception that could happen on quitting the game program in some rare circumstances.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Show Fleet Ship Line Numbers" settings option to the Debug section that is for helping us root out problems with multiple ship lines of the same type within a fleet.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen inside LazyLoadSquadWrapper when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare indexing exception that could happen inside GetEntityByID when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Phenomphear for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Reduced firepower and health of Instigator and Warden Fleet Bases.<br />
** People liked it when shown the values before the release, but it seems to have caused issues elsewhere. For deepstriking defense, probably need to be another method.<br />
** Also lowered the range a tad of both and removed the forcefield from the Warden Fleet Base.<br />
<br />
* Upped Parasite damage slightly, doubled the zombification damage amount.<br />
** So now they zombify in 5 shots, and 1 at MK7.<br />
<br />
* Bumped up starting metal storage to the maximum value.<br />
<br />
* Home Human Settlements gain 260 metal per mark, up from 120.<br />
<br />
* Reduced metal cost of Plasma Turrets and Beam Cannons by half.<br />
<br />
* Human Home Command metal income 900 - > 2,200, increase by 400 per mark.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations now benefit from the Citadel Technology.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Citadel Tech from 3,000/4,500/6,000 to 2,000/3,000/4,000.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Sentries Tech from 1000/1500/2000/2500 to 500/750/1000/1250.<br />
<br />
* Watchman Frigate energy usage 7,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.005 Answering Your Top Requests ==<br />
(Released November 5th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some code to dump the current state of the Hunter Fleets in threat popup display window. Only enabled with the Debug_Tooltip setting. <br />
** Intended for debugging/internal testing.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Line And Count Revisions ===<br />
<br />
* There are now a maximum of 5 ship lines (other than drones, things like hydra heads, and the fleet leaders) that any fleet can have. Previously it was 6 for some fleets, 7 for others.<br />
** This applies to the ARS and other ships.<br />
** This is defined in central xml so that we can tune it if need be.<br />
<br />
* ALL strike fleets are now considered to have 5x slots for strikecraft and frigates, and their "empty slots" are no longer a "physical thing" (people reporting oddness on how these custom fleets worked will know what this means).<br />
** This lets you take any fleet that you capture and swap stuff around so that it has a full 5 slots of stuff on it, which is really handy.<br />
** This also makes the interface for empty slots a lot more condensed and easy to read when you're swapping something else to them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an oversight that was causing players to be able to build more than a single copy of each of the empty flagships in the game.<br />
** This in turn caused various issues, such as trying to move empty slots between two Stealth Alpha fleets would not work, etc. That was never supposed to let you have more than one in the first place! Go figure.<br />
<br />
==== ARS Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* You are no longer allowed to hack an ARS for a ship line if that fleet already has the ship line<br />
** If there is any way to merge ship lines then people will want full ability to merge/split ship lines, which is not something Chris wants to allow. So for consistency's sake, this is being removed.<br />
** Fleet Capacity Extenders have been added as a replacement for this mechanic, and those are both clearer as well as being WAY more powerful.<br />
<br />
* When you find an ARS, it now works much differently. Rather than having just ONE ship type available at it, it has five. It will always have 4 strikecraft and 1 frigate type.<br />
** When you click the "Grant Ship Line" hack on the ARS, it no longer just does the hack -- instead, a new popout sidebar window appears, asking you which of the lines you wish to have granted to the fleet in question.<br />
** This shows you the fleet in question, what ships it has, and reds out any options that are invalid for that particular fleet because they happen to be invalid.<br />
** This gives you a TON more control over how you grow your fleets via ARS, without you having to do a bunch of expenditures of hacking points on re-rolls of the ARS.<br />
** This also gives us the framework for having hacks in general that let you make a sub-choice in them after choosing to do the hack itself, which is a powerful new ability for hacks. We'll be using this again super soon for upgrading specific ship line ship caps in a fleet via a new structure.<br />
** The fact that there are five options now is reflected in the text and will affect existing savegames.<br />
<br />
* If you DO choose to re-roll an ARS, it will give you five fresh ships. They may or may not have overlap with the prior batch or with your current fleet's contents.<br />
<br />
==== The Arrival Of Fleet Capacity Extenders ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new structure that you can find throughout the galaxy in new savegames: Fleet Capacity Extender<br />
** Hacking this structure doubles the ship cap for one of the fleetship types belonging to the Fleet that did the hacking (your choice as to which type).<br />
** This DOES show up in existing quick starts, but won't seed in savegames you're actively playing.<br />
** This new structure essentially is a far-more-powerful version of the secondary function that people used to like on ARSes (that we removed in this build).<br />
*** The fact that it was confusing to merge ship lines via the ARS was a good reason to remove that function, but this new structure is more powerful and doesn't have the strangeness of being a sometimes-thing. It always works like it works.<br />
** About the same number of these are seeded as ARSes, except not one on the adjacent planet to your start. The richness of what you can conquer is now a lot higher.<br />
<br />
* To prevent a lot of exploits that people would have started doing immediately, the upgrades from Fleet Capacity Extenders can no longer be applied to the same ship line in the same fleet more than once.<br />
<br />
==== Custom Fleet Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* The custom fleets, which previously had a max cap of 7, now only have a max cap of 5 like everything else.<br />
** It's possible that these fleets, or other fleets that got upgrades to 6 from an ARS, are over the new cap in old savegames. That won't harm anything.<br />
<br />
* Rather than having 9 explicit custom fleets (three regular, three cloaked, three speedy), the game now has a single type of custom fleet (regular) that you can build 9 of.<br />
** This makes the menu way less overwhelming down in the custom fleets section, and it doesn't give any special fleet leaders (speedy or cloaked) that are better than what you find out in the galaxy.<br />
<br />
=== EXP Revamp And Spending Science To Upgrade Specific Planets ===<br />
<br />
* The non-turret defenses, and command stations in general, no longer get mark levels based on EXP going up on their fleets.<br />
<br />
* Mobile player offensive fleets are still able to gain EXP like they always have been, and in the main it is still very useless for most of them (since only their flagships upgrade, for the most part; very useful for things with a powerful flagship but otherwise not much).<br />
** Note that this will get more useful in the future as we start adding in perks for these types of fleets that will affect other ships as you level up. That's just a TBD item.<br />
** The goal with these is still to have a bit of that flair of "hero stuff" that people have been asking for since the early days of AI War 1. We're proceeding somewhat cautiously with it, keeping it more on the useless end of the spectrum rather than something that takes over the game.<br />
<br />
* All the other kind of fleets are no longer able to gain EXP at all. This means battlestations and command stations, mainly, for you.<br />
** This was, by contrast, super duper useful to the point of being an absurd exploit. But it also wasn't a fun thing, requiring grinding rather than actual strategy of any sort.<br />
** This was one of the really big ways that people could force a victory far faster than they should have been able to, and really mess up the economy of things.<br />
** Existing savegames will lose all their unspent EXP, but WILL keep their existing added levels from this source, simply because a ton of games would have economies in the toilet without these levels remaining for now. But those savegames with leveled-up command stations are definitely overpowered in the player's favor, now.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting and inspiring this and many of the other related changes here.<br />
<br />
* When calculating how many fleets there are on a planet for EXP penalty purposes, it now ONLY counts mobile player fleets. It DOES include support fleets, but not battlestations/citadels, and not command stations.<br />
** So this is something that makes it so that you're penalized a lot less rapidly for having many fleets on a planet.<br />
** For the "max mark level" calculation that it does, it's now only based on the mark level of the mobile offensive fleets, too.<br />
<br />
* A new button has been added in place of the fleet EXP stuff for planetary (command station) type fleets. It's hovertext reads:<br />
** Planetary fleets can be upgraded (all ships within them) by directly spending science. This can be a very science-cost-effective way to get more metal income or energy production.<br />
** Changing the type of command station you're using, or losing the planet and recapturing it, won't cause you to lose your upgrades on this planet.<br />
<br />
* By clicking the above button, you can spend science in a whole new way an upgrade ALL the ships within the planetary fleet by one mark level (regardless of whether normally those would have been upgraded by EXP -- this isn't EXP, and you're paying science for it).<br />
** The cost is pretty cheap for the first added mark, at only 1000 science. The next is 3k, then 6k, then on to the absurd with 9k, 18k, and 36k. So you CAN upgrade one of your planets like crazy if you really want to, but it's prohibitively expensive to do so.<br />
** All of this gives you a lot more flexibility and allows you to do spot-upgrades for purposes of getting a better economy of having better defenses at a location.<br />
** This is pretty important for high level play with the removal of the EXP for command stations (and battlestations/citadels, although they aren't gaining the science unlock ability).<br />
** We may need to tweak the costs of these at some point to think about if we want the first upgrade to be even cheaper, to really tempt you. It's hard to say if this is tempting enough, as we want you to have strong defenses but be weighing that against the more generalized science expenditures that benefit offense AND defense. This of course also benefits your economy in a major way, so we may have to revisit how much more metal generators and the command stations generate as their mark levels go up if we reduce the science costs here. We shall see. For now, conservative steps. Anyone who isn't already a fairly advanced player may not even notice the difference here.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Teams ===<br />
<br />
* It is now possible for minor factions to have alliances amongst themselves to take down the Player and AI. In the game lobby, several factions can now join "Team Red", "Team Green" or "Team Blue". All factions on the same Team are allied against everyone else in the game.<br />
** Supported minor factions: Marauders, Nanocaust, Devourer, Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart to "Fun With Factions" demonstrating this mechanic<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Toggling objective importance is now done with a Right Click. Left click keeps the old behaviour (usually centering you on the planet in question)<br />
** This was suggested by a few people on discord I think? I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* Fix a surprising bug where the AI wasn't correctly generating threat when attacked by a player if the respective strength ratios were within certain ranges.<br />
** This might have some actual balance implications<br />
*** Thanks to zeus for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Death effect damage is no longer a strangely high number. Actually, this change allows for a lot more diversification in how effective units are at applying it. The start of this is done, with more tuning to follow.<br />
** This is most likely a somewhat large shift in the balance of it, which feels a tad necessary? Quite a few stories of mass hordes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference when calculating energy usage<br />
** Reported by Edmaniac<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the experimental pursuit mode implementation that could cause issues in "normal" mode where your units would not shoot at things properly.<br />
** Reported by a number of people<br />
<br />
* Structures that are under construction shouldn't generate AIP anymore if killed<br />
** reported by Chthon and zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Fix some confusion about killing reconquest command stations if you haven't paid the AIP price for that planet yet. It now correctly charges you AIP and lets you scout. The tooltip for such a reconquest command station tells you what's happening<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Destablilize Exogalactice Wormhole hack wasn't correctly killing the wormhole<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for the bug report<br />
<br />
* On particularly large maps (> 120 planets), increase the places that Officer Fleets are allowed to spawn<br />
<br />
* Fix an exciting bug where AOE shots with > 10 potential targets were doing 10% damage to each potential target. So if there were 20 targets each taking 10% damage, that's 200% of allowed damage done. 50 targets would be 500% damage.<br />
** This was particularly obvious for high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AOE shots were doing too much damage when killing lots of stacked units<br />
** Again obvious with high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Reported by Puffin<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with the tooltip on Alarm Posts; it had the ratios reversed<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow marauders to build outposts if the significantly outnumber the enemy; this prevents a single cloaked ship from stymying them.<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make the Cloaking hovertext a bit more obvious with colour<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the tooltip for uncaptured flagships where it was showing the Strength if all its units were at level 1, instead of reflecting your actual mark levels<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the bug report<br />
<br />
* In the science screen, the Ship Types You Could Capture now show the mark level for that ship line<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Your ships will now target down Eyes automatically in pursuit mode, once you've disabled their invulnerability<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The Objective tooltip for an ARS now shows the ship line in the colour of the mark level you have for it<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for reporting<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for a notification of a wave against one of your planets now tells you your defensive strength. <br />
** Suggested by NB_FlankStrike<br />
<br />
* Improve the tooltip for hacks that increase the cost for the next hack of that type to improve clarity<br />
** I think someone on steam got confused about this<br />
<br />
* Maybe improve the spacing for the X map. No promises.<br />
** Thanks to gigastar and cthonic_one for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Slight tweaks to the AIP hovertext to improve readability<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where several minor-faction specific hacks were not showing the hacking points used correctly in the hacking log<br />
** Thanks to Interloper for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of the distribution node hovertext<br />
** Suggested by Cyber-Kun<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for an upgrade in the Science Menu now tells you approximately how much Strength increase there would be to your fleets<br />
** Thanks to donblas and Phenomphear for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference related to the Spire Objective<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip to explain about automatically building engineers and factories and so on.<br />
** From a comment by donblas<br />
<br />
* Hovering over a save game in the Load menu will tell you how many times that save game has been loaded. So if you're stuck at a particularly hard spot then you'll get some feedback as to how hard it is<br />
<br />
* The intel tab entries for the hacks for the tech vault and the ARS and the FCE are now three different colors, so that you can tell them apart at a glance if you have a huge galaxy completely explored. This way you can see at a glance what is what, now that it's sorting (rightfully so) by how easy or hard it is to get to each one.<br />
<br />
* Any sidebar build items that would be uncategorized are now invisible instead. These are assumed to be things that exist for legacy purposes but that we don't want to build.<br />
** It sometimes also winds up including random stuff like gravitic battlestations or whatnot that could be constructed but should not have been.<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, it no longer shows the ship cap for command stations (that was spurious, anyway).<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, for flagships that you can construct it now shows the total of that kind that you have in the galaxy as well as what the galaxy count is for them.<br />
<br />
==== Instigator Polish ====<br />
<br />
* Instigators now have a permanent notification (like wave notifications)<br />
** Note this reuses the Wormhole Invasion icon for the notification for the moment<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Instigators no longer show a Cumulative Effect, just a description of what the effect does and how many times it has fired.<br />
** The units for Cumulative Effect weren't meaningful to anyone who wasn't a developer, and it just confused people<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the ship-spawning instigator base had a bunch of decimal points in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for bringing this to my attention<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Zombification no longer works on Dyson ships, Dire Guardians and such things. It was kindof OP.<br />
** The old behaviour can be enabled as a Galaxy Setting<br />
<br />
* Different AI Difficulties now increase the mark level at different AIP amounts. As a result of this, different AIs can be at different mark levels.<br />
** Suggested by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* The Hunter and Warden fleets now get decloaking ships, in the hopes of preventing permanent scouting by cloaked units<br />
** From a discussion on discord I think?<br />
<br />
* If your fleet outnumbers the AI "enough" on a planet then all the Guard Posts will release their ships so the ships can run away<br />
<br />
* Allow units spawned from Guard Posts to run away more quickly from an overwhelming attack<br />
<br />
* Buffed Astro Train durability and damage a bit, albedo 0.3 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Increased self construction rate of Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon reload time 4s -> 6s, damage 1,810 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Gave Forcefield Frigates the same priority as Forcefield Generators.<br />
** So the AI will ignore it in general if there are unprotected targets to go after.<br />
** Might cause a weird thing with Siphoners, but see how it goes?<br />
<br />
* Increased Hull Tech cost by 2,500.<br />
<br />
* Increased durability of things like Raid Engines, Alarm Posts, Data Centers, and Co Processors.<br />
<br />
* Major Data Center only reduces AIP by 60, and increases by 90 on death.<br />
<br />
* Increased chance of wormhole Tachyon Sentinels.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now has Pulsar Tanks in place of MLRS Corvettes, and Vanguards in place of Grenade Launcher Corvettes. Also removed 1 of the starting Siege Frigates.<br />
** This Fleet had an issue in that it had crazy synergy, with it being mostly Splash and Heavy Tech, plus not really fitting the Doorkicker name much. Both Pulsars and Vanguards have Doorkicker like abilities, and since these units can properly attack single targets, 1 Siege Frigate can be safely removed without impacting the Fleet too much, as these were apparently their own issue.<br />
<br />
* AIP Floor is now increased by 35% of AIP gain, up from 20%.<br />
<br />
* Metabolizing Gangsaw engine_gx 14 -> 13.<br />
<br />
* Reduced minimum and maximum unit type counts in the more thematic Fleets (i.e the ones with mass Fusion Bombers).<br />
** Incredibly synergistic inherently, with far more units in general too.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the count of some of the "flat upgrade" units, like Heavy and Parasitic Fusion Bombers.<br />
<br />
* Buffed the damage output of most of the normal Guard Posts as well as a few of the Dire.<br />
<br />
==== Economy And Engineering ====<br />
<br />
* Drastically reduced the assist construction and repair rate of Engineers.<br />
** It was possible for these to eventually end up assisting Factories to absurd amounts - actually a good bit more than the Factory.<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvesters income 80 -> 60, amount gained per mark 40 -> 30.<br />
** This might not be enough, come to think of it. Player unit costs never increase unlike Classic, which means late game costs to rebuild after a fleetwipe are pretty low compared to here, leading to the below "slapping" event.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station income gained per mark 400 -> 150.<br />
** While the player does have less income, the rate at which it can be spent is also much lower, so it's likely the player would start to noticeably lose a battle and retreat a good while before depleting their reserves.<br />
** Also, while we don't want people to be sitting around for ages waiting after a fleetwipe for it to replenish, it was also rather silly that you could do things like, to quote someone "Bleed out the praetorian guard by slapping it with wads of cash".<br />
<br />
* Reduced energy cost of Turrets a bit.<br />
<br />
==== Eyes ====<br />
<br />
* Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships<br />
** This makes Eyes pretty useless against minor factions. Unclear what (if anything) should be done about that.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid.<br />
<br />
* Eyes are now MK7.<br />
** Mostly important for the Ion Eye.<br />
<br />
* Tripled range of Plasma Eye.<br />
** Is now planet wide range, like the Ion Eye. No more sneaking about out of range.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Eye damage tripled, max targets hit before spreading damage reduced to a third.<br />
** Means it can focus a lot more on single targets than before.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now works on albedo of 0.4.<br />
** Yes, this means it can target most Frigates now. Eyes check Fleets, and not units, so this is possible. Also lets it target a few more Strikecraft.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now has splash damage on each shot. Radius of 1,000, hitting 5 targets.<br />
** Done this way instead of just increasing shot count, as that many shots could be a bit too bright and painful to look at. Simple enough to change.<br />
<br />
* Both Eyes now have tachyon systems.<br />
<br />
==== Flagships ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly reduced Transport Flagship priority.<br />
** AI should focus more on killing the actual combat units around rather than chasing an unarmed ship and getting shot to bits during it.<br />
** Combined with the far weaker Engineers reducing the fleet replenishment rate to more...reasonable speeds, hopefully this prevents a lot of attritioning?<br />
<br />
* Reduced durability of Transport Flagships.<br />
** Mostly applicable during deepstrikes.<br />
<br />
* Differentiated the Transport Flagship types:<br />
** Normal ones are the same (including the above).<br />
** Cloaked ones are now a good bit slower.<br />
** Fast ones now have less health.<br />
<br />
* Ships unloaded from a transport now have a delay before firing.<br />
** Hopefully should make the "Unload units, snipe target, load again, run away" strategy less OP. Further changes may be necessary.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Hacks now define if they work based on the closest hacker or not, using a new tag use_closest_hacker_for_check.<br />
** Before it was inferring if it should do that, which was potentially going to be confusing down the line.<br />
<br />
* A variety of bugfixes and improvements to the internal hacking logic.<br />
<br />
* Flagships now move much more slowly when hacking<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting that you could just run away from the nanocaust hack response<br />
<br />
* Increased Cost of Intra-Galactic-Coordinator Hack (120 if owe AIP, 60 without).<br />
<br />
* More hacks now have an escalating cost to them (1.2x what it was last time).<br />
<br />
* Shortened and cheapened the Ion Cannon and Mass Driver hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased cost of Grant Ship Line and Grant Tech hacks.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully increased the difficulty of the Super Terminal.<br />
** This seriously'll need more feedback. There are so many variables in it that whatever test games Puffin has is probably missing something else.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Convert ARS to Science.<br />
<br />
* Some minor duration changes to a few.<br />
<br />
* Added Exo-Waves on completion to a few hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased response strength of quite a few AI hacks.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.003 Sortable Objectives ==<br />
(Released October 28th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where ARS hacks were allowing you to get 7 ship lines instead of 6<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix an OBOB where we were reporting inconsistent stack numbers in the hover entity info text<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* New installations of the game now save 3 autosaves instead of 1<br />
** Suggested by yupyip<br />
<br />
* Flagships in Hold Fire Mode no longer deploy drones<br />
** SUggested by CWW256 on discord<br />
<br />
* Clicking on an Objective will now tag it with an Importance. Clicking once makes an Objective High importance, putting it at the top of the displayed list. Clicking again will make it Low importance, putting that objective at the bottom. Clicking a third time makes it Normal.<br />
** Suggested by Greeniguana<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to hoverEntity and fix a possible null reference<br />
** Thanks to kerzain for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tutorial 4 now mentions you can hover on the AIP amount on the top bar for some more information.<br />
** Thanks to Potkeny in Discord for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology hack now mentions not increasing the cost of unlocking it with Science.<br />
<br />
* Hack Intra-Galactic Coordinator and Hack Global Command Augmenter now note exactly what the reduced cost is if you have paid the AIP cost for that planet.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Science resource bit at the top now has the same blue colour for all the amounts, rather than being a light green, so it's consistent with every other mention.<br />
<br />
* Metal section of the top bar now has actual proper colouring.<br />
<br />
* Cost to fully extract all the science from a planet is now in green, like most hacks are.<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Sabotage Hack now mentions it doesn't cause an AIP increase for destroying structures which would normally do so.<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved the Experience tooltip information to have the correct logic and perhaps read a little bit better.<br />
<br />
* The "Ally to AI" setting description now explicitly says that all player-allied factions are also allied.<br />
** From a discussion with Astra on discord<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Hacking resource hovertext on the top bar now has the hacking point amounts in green rather than a red.<br />
<br />
* AIP hovertext on the top bar has some minor colour additions, as well as an explanation of what the AIP Floor actually is, as well as stating reduction is never wasted.<br />
** Thanks to Nuc_Temeron, Halfshell cat, right01, amblingalong and Pexpy in Steam Discussion for prompting this.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines now show on the galaxy map.<br />
** Suggested by gigastar in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Hunter Waves option is renamed to Threat Waves, and description updated to be clearer.<br />
** They never actually joined the Hunter Fleet immediately - they were threat, so it was rather in error.<br />
<br />
* Added some information about how threat is generated, and it eventually joining the Hunter Fleet to the info displayed by hovering over the top bar area.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Decoy Drone damage halved, tripled build time, health reduced 25%.<br />
** Puffin was finding these were a bit absurd in extended practice. More testing required.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology Hack cost increased to 20.<br />
<br />
* The Engineer and Factory changes from previous, as those were missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.002 ARSes, Instigators, and Tech Vaults, Oh My ==<br />
(Released October 25th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* ALL of these changes are thanks to Badger and Puffin. Chris was working on the world's longest AMA for some reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/dmhlu6/ama_i_am_chris_park_founder_of_arcen_games_and/<br />
<br />
* Add some new Quick Starts by community member zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Experimental Targeting Change<br />
** Under Galaxy Settings -> Units there's now a setting to enable/disable a new pursuit mode.<br />
** This mode makes ships prefer to kill all nearby units before moving on; hopefully it will make Drones less apt to go aggro guard posts everywhere.<br />
*** Looking for player feedback on this<br />
*** This also will affect the way AI ships will fight, so I'm loooking for feedback on that aspect as well<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagships now cost very little energy.<br />
** This was originally so they would be hurt more by Nucleophilic units, but you can usually just micro them around and that's...not really fun or interesting. So just greatly reduce it, since you were otherwise being penalised for using the custom ones.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and seemingly others for bringing up.<br />
<br />
* The Human Resistance Fighters now help less often in battles, so it feels more rare/special when they do. They also can't go back to a planet for at least 15 minutes after their last time there.<br />
** I forget who asked for this (sorry). They used to attack about 60% of the time, now it's more like 30%<br />
<br />
* Macrophages now need more metal to do things on Hostile To Players Only mode. Also decrease base telium income when that telium has harvesters on the map; harvesting should be the primary form of income<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Crippled flagships now have a 5 minute delay until they are eligible to be repaired. This is to make crippling a Bigger Deal in battles where you might have engineers<br />
** Note that taking the crippled flagship out of combat (ie to another planet where there are no enemies) will reset the repair delay<br />
*** From a discussion about flagships on discord<br />
<br />
* Engineers and Combat Engineers have less health, and are also much higher target priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories are much higher priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a few problems with quickstarts<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Dark Spire could give errors after it has killed all the players and AIs in the game.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for bringing about the triumph of the Dark Spire<br />
<br />
* Fix a strange null reference exception in some findHumanKing code in the game lobby<br />
** Spotted by Nuc_Temeron on stream<br />
<br />
* Fixed Mini Cluster Bombs being swappable. Woops.<br />
** Thanks to Mayheim on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Launching with OpenGL instead of DirectX11 can be problematic for some people, so on GOG the default launch is now DirectX11. On Steam it still shows you the option of which you want, but starts with DirectX11 as the default.<br />
** Thanks to Ronin Storm and Pheespud for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Replace a few mentions of FRD with Pursuit Mode in the Settings<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Auto-Kite setting<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx<br />
<br />
* The button in the lower left that just said "Coming Soon" now says "Chat Menu. Coming Soon" so it's clear what it is.<br />
* Include mention of the shortcut for toggling between the galaxy map/planet screen in the tooltip for the planet name in the top left.<br />
* Improve the tooltip for the clock to mention the buttons that control game speed<br />
* Add more colours to the incoming wave tooltip<br />
** From a remarkably uncivil and poorly written screed on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the explanation for the Praetorian Guard<br />
** Thanks to unicurse for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window available when you click on the Threat icon in the resource bar now shows threat in traditional Strength units (with the raw value divided by 1K).<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx and Puffin for pointing this out<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window now shows the total visible hunter/warden strength in the galaxy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Nanocaust ships were winding up being counted as Threat incorrectly<br />
<br />
* Improve the colouring in the science tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* Some tutorial improvements. Includes a bunch of colour.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for pointing it out.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the AIP history display when claiming structures<br />
<br />
* If a wave is against a minor faction that owns a planet, the game now tries harder to show the faction name in the tooltip. <br />
* If a wave is not against a player planet, the icon will turn grey more consistently.<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Pretty neat idea.<br />
** Thanks to Jaridan on Steam for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Add some colour to the counterattack notification hovertext to improve readability.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hacking description for local watch hacks<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Show better colours for zombies in tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip, Apthorpe and darkarchon<br />
<br />
=== ARS Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'cant hack due to too many ship lines' message for the ARS hack to explicitly call out which fleet you are using, and mention that the hack is done by the closest flagship<br />
** Some people on Steam were finding this confusing.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where custom fleets couldn't hack ARS for more ship lines<br />
** Thanks to zeus and Chromatism for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Lone Wolf Fleets could hack ARS<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where things like Hydra Heads were being counted as ship lines for the purposes of an ARS hack<br />
** This bug has popped up in so many places, fixing it is like, well, killing the heads on a hydra<br />
*** Thanks to yupyip for reporting this one<br />
<br />
* ARS Reroll hacks cost less Hacking Points but have a stronger response<br />
<br />
* ARS to Science conversion hack now grants more science<br />
<br />
* ARSs are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to ARS hacks, given that every other changes constitute a buff to the player<br />
<br />
=== Instigator Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to Instigators; decrease their power and make the bases spawn less frequently<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Instigator Bases weren't correctly tracking their cumulative effect<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting I look at this<br />
<br />
* Fix some punctuation issues with Instigator Base descriptions<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases now report how many times the effect has triggered<br />
<br />
=== Tech Vault Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The "Turn Tech Vault into Science" hack now grants a bit more science<br />
<br />
* Add a "Reroll Tech granted by Tech Vault" hack<br />
<br />
* Hacking a Tech Vault for science no longer increases the cost of the next upgrade<br />
** It seems like everyone wants this<br />
<br />
* Tech Vaults are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to Tech Vault hacks, given that every other changes constitute a strong buff to the player<br />
<br />
== Version 1.001 Official Game Launch! ==<br />
(Released October 21st, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some Tips with a brief explanation of what the AI sub-fleets (Warden, hunter etc) do.<br />
<br />
* The first time you click the Single Player menu (after this build), it gives you a modal prompt asking you if you'd like to do the tutorials first, or if you'd like to just play. This should help prevent people from missing that there are tutorials.<br />
** We did NOT add the tutorials to the Single Player menu, however, as that just gets very cluttered and makes the whole menu harder to read.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The Tutorials button on the right side of the main menu is now colorized and flashes very subtly every half second between two almost-identical colors. This should be much more noticeable without being obnoxious, and without cluttering up something like the single-player menu.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and Badger for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the hovertext for a command station in the sidebar reported the wrong number of turrets<br />
** Thanks to Wurfell on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The AIP history for games begun from Quick Starts will now show AIP change from you as from your username, not "Puffin"<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that can happen in EmitOnAOEParticles.<br />
** It will now log more info, and just do so silently, and not actually impede play like it previously did.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Super Terminal now mentions the Exo-Galactic Strikes.<br />
** Thanks to kocur4d for prompting.<br />
<br />
* Don't let the AI launch mini-waves after exploration/watching hacks<br />
** It was confusing. Thanks to Puffin for report.<br />
<br />
* The Metal launch option on OSX has been removed, as that was still launching under OpenGL anyway.<br />
<br />
* Non-Steam builds no longer try to log into Steam and complain in the log if they can't, and nor do they show "Not logged into Steam" on the main menu.<br />
** This gave the impression that the Steam client was required, when it definitely in no way is. These behaviors do still exist for Steam copies of the game, but just so that you can tell if you're not logged in right for whatever reason.<br />
<br />
* Improve the Instigator Base description to explicitly state that the base effect ends with the death of the base<br />
** Suggested by Apthorpe and Echthelon<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The Dark Spire Ward now instantly blows up any DS ships that enter the planet. The Ward's description has been updated to match<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the report.<br />
<br />
* Doubled range of Devourer Golem.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for bringing up the Devourer.<br />
<br />
* Doubled drone count of the basic Combat Factory.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Repair units now repair shields at the same rate as hull.<br />
** Outdated change from when personal shields cost metal to repair.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked cost of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
==== Golems and Arks ====<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem damage 1,000 -> 2,000, Sabot damage 2,000 -> 3,000, range 8000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem damage 700 -> 1,250, Sabot damage 1,500 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem speed 600 -> 1,000, damage 200 -> 350.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem damage 100,000 -> 200,000.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 450 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 50 -> 80, can only target mobile units, can't target high mass targets, costs 50 AIP to capture instead of 20, and is a Lone Wolf like the Hive Golem.<br />
** AI Botnet Golem has a lower chance to spawn on AI planets as well.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
** Note existing ones will still have their Fleet, and will kind of look a bit odd in the Intel Tab saying it's a Lone Wolf, even though it's still got a Fleet with it. New ones will be normal.<br />
<br />
* Standardised AI Golems to be 3x the durability and damage of a player Golem.<br />
** They were pretty close as is, apparently.<br />
** Also gave them proper costs now.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira damage 3,000 -> 7,000, now takes half damage for 5 seconds after using a wormhole, does bonus damage to shields and also has vampirism, similar to the Siphoner unit. <br />
<br />
* Thanatos single shot weapon damage 6,000 -> 12,000, Parasite Bolt damage 600 -> 900.<br />
<br />
* Ark One damage 350 -> 1050.<br />
<br />
* Orchid damage 7,000 -> 14,000, repair rate increased 50%, repair range doubled.<br />
<br />
* Gryn damage 6,000 -> 16,000, increased fleet unit construction rate 33%.<br />
<br />
* Ark AIP cost reduced from 20 to 15.<br />
<br />
* Reduced AI counterattack bonus for crippling some player Fleet centerpieces.<br />
<br />
==== Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Mass Combat Engineer starting Support Fleet design now uses the Rejuvenator Combat Factory instead.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting replacing this, as it was really unappealing.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.954 Hacking Log! ==<br />
(Released October 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* When you click on the Hacking icon in the resource bar you get a history of all the hacking points you've spent.<br />
** Nota Bene: This will only apply to hacks you do after you install this patch<br />
<br />
* Tweak the helping hands tooltip to mention leaving the marauders their own planets<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* For the hover planet info, explicitly call out if taking the planet would cause AIP, and show the AIP in Red to make it stand out. Also more explicitly call out minor faction owners<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the game was showing incorrect colours for enemy strength on galaxy screen if the planet was owned by a minor faction.<br />
** Thanks to Genrazian for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having partially claimed or hold-firing flagships could prevent building things<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bunch of typos all over the place<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for hunting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the tooltip for GCAs was lying to you about how many turrets they granted<br />
** Reported by RockyBst, Democracy and probably others<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Helping Hands quickstart to make sure the Nanocaust is your ally<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the fix and Genrazian for the impetus<br />
<br />
== Version 0.953 Hotfixes For Certain Linux + Hardware Combinations ==<br />
(Released October 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* On Vulkan on Linux in certain circumstances, there was some form of shader error in the Amplify Bloom rendering. That issue should now be fixed.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Just like windows has launch options allowing you to select between OpenGL and DirectX11, Linux now lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Vulkan - Experimental, and macOS lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Metal - Experimental.<br />
** This needs testing, and is a Steam client update only, not actually a change to the game.<br />
<br />
* Completely rebuilt the asset bundles and their projects to be based on Unity 2019.1.7, same as the main project has been for some time, and to make sure that they explicitly have Vulkan and Metal shader support built into themselves now that the game supports those new platforms.<br />
** This should hopefully solve the issues that we were still seeing with a few people using Vulkan on Linux, as well as potentially some "shader not compiled for this platform" issues with OpenGL on Linux for certain ships that were compiled against an older version of Unity.<br />
** This MAY also fix the Gyrn refractive glass not appearing in-game on any platform, although we haven't test this yet. It may be that we need to write our own shader for that, or update the one from Circonia Studios that we were using previously. Most likely it was an issue that was coming across because of different unity versions, though, we're not sure.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tutorial fix from Craig.<br />
<br />
* Enable strength icons with borders on the galaxy map. (I find it makes a big difference in readability when they overlap links of a similar color.)<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for implementing!<br />
<br />
* Updated a whole bunch of our shaders that were not going to properly work with Metal or Vulkan simply because they were being compiled with exclusive platforms set to directx11 and opengl.<br />
** These should now work, and include things like the icons for ships, and many of the ships themselves. But it hasn't been tested yet. It certainly won't hurt anything, anyhow.<br />
<br />
* The Ciconia Studio glass shaders that we were using for the Gyrn bubble have been updated to their latest version, which should provide better compatibility and hopefully have those actually show up again in-game.<br />
** Why those were showing up in the prep projects but not the actual game is something of a mystery. If this doesn't work, we'll just have to create our own refractive shader with rim lighting, but we'd rather not waste the time if this simple update works. Please do let us know!<br />
<br />
* Fixed one backer name in the credits (Kevin A Munoz), which did not translate over well into pure basic-ascii characters when we ran it through a handy processor (https://pteo.paranoiaworks.mobi/diacriticsremover/) to get rid of unicode characters not supported by our fonts.<br />
** If other folks find that their name got a bit mangled, please do let us know! There were SO many people's names that it was impossible to go through them all manually.<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the shaders for the Gyrn glass bits so that it uses a refractive shader based on Amplify Shader Editor and thus should actually render in these newer unity builds.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.952 A Little Help From Scary Friends ==<br />
(Released October 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Create a tip that points to the instructions in the wiki for how to create your own planet name list. I figure people will want to do this at some point.<br />
<br />
* Spelling/grammar and clarification improvements to some tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Craig and Badger for pointing things out.<br />
<br />
* We FINALLY have all of the kickstarter and backerkit backers thanked in the credits for the game. It's... um... a lot.<br />
<br />
* The credits screen has been split into three scrolling panels, rather than one giant one that scrolls everything. It's also now in two columns rather than three.<br />
** The left column is the same as it was before.<br />
** The center column now has just the top kickstarter backers, aka those at Mark III or higher levels of backing. That's the first 784 people, all backing at $44 or more.<br />
** The right column now has the Mark II and down backers, which is the remaining 2,264 people out of the 3,048 total backers.<br />
** These splits make it so that the scrollbars are actually sensitive enough that you can find what you're looking for. AND we alphabetized the backer names in each category, so that if you know your category you can find your name now.<br />
** Yeah this isn't really a top priority for the game in some ways, but it's a matter of showing respect for the people that made it possible in the first place. There are other kickstarter rewards for specific tiers, and some kickstarter stretch goals, that will happen post-1.0. But this is one of those basic "this needs to be in there for people on day 1 of launch" things.<br />
<br />
=== New "Helping Hands" Quick Start ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Quick Start to the Basics category, called Helping Hands. This really weighs the settings in the players favour, and is intended as an easy to win scenario that just lets you experience things with little stress.<br />
** Badger came up with this.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some changes to the out-of-date planet info representation<br />
** Thanks Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Some changes were made to make sure a player knows which Flagship is hacking (and doesn't try to make that flagship leave the planet)<br />
** Put in a line between the Hacker and the Target to really remind the player visually that the hacker is bound to the target (a great suggestion from Asteroid)<br />
** Add some text to the Hacking Notification reminding the player that the hacking flagship can't leave the system. <br />
*** Thanks to a bug report from kmunoz<br />
<br />
* Improve the hacking resource bar tooltip to show the number of hacking points spent per AI faction and the number of hacking points that will increase the hacking response level<br />
** This is something people have wanted for a while<br />
<br />
* Rather than confusingly opening a multiplayer submenu with little "coming soon" tooltips, the multiplayer button on the main menu now pops up a lengthy text note directly from Chris which explains the backstory and what is coming and a bit about the development process that led us here.<br />
** Big thanks to Craig for suggesting this.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting for showing an entity's world location.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug command to give all your fleets 1K Exp. Good for impatient people.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "level up" message for Planetary Fleets<br />
** Suggested by ArquebusX<br />
<br />
* Fix a nasty bug where the AI killing stacks could cause counterattack strength to increase enormously<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix an off by one error when showing the "What Level a Fleet will level up to next" message in the Fleet tab<br />
<br />
* Extra defensive entities seeded for the AI (like Golems for the Golemite) now patrol their planets in an imposing fashion, instead of just sitting in one spot.<br />
** Only affects new games<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when scrapping a command station<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debug handling in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations for a crash that could apparently happen during one of the tutorials for some people, and also put in extra debugging logic so that if it does happen again we'll know more precisely what the problem is. It should also no longer halt gameplay in general if such an error does happen.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer, related to GameCommands being null.<br />
** This is probably a problem with how GameCommands are being used somewhere, and might rear its head in the form of some desyncs in multiplayer when we get back to reimplementing that. Just one more reason why the desync auto-repair work we have planned is going to be so essential. It's hard to know if a bug like this comes from something a modder was doing, or a mistake on our own part, or what; but either way, the game needs to be resilient to that in both single player and multi player, and that's a good example of why our upcoming hybridized approach to lock-step versus sync-correcting the game (RTS versus action game styles, blended) is going to be well worth the wait.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game will prioritize Combat Fleets over Support Fleets when choosing the hacker. It will only use support fleets when there are no combat fleets on a planet<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Tutorial tweaks ====<br />
* Tutorials no longer display 'homeworld under attack' notifications, which aren't pertinent to any existing tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Autobuild settings no longer apply to tutorials; this is mostly so developers can test tutorials the way a new player would see them<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Threat Interactions ===<br />
* Some minor factions generate Threat that winds up just annoying players, in particular Anti-AI zombies.<br />
** Add an XML field that can be applied to any Faction that says 'any threat provoked by this faction will just go back to sleep once the enemies are gone'<br />
** Current factions with that field:<br />
*** Zombies<br />
*** Devourer<br />
*** Dyson Sphere<br />
*** Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Note that putting this field on the Human faction would make for an entertainingly confused AI, like fighting Guy Pearce from Memento.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The AI's planetary reinforcement cap can now increase as AIP increased (otherwise planets never really got stronger than they are at the beginning of the game except if Threat or subfleets wander through).<br />
** At difficulties <= 5, no change. At 6, the AI gets a 10% power increase per 100 AIP. At 7, 20%, difficulty 8-10 a 30% increase.<br />
<br />
* Cost of hacking Global Command Augmenter if you haven't paid the AIP for the planet reduced from 120 to 60.<br />
<br />
* Cost of Reroll ARS reduced from 80 to 20.<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to control AIP generation from allied factions<br />
** When you have allied factions like the Marauders or Nanocaust, when they kill command stations and so on it generates AIP. This is a balancing mechanism to keep these games from being too easy.<br />
** This can now be disabled mid-game. Disabling this makes the game much much easier, but should help in making some beginner-level quickstarts<br />
<br />
== Version 0.951 Hotfixes ==<br />
(Released October 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix typo in metal popup window<br />
<br />
* Don't let structures generate energy while you are still building them<br />
<br />
* Fix galaxy map possible/incoming wave animation being displayed for links between the AI and another faction than the player, even for unknown worlds and during map generation.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Fix null Reference when holding R on the C-view of a fleet you haven't captured yet. As a side-effect, the units highlighted in the R-view are now the ones on the currently selected planet, not necessarily the one the unit being viewed is on.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* When attacking an AI homeworld, killing all the guard posts is enough to cancel the counterattack, you don't also have to kill the AI King<br />
** Reported by zeusalmight and Nuc_Temeron on Steam<br />
<br />
* Further differentiate the lower AI difficulties by increasing their overconfidence ratio a good amount<br />
** This should make them much more willing to attack and fail.<br />
<br />
* Internally improved some of the documentation on why the sound effects play quite like they do when there's a voice effect and a sound effect playing at near the same time. This should solve some confusion that devs and modders could have.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== OS Compatibility ===<br />
<br />
* We've disabled "graphics jobs" in unity, as that may have been causing some problems on a very few machines (certain older intel cards, mainly not windows boxes).<br />
<br />
* We've updated linux to now default to using Vulkan rather than OpenGLCore.<br />
** Vulkan is only able to be triggered by directly having it be the default, and not by the command line, so this is how we had to do it.<br />
** On linux, you can use the command line -force-glcore to make it use OpenGL again if Vulkan is giving you trouble. But now you have a choice about it.<br />
<br />
* On OSX, we now support Metal, although it still uses OpenGLCore by default (and actually in this case we can't give any definite assurances that Metal will work completely correctly).<br />
** But if you want to give it a shot for whatever reason, you can enable that with force-gfx-metal in the command line to make it use metal instead of the default OpenGLCore. Previously that command line prompt would fail.<br />
<br />
* More info: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html<br />
<br />
=== Audio tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the 'ai wave arrives' taunt wasn't being played for some code paths<br />
* warden and hunter only taunt when they think they will win.<br />
* Correctly play the AI killed your command station taunt (the game will 80% of the time choose a taunt and 20% will choose the old 'planet lost' audio).<br />
* Don't spam the game with 'player command station under attack' notifications <br />
* Don't play more than one 'player ship constructor killed' message per planet per attack. This taunt currently only triggers on the death of a Factory. Previously you could get 3 taunts from the 3 factories on a military command station planet, which seemed a bit excessive especially since you also usually get the taunt for the command station too.<br />
** Possibly these messages should be changed to be for the crippling of a combat factory instead of killing a factory.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the AI taunts so that a specific taunt group can't play more frequently than every 30 seconds, as opposed to every 4.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.950 First Press Build ==<br />
(Released October 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* More work on adding support for numStacksKilled when handling death effects. Should get most everything now<br />
** Including Dark Spire, Metabolization, Zombification, etc...<br />
<br />
* Slightly tweak the Dyson Antagonizer warp in time<br />
<br />
* The Dyson Antagonizer now prefers to spawn on lower mark planets until the AIP is reasonably high<br />
** This behaviour now matches Instigator Bases<br />
<br />
* If you have a fleet in Load Mode but some elements of that fleet are on remote planets, those elements will try to find the Flagship and load themselves, instead of just sitting there<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures and don't want to click more than necessary<br />
<br />
* Non-Combatants like Engineers and Transports no longer cause Guard Posts to release their ships<br />
** So if you have a fleet in Transport mode with all ships transported, flying through AI planets should no longer cause the AI to generate Threat. I believe this was really confusing players, since the game encourages Deep Striking, but Deep Striking was releasing tons of Threat from planets you never attacked<br />
<br />
* Add a quickstart from community member Nuc_Temeron.<br />
** His description:<br />
*** In this scenario there are two level 7 AIs (Thief and Ensnarer) with Shark B enabled, which gives the Hunter fleets a quick surge of strength whenever you lose a base. Defend your territory well! You will have to depend on your allies, the Human Resistance Fighters (Intensity 8), to overcome these greedy swarms! The AIs are also supported by shipments from Astro Trains at Intensity 8 so you can't stay on defense for long.<br />
*** The Macrophage has also infested this zone at Intensity 6 and is hostile to all.<br />
*** The player starts with the Doorkicker Fleet, the Minelayer Battlestation and the Overloader Combat Factory in an 80-star Octopus zone.<br />
<br />
* Some Tutorial tweaks from Puffin<br />
<br />
* Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet<br />
<br />
=== Newly integrated AI taunts ===<br />
* 16 for AI Destroys player Command Station.<br />
* 13 for AI Destroys Player Golem.<br />
* 5 for AI Recaptures Planet.<br />
* 9 for AI Sends Wave.<br />
* 2 for Player Frees Dyson Sphere.<br />
* 10 for Hunter Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 8 for Overlord Transforms.<br />
* 12 for Player Claims Flagship.<br />
* 10 for Player Claims Golem.<br />
* 14 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (High Mark Planet).<br />
* 16 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (Low Mark Planet).<br />
* 5 for Player Destroys Warden Fleet Base.<br />
* 4 for Player Finds AI Overlord.<br />
* 5 for Player Fortress Destroyed.<br />
* 12 for Player Home Command Station Under Attack.<br />
* 7 for Player Stationary Constructor Destroyed.<br />
* 19 for AI Launches Counterattack.<br />
* 14 for Warden Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 1 for Warden Fleet Retreats (unused for now).<br />
** This is a total of 174 voice lines in 18 categories!<br />
** Thanks to Nathan Frisson for his awesome job voicing the AI in these clips; to a variety of players and staff for contributing fun lines for him to say; to Pablo Vega for processing this out so that he sounds wonderfully menacing, as well as splitting the files, removing mouth sounds and breaths and so on that would make it not sound like an AI; to Badger and Puffin for selecting the best takes and organizing them properly so that we could get them into our sound pipeline; and to Badger for actually wiring up the parts of the code that trigger these.<br />
<br />
* This obviously needs additional testing; if you think a line should be playing and it's not then a mantis report + save game would be appreciated!<br />
<br />
* There is now a dedicated audio bus to the AI taunting you, and it has its own gain settings and so on that are a bit louder than the "routine voices" that you hear elsewhere.<br />
** This also now will let us mix the AI voice in however we choose to do so.<br />
** We have a separate voice mixer for the AI voice lines now, and since those are much more complicated in terms of effects we have those coming in as a barely-compressed PCM stereo track. Downsampling, adaptive sampling, and/or mono makes it muddy fast.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* When unloading ships from a Transport, they inherit "time spent on planet" from the Transport so you can't cheese First Few Seconds On Planet bonus effects<br />
** Thanks to Smaug on Steam for reporting and Puffin for testing the fix<br />
<br />
* Remove some outdated text in the Scouting objective tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Telkir for reporting<br />
<br />
* Prevent Astro Train objectives from leaking the location of trains you shouldn't be able to see<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where for non-AI homeworld planets, the AI was spawning extra Guard Posts instead of Dire Guardians<br />
** This should make things much more interesting. Note that dires are still limited to high mark planets<br />
<br />
* Fix an Off by One Error when the game was telling you what level a fleet was<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference when ships would try to join the Praetorian Guard (ie the AI overlord is being attacked)<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the "metal income per planet" display was showing inaccurate information<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where it was much harder than necessary to maneouver flagships in tight spaces. If you wound up clicking on an allied unit the flagship's rebuild metal flow would make it try to assist, which is ... unhelpful.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fleets in Load Mode no longer deploy drones. This enables you to sneak combat factories past high-mark planets without the drones triggering lots of threat<br />
** Requested by overzot on steam<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the visual line for ships claiming other ships was not displaying. Turns out an image that was once white that we were using as part of its material got changed to black at some point, thus making it effectively invisible because of the math of how the shader was run.<br />
** We took this change to go ahead and make the claim lines more attractive in general, and they now have a cyan-greenish look to them, but double-beamed, so that they look kinda like the repair lines but still distinct.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and BadgerBadger for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Added in an OnLoad from savegame fix that should prevent stationary ships from being twitchy and thinking they should pursue you. This bit is untested.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game no longer gives a harmless "Could not do Shutdown for network, the engine network interface was null" message if the game is shutting down prematurely for whatever reason.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor issue where the game was reporting that your target framerate and vysnc count were being set right before they were, rather than right after. If it was failing, you'd have had no idea.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs the system info about itself far earlier in the load process, to help with cases where potentially we're unable to load things for some reason; we'll still get the system info in the debug files from now on.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The game's bootup log now is all-inclusive about all the steps that it takes, inside ArcenDebugLog.txt, so that in the event of a problem we now find out when that happens.<br />
** This makes for a much longer log every time you start up the game, but it's not something that is visible to players unless they go into their debug logs for whatever. And the information from it is definitely useful.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs what version it is on as soon as it can, but NOT before it can (heh), which it was temporarily doing on an internal build when we started logging system data really super early.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoNotShowAndAlsoDoNotSendToUnityLog verbosity level that lets us skip showing certain things in the unity log but still send it to the ArcenDebugLog.txt file. This is a big deal for us in terms of not having our unity editor logs flooded with stuff that we'd want to collect in a bug report but don't need to see every last time.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of selection issues on the galaxy map with fleets not always deselecting properly and instead sometimes being additive, etc.<br />
** It's actually a number of bugs all in one, because basically there was some older per-planet logic that was still being used here (and on planets) from back when cross-planet selection was only kinda-sorta a thing. Now it all works consistently galaxy-wide, or at least should. But if you see any remaining (or new) bugs, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif and Asteroid for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, hitting the escape key would just clear your selection on the current planet. Now it clears the selection on all the planets, as it should.<br />
** We didn't see the "when a fleet traverse a wormhole, it's selection is lost. This issue only occurs if the selection was made in the planet view. If you select the fleet on the galaxy map, it works correctly." issue, but probably what it really was was the above one. Or something fixed in the batch right before that. If it's still something anyone else sees, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with the planet links where their collision capsules were intersecting with the collision boxes of planets and ship icons on the galaxy map.<br />
** This was having the effect of making it so that quite often you couldn't select specific ships except at certain zoom levels, or couldn't click planets or ships reliably in general (zoom level and scale of icons did play a role here also).<br />
** Basically, the solution was to make it so that we first raycast to find ONLY the planets and ships/fleets, if there are any under the mouse cursor. These use one set of physx layers.<br />
** Only if we don't find anything with that first raycast do we then do a second raycast against the new physx layer that the links now use. Now it doesn't matter if the capsules for the links overlap with planets or ship icons (no way to stop that, really), because it will ALWAYS give preference to the other icons first, and only go for the links between planets if the icons fail.<br />
** Thanks to Smaug, I-KP, and Pat for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Energy Usage bar now gives detailed feedback for what is consuming your energy (broken down by fleet) and what planets are generating the most energy<br />
** Requested by darkarchon<br />
<br />
* The Tooltip for Tech Vault objectives now list which ship lines will benefit from hacking the tech vault<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* For the Flagship/GCA objectives, show the count of ship lines before listing the ship lines so I don't have to count them<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* Improvements to the R-Click "Strong Against" view:<br />
** Fixed damage bonuses listed in this view not always matching the mirror "weak against" view.<br />
** Show only units you discovered on the map, leading to a lot less clutter early-game.<br />
** Sort units that are in the same system as the friendly unit you're examining at the beginning of the list, and bold them.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the code and kmunoz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* CPAs always now give 10 minutes warning; given how impactful they are, a long warning period is justified. Previously they were getting less warning time than a regular Wave by default<br />
<br />
* When a Fleet levels up, only say "Some ship types may level up with the fleet" if the fleet actually contains ship lines that will level up<br />
** This was annoying Badger, since most ship lines don't level up anymore but the game made you think they did.<br />
<br />
* New icons for the Tech Menu!<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
* Better alignment for hotkey indicators on standing order buttons and for the icons in the build sidebar<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
=== Changes for lower AI difficulties (<= 5) ===<br />
<br />
* There were some complaints that there wasn't enough differentiation between high and low mark AIs, so we're making some changes to make lower mark games have an easier feel in a number of ways<br />
* Seed extra ARSs and Tech Vaults in the galaxy<br />
* Seed more low-mark planets near the player<br />
* Nerf AI income <br />
* Nerf AI defenses<br />
* Make the Hunter and Warden fleets dumber by allowing them to trickle into a battle piecemeal instead of waiting for reinforcements<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with hazxan on Steam<br />
<br />
== Version 0.900 Custom Fleets With Empty Slots ==<br />
(Released October 11th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Instead of spawning instantly, a Dyson Antagonizer now warps in over time, giving the player a chance to destroy it before the Sphere gets Antagonized.<br />
** Requested by zeus almighty. You'd think he could have just struck it with a lightning bolt or seduced it in the form of a goose...<br />
<br />
=== Tutorial and Tips Work ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Tutorial 99", which is even in its description just a note to be sure and check out the "How to Play" section of the game and other resources.<br />
** Since various people seem to miss those other resources but easily see the tutorials list, having this always be the last tutorial in the list no matter how many other tutorials we add seemed like a good idea.<br />
<br />
* Also got rid of the "Example Tutorial" that was junking up the tutorials screen, since now there are plenty of much more involved examples that are also actually fully-functional tutorials.<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip under the Modding section to explain how to make your own Quick Starts<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units sometimes were waiting out of range instead of closing to firing distance<br />
** Reported by kmunoz and Telcontar on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where flagships could just wander away from where you told them to go<br />
** Reported by kmunoz.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen in the wave notifications.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really rare nullref that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debugging to fix ships not rendering right in some rare circumstances and thus causing a cascade of all things not rendering. Now it should fail gracefully if it fails at all, and give us more information on where it failed, then let you keep playing without making everything disappear.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== "Custom Fleets", Aka The Remedy For Control Groups ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed things up so that fleet flagships can be constructed from the build sidebar, or other self-constructing means. This was never possible before in the engine, turns out.<br />
<br />
* There are 9 possible fleets that you can create at any of your command stations, now. Each one has 7 empty ship lines in it, and they are 3x cloaked, 3x velocity (fast flagship), and 3x workhorse (normal flagship).<br />
** These can be constructed at any point and you can start putting some of your specialized ships into them via ship swapping. The interface makes this clear and suggests it, as well. Basically for people who wanted to pull aside just their melee ships or cloaked raiders or whatever, now you can do that; this lets you control "sub fleets" in effect, by splitting your existing ship lines among more fleets, exchanging empty slots for ship lines you find elsewhere.<br />
** This was something that Chris went back and forth on a lot of times in terms of how to handle control groups that were more specific than 1+ fleets at a time. Ultimately the display and automation benefits of having control groups always stay linked to just 1+ fleets outweighed the benefits of changing that; but in order to allow for players to have smaller custom fleets as they may desire, activated by control group as they may desire, here's this new feature.<br />
** This is, of course, in addition to the hotkeys for quickly selecting units of specific criteria a while ago (cloaked units, melee units, whatever). This is for when you want to make a permanent or semi-permanent sub-grouping of ships for whatever reason (of which there are many valid ones to have).<br />
** Thanks to a lot of people, including Nameless Terror, ulu, Asteroid, and others for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== UI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Standing order buttons now display their key shortcut on the button itself, provided it can be expressed in a single letter (so X and V are displayed, Delete isn't).<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Science bar now has icons for the various techs.<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Wave progress indicator on galaxy map links now animates smoothly instead of once every second. (No associated visual at the moment, Chris didn't find the proposed particle effect good enough.)<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* For all mobile flagships and citadels (not lone flagships, though), there is a new "Flagship Movement Mode" in their fleet status window.<br />
** Your flagships are usually precious enough that you don't want them to roam around in pursuit mode or attack-move mode. HOWEVER, you will often want to set them into those modes in order to make any ships they construct pop out in those modes.<br />
** When this is set to"Stay Put Unless Direct Order", it acts as you might expect and causes the flagship to ignore things like Pursuit mode, but for ships it creates to be put in that mode (and obey it).<br />
** When this is set to "Roam If Instructed" mode, the flagship will pursue when in pursuit mode, attack when in attack-move mode, and so on. This can be useful for Arks and Golems in some cases, or even for things like Combat Factories (on peaceful worlds).<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Refinement of Fleets]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Pre-And-Post_Launch_Polish&diff=37410AI War 2:Pre-And-Post Launch Polish2019-12-19T05:18:47Z<p>Ovalcircle1: Typos</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
The game is solid at this point and something we're really proud of and that players are having fun with. But inevitably, the more people we have playing it, the more things get brought to our attention to refine and make as smooth and fun as possible. This is basically a period we've set aside for doing that sort of thing, rather than focusing on any major new content drops or other major new features.<br />
<br />
There may still be the odd major new thing, who knows -- sometimes the volunteers or modders wind up creating something and we're certainly not going to turn that down! But by the start of this phase the game was mature and really huge already, so focusing on polish seems like the way to best serve the largest group of people.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.022 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
== Version 1.018-1.021 Methodical Achievement ==<br />
(Released December 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* If your allies are off fighting without you, you don't get galaxy map information about their battles unless you are Watching the planet<br />
<br />
* Units deprioritize targets they dramatically overkill<br />
** Hopefully a slight buff to Artillery Golems and the like. Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for a bug report<br />
<br />
* Very firmly prevent exogalactic wormholes from wormhole invasions from being used to send regular waves<br />
** This isn't a great solution, but it will work for now. Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Both the campaign-world itself, and all of the factions within it, can now store "historical data" in the form of arbitrary strings, integers, and booleans that have getters/setters that take a string parameter to find them.<br />
** This lets us elegantly and simply and centrally track... whatever needs tracking. This can be used by mods, DLC stuff, the core game, achievements, and everything in between. It can be working data for the UI that needs to be serialized for whatever reason (so NumARSsHacked_ForUI could have been used in this if this had existed, for example), and so on.<br />
** The nice thing is that all of the code that can use this can absolutely be ignorant of each other, but it also allows for cross-mod reading of data if need be, without any sort of serialization problems that we might normally run into.<br />
** This also neatly solves the problem of "we need to store some data for a new achievement or whatever other purpose, but to do so would require incrementing the game version number and messing with serialization in a potentially dangerous way when there are many cooks in the kitchen." Now no version number incrementing is required, and the serialization of this sort of thing will "just work."<br />
** A word to the wise: absolutely filling this with huge amounts of data or with really long string descriptors will have an adverse effect on savegame size, so please use responsibly. ;)<br />
<br />
* All of the cheat-style helper things in the debug menu should now block achievements from being logged, although this is not tested.<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip explaining that selecting units and right-clicking on an enemy unit will make your selected units prefer to kill the unit type you clicked on<br />
** Thanks to overzot for a bug report <br />
<br />
* The game now has capabilities of noticing the steam overlay is open (though we don't do anything with that yet -- do we need to with the way focus is handled, can anyone confirm?).<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where 'Random Any' AI Difficulty could return the Tutorial difficulty<br />
** Reported by Ampersand on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a crash with Marauders<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo, Endovior, and Rigellian for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where if code tried to look for a setting by name, and that setting did not exist, it would look instead to a "null setting" value that would be of an indeterminate value.<br />
** For instance, in some cases it could set a bool null setting to true during some set operation, and then other times it would try to read that back out and get true as the response for something that should be defaulting to false because the setting only existed in (for example) DLC files that are not present.<br />
** It's possible that for missing settings that code checks for we should be more aggressive and outright throw an error, but for now it just is always doing nothing on sets or returns the system-default values per type on gets (bool=false, int/float/fint=0).<br />
** Thanks to a Badger for helping us accidentally discover this with players and a DLC-only fireteam setting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some debug logging for when it's trying to log achievements on game victory.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where some Objective Importance flags weren't being cleared when the objective was completed, leading to galaxy map clutter<br />
** Thanks for alocritani for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The number of seconds played (in game time) is now properly logged to the statistic sets.<br />
<br />
=== Methodical Pursuit Mode ===<br />
<br />
* The default targeting mode for Pursuit Mode (FRD) now does a better job of choosing targets that aren't being overkilled (so each shot can be more effective), and also de-prioritizes units that can't shoot it.<br />
* The practical upshot of this is that your units will prefer to Methodically take out a planet piece by piece, instead of spreading out and trying to hit a lot of targets simultaneously. This is particularly valuable when attacking AI planets with lots of Guard Posts with ranges that don't support each other.<br />
** This new approach will make your forces win some close battles they were losing before when attacking the AI, but also will make them win a fight more slowly if you have a significant advantage. I think the "winning close battles" should be the default <br />
** The player, minor factions and AI difficulty >= 7 have access to this.<br />
* Methodical Pursuit Mode can be disabled (for all factions) via a Galaxy Setting<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Player units start to take longer to build as their Mark increases. Not an increase in cost, just in production time.<br />
** Currently this is linked directly to their health multiplier. Mark 2 is 1.25x, so it takes 125% of normal time to build. Mark 7 is 4x, so it's 400% of normal time.<br />
** Why? Well, thanks to units not increasing their cost as they Mark up, your units get more efficient in terms of "how long it takes to build" and "how much health it has". Essentially, the "health per second" you can input into a fight increases a lot as you improve your ships.<br />
** Eventually this could lead to things like a single Military world worth of Factories, plus a Combat Factory building Mark 7 units fast enough that the "health per second" was notably greater than the Overlord Phase 2 could DPS!<br />
*** Some numbers. A single Factory would produce a Vanguard every 2 seconds. Said Vanguard at Mark 1 has 24k health, so this Factory is inputting 12k health per second into a battle.<br />
*** If that Vanguard was Mark 7, that factory would be outputting 48k health per second. Then add in the other Factories on your planets, the Combat Factories, and the Engineers in the above example with the Overlord, and you would have 384k health-per-second. This is not including shield regeneration, repairs, drones, zombification, etc.<br />
**** This is fairly experimental, but is also a large nerf to the players ability to "throw wads of cash" to solve every problem, so will be keeping an eye on it, particularly in case it brings back the "Netflix Time" problem of Classic, although the build times here are already far shorter, and the increase less, plus the metal costs don't change.<br />
<br />
* Increased most Frigate durability 50%.<br />
<br />
==== Cloaking ====<br />
<br />
* It now takes 10 seconds for cloaking to return after being depleted.<br />
** This is so it plays nicer with the below changes, else some units will constantly recloak while attacking, due to their reload time being longer than the recloak time.<br />
** As the below changes make it so cloaked units do far more damage before the cloak wears off, hopefully the micro requirement will be drastically reduced so that this added delay isn't a problem.<br />
<br />
* Increased the damage and reload time of most cloaked units by a fair bit.<br />
** This means they do much more damage before the cloak wears off, generally making them better at assassination and opening volleys.<br />
<br />
* Revealer Battlestation tachyon range now covers the entire planet.<br />
** A benefit to it over other decloaking sources.<br />
** From a mention sometime ago in Discord, forget who.<br />
<br />
* Tachyon Array range increased 25%, now decloaks twice as fast.<br />
** Gives a reason to use these over Sentry Frigates (beyond just cost), which have enormous range and in general were just superior.<br />
<br />
* Doubled the cloaking points at Mark 1, and amount gained per Mark for most units.<br />
** This means there is a notable delay before something is revealed, meaning there's some benefit to having higher Mark decloakers.<br />
** This also makes it easier for the player to do stealth ops, even if there's a bit of detection around.<br />
<br />
* All 5 starting Battlestation designs have 5 Tachyon Arrays.<br />
** So early on you have some extra decloakers to hand around, particularly for any early economic worlds and against the Ghost AI type.<br />
** Thanks to Donblas for suggesting sometime recently.<br />
<br />
* Increased the cost for the AI to purchase most cloaked units.<br />
** With the above changes these will probably have an enormous jump in power (which is seemingly needed, based on comments on cloaking in general). So, there will be less of them. If you can reveal them in time, great, less to kill! If you can't...<br />
<br />
=== Achievements! ===<br />
<br />
'''TLDR: These are presently Steam-only, and we're still entering the data for them. But you can earn them even before they can be logged to Steam or GOG and it will log them later. We'll have the data for these up shortly, but it's a manual data-entry process to do these. You'll be able to see the list of achievements as they are added, and later on can see them in a list in-game (but cannot yet). Next build, probably.'''<br />
<br />
* The game now properly logs achievements to Steam, and also locally. It's possible to use the debug menu to clear your local achievements to redo them if you want to, but that won't clear them on Steam.<br />
<br />
* If you have achievements locally-earned but not on Steam for some reason, then starting up the game program while logged into Steam will sync those achievements onto there. So you don't lose an achievement that you got while in offline mode or similar.<br />
<br />
* There are a bunch of achievements (uh... 139 of them??), but the data for those haven't been fully put into Steam yet. Anything you earn prior to it being on Steam or GOG will sync up with those platforms when they have the data in question.<br />
<br />
* Note that GOG achievements are coming soon. The data from them gets imported from Steam, which is handy, so we want to get the data in first. But we also need some code updates to integrate with their things prior to that.<br />
<br />
* Achievements now immediately log themselves to disk after you achieve them, so that if you don't get to a saving point or exit gracefully you don't lose that having been logged. This applies whether or not it logs to Steam or GOG or what have you, for your own personal records. This does so in an intelligent way with minimal disk calls even if you have a bunch of achievements all tripping at once and getting logged.<br />
<br />
==== Cheating Is Perfectly Ok But Doesn't Give Achievements ====<br />
<br />
'''Bear in mind, though, that tons of this game is open source and easy to compile. If someone wants to make a button that literally just gives them an achievement, the code is right there to do it. Kind of a spoilsport thing to do, but people have ways of granting themselves achievements directly via the Steam API anyway, when it comes to that. So even if we encrypted our game and did no open source work, Steam is already vulnerable to anything that supports client-side achievements. Some people will cheat, that's unfortunate, but without using an external Steam-targeted tool or recompiling parts of the game you can't do it with ease. So there's that.'''<br />
<br />
* If you use the cheat-style debug menu items, then it will skip granting you achievements in the campaign in which you did that. It will note that you would have gotten an achievement but that that was skipped at the time-of, because otherwise we'd have confused bug reports.<br />
** The non-cheaty debug menu options (or ones that make it harder for YOU, like increasing AIP) don't cause achievements to not work in the campaign in question.<br />
<br />
* If you use the debug menu to change the AI difficulty up or down after 60 seconds of gametime have elapsed, then that counts as a cheat for achievement purposes. If you do it in the first 60 seconds (plenty of time if you're paused, and have just loaded a quick start, for instance), then it will not consider it a cheat and let you go about your tweaking.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.017 Random AI Types ==<br />
(Released December 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where cancelling a wave when fighting AIs in Civil War Mode could softlock the game<br />
** In Civil War Mode, the AI is allowed to send waves at other AIs planets that are neutral but still have turrets. This was done to prevent the case where the AIs were just sniping eachothers command stations but not actually destroying all the defenses with waves. This was not playing nicely with the code that was trying to silently reroute waves to new targets if the old target had died. So the game was queueing a Civil-War style wave, then immediately trying to re-route it each time.<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Improve the Notification for Raid Engines to remove some weirdly long text<br />
** Thanks to a save game from Sigma7 for making me notice this<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Dyson ships were getting stuck on cloaked units, or units inside guard posts<br />
* Fix a bug where Dyson ships were killing warp gates, increasing AIP<br />
** Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Various Weapons" fleet name styling to the game.<br />
** Description: Weapons from other games. Can you recognize the references? (Created by DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY)<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for providing these!<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Wormhole Invasions weren't actually sending any ships<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste and Peter Ebbessen for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Random AI Types And Nicer AI Type Lobby Display ===<br />
<br />
* Add Random AI Types to the game. There is a "Totally Random", and also Random based on how hard the AI Type is, so "Random Easy", "Random Hard", "Random Brutal", etc...<br />
** When hitting "Esc" to bring up that menu in game, a randomly chosen AI Type, just will say "Random". There's a setting to actually reveal the random AI type if you'd like<br />
** This has been requested by a lot of people across mantis, discord and steam. This basically matches AIWC behaviour, which I think people liked.<br />
<br />
* The dropdown in the lobby for the AI difficulties now shows what difficulty category each one belongs to, nicely-colorized.<br />
** It also sorts by difficulty category and then by name of the difficulty (with the default showing up first in its respective category as the one difference there), and with the random option for each difficulty type preceding it.<br />
** Big thanks to Badger for suggesting that we implement in such a much nicer way like the first game had it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Outguard hacking response nerfed by ~25%, and final response by 50%.<br />
* Outguard tertiary wave now fires every 75 seconds instead of every 50 seconds.<br />
<br />
* Some AI Reserves units will now join the Hunter Fleet instead of warping out. Higher AI Difficulties mean more units join the hunter.<br />
** Thanks to VengefulWight for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Reduced Impactor Citadel range to levels similar to the other Citadels (excluding Interceptor).<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for reporting a case of this thing wiping an entire AI planet of Posts almost immediately.<br />
<br />
* Reduced target priority of Citadels.<br />
** Hopefully this'll help reduce the potential for them to be the top priority of the AI over everything else.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the counterattack multipliers of Golems/Arks and Lone Wolves.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting an ow case.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigates, Arks and Golems (excluding Rorqual Hegira) now use a 2/1 hull/shield ratio.<br />
<br />
* Buffed the Dyson a little.<br />
<br />
* Astro Train projects that are only enabled at > Intensity 5 no longer require their Trains to go near the player.<br />
** Led to Trains never really completing projects and being infinite resources instead.<br />
<br />
* AI Homeworlds should now always have 8 Posts, instead of ranging from 5 to 8.<br />
** This could cause wide swings in how difficult they were, across all difficulties. This allows some standardisation, while keeping most of the variance in the AI difficulty values.<br />
<br />
* The wormholes on AI homeworlds are all on the edge, similar to the player ones.<br />
<br />
* Replaced the NastyPick set up that was used to seed things like Ion Cannons, Eyes, so on.<br />
** Instead, now there are 4 different things that work similarly:<br />
** BigGunNastyPick (Mass Drivers, Ion Cannons)<br />
** EyeNastyPick<br />
** SupportStructureNastyPick (Magnifiers, Troop Accelerators, etc)<br />
** WildCardNastyPick (Mass Drivers, Ion Cannons, Fortresses)<br />
** This means there can be more variance in what a planet has, plus some potential nasty combinations.<br />
** It also means certain things can be flat out turned off for certain difficulties (like Eyes at low ones), and per-difficulty tuning of each thing.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.016 Back From Beta ==<br />
(Released December 13th, 2019)<br />
<br />
'''There were a number of fixes that we also pushed directly into the 1.015 build without updating the version number, while that was in beta. So some of the things that would have been part of this build already went out and were tested because they were game-breaking in some fashion. All is well now, that we can tell from our testing and player feedback so far. Knock on wood!'''<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units pulled through a wormhole by a tractor beam could wind up outside the gravwell.<br />
** Reported by zeusalmighty and chthon<br />
<br />
* Add voice lines for Dark Spire Vengeance Strikes, and when a Dark Spire Locus spawns<br />
<br />
* Add a tip giving a very brief explanation of wave compositions<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbessen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Status debuffs like paralysis, engine stunning and weapon reload time increases will decay faster on stacked squads <br />
** Intuitively this makes sense, since the effect is in theory split across multiple units)<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.015 Testing The Outguard Waters ==<br />
(Released December 12th, 2019)<br />
<br />
'''To play this version, you need to go into Steam's properties for the game, and then the betas tab, and enable the 'current_beta' branch. If you're not worried about potential bugs or broken balance, then please do so -- we could use lots of eyes on the new Outguard changes, but we don't want to inflict those on everyone without more testing first. If we can get enough people testing this out, we can promote this out of beta tomorrow, which would be ideal since there are some important bugfixes in here in other areas of the game.'''<br />
<br />
* You can prevent your ships from pathing through specific planets by right-clicking the planet name in the resource bar (at the top left of the screen)<br />
** This is intended for cases like "I don't want my fleets to travel through that scary Eye planet by mistake"<br />
** The primary UI feedback for this is to hover a given planet and it will tell you if you've asked to not path through it. It would be nice to have a planet icon flair or something someday?<br />
*** This is a longstanding request from many people, including Astilious and Democracy. As a piece of trivia, this is actually the second time badger has done the UI portion of this feature.<br />
<br />
* Removed the limit of 1 Non-Turret Defense per Guard Post, and replaced it with a limit for each individual unit type it could pick (i.e only 2 Forcefields, but can have 3 Gravity Generators) for the entire planet.<br />
<br />
* Added a new way of writing timespans that writes minutes and seconds if it's less than 1 hour, and hours and minutes if above that. This keeps them a consistent length, and is particularly useful for the journal listing so that really old things just show the hours and minutes ago they were, rather than bothering you with being down to the second.<br />
<br />
* Hacking response decreased for AI difficulty 8-10<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Make Anti-AI Zombies less likely to get stuck by small groups of cloaked enemy units<br />
** Thanks to Dunno for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a concerning and nonsensical bug where the same ship was attempting to be added to a fleet more than once on creation, but then not winding up in the fleet at all from its own point of view, thus spewing errors.<br />
** This may ultimately be part of some much larger issue with pooling of units -- potentially one that happens specifically when the simulation is running agonizingly slowly for whatever reason.<br />
** Thanks to razgrizh for the report.<br />
<br />
* It is possible to get ships trying to set a pursuit target for a higher weapon system index than they actually have, mainly if the ship somehow changes type while maintaining its ID between the autotargeting and the finalized logic. This again shouldn't be possible, but seems to happen now in the same savegame where the other concerning bug just was. Now it won't complain about these, but will just ignore the bad data.<br />
<br />
* Put in some new counts in the escape menu's performance section that show the number of drones deployed and recalled, and the number of ships added into fleets and taken back out of them, as well as the number of failures of each.<br />
** As it turns out, in the strange savegame with bad performance of marauders, there are TONs of ships that are failing to be re-added properly, and drones popping in and out constantly. So this gives us something to work with on why it's so slow.* Put in some new counts in the escape menu's performance section that show the number of drones deployed and recalled, and the number of ships added into fleets and taken back out of them, as well as the number of failures of each.<br />
** As it turns out, in the strange savegame with bad performance of marauders, there are TONs of ships that are failing to be re-added properly, and drones popping in and out constantly. So this gives us something to work with on why it's so slow.<br />
<br />
* Removed the always_deploy_drones tag, since there is logic that causes drones to auto-recall if there are no enemies nearby. This was causing drones of marauder outposts to go in and out of the outposts constantly and rapidly, tanking performance previously. Anyone else who used the same logic was going to run into the same thing.<br />
** The savegame that previously ran SUPER slowly, aka about 2% of normal, now runs at 70-80% of normal instead.<br />
** This fixes a number of reported "Very Slow" saves, including reports from razgrizh,deo and NRSirLimbo <br />
** Thanks to Badger for finding and fixing this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed the AI never building Non-Turret Defenses.<br />
<br />
* AI types such as the One Way Doormaster and Turtle, which spawn more of certain structures, will no longer spawn the Trader versions of them.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where most of the planets in the galaxy could be named Murdoch<br />
** Thanks to Orelius for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make sure the AI taunt for "wave arrived" only plays when the wave is hitting a player planet<br />
** Thanks to deo for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Voice Line Work Continued ===<br />
<br />
* Instigator Bases now play a voice line when they spawn<br />
* "Homeworld Under Attack" now has its own line. This fixes a bug report from DevoutHaruhiist<br />
** There's now a line that plays when a bubble shield protecting your Home Command Station is under attack. If the AI actually takes down the shields and hits your Command Station itself then it plays a Taunt at you.<br />
* "Critical Planet under attack" is played if a planet with some Critical Infrastructure (like a GCA) is attacked<br />
* There's now a line for "Regular Player Planet Is Under Attack"<br />
* "Combat on Border World" now plays if you are in combat on a planet owned by an allied faction (allied human? allied faction?)<br />
* When a notification for "Wave targeting home planet" appears, you now get a voice line to make sure you don't miss it<br />
* When a notification for "Wave targeting planet with Critical Infrastructure" appears, you now get a voice line to make sure you don't miss it<br />
* Add voice lines for Macrophages Enraging and new Telia spawning<br />
<br />
=== Outguard Rework ===<br />
<br />
* Outguard Rework - Reworked to be cooldown based, more customization options in xml, and added in 3 more groups.<br />
** Huge thanks to StarKelp for designing and implementing this whole piece!<br />
<br />
* Gameplay Changes<br />
** Each Outguard now comes with a number of summons.<br />
** These summons scale with the total amount of earnt AIP.<br />
** After use, you must wait a period of time before summoning the same one again.<br />
** In addition, as long as it is under capacity, it will slowly rebuild its used fleets, giving you further uses in the future.<br />
** Base values are as follows;<br />
*** Offensive/Utility: 5 minute cooldown, 15 minute recharge, 10 minute duration<br />
*** Defense/Stationary: 5 minute cooldown, 20 minute recharge, 10 minute duration<br />
*** Donated To Player: 5 minute cooldown, 30 minute recharge, infinite duration<br />
** Outguard units now inherit techs properly.<br />
** Turret spawning mercs are now spawned between your command station and a hostile wormhole on a friendly planet.<br />
** Turret spawning mercs are now spawned near the center of the planet on a hostile planet.<br />
** Turrets will now spawn around each other instead of on each other.<br />
** Hacking the Beacon must again be done by a Fleet on the same planet. It also lasts 150 seconds, and costs 10 Hacking Points and 10 AIP (upon completion). These hacks will result in brutal AI response, far higher than most other hacks, so be prepared.<br />
<br />
* Code Changes<br />
** Unit tags will now attempt to search by tag first, and internal name second as a backup.<br />
** A multitude of new xml tags to configure nearly all of the changes.<br />
** (Many older Outguard units retain some older, no longer used values, for compatibility's sake.)<br />
<br />
==== New Outguard ==== <br />
<br />
* Spire Archivist, potent forcefields and beams<br />
<br />
* Democratic Demolitionists, grenade launcher turrets and ships<br />
<br />
* Hydran Hobbyist, an extremely redundant hydra starship with low damage and high disabling capabilities<br />
<br />
== Version 1.014 High AIP Playstyle Viability ==<br />
(Released December 10th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Continued work on voice lines:<br />
** Human Resistance Fighters warping in and out has voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Marauders attacking have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Risk Analyzers firing have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Astro Train depot spawn/train spawn have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Low on Metal, Metal Exhausted, Low on Power, Brownout (no power) are in<br />
<br />
* Improve readability of unit hovertext by suppressing the Exp section unless the player wants detailed tooltips<br />
** I for one almost never care about this information. Suggested by Dekar on discord<br />
<br />
* Tweak the prompt when exiting the game to make it harder to confuse the Exit to Desktop button with the Quit to Main Screen.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "Delete or Keep Campaign" prompt so it doesn't run off the edge of the button<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Hopefully fix a bug where waves were still spawning after being disabled<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI Reserves would never spawn on difficulty 10<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting<br />
<br />
* Hovering a planet in verbose mode will tell you whether the AI Reserves can respond to a deepstrike there<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference in fleets code<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the having multiple AIs meant that the game wasn't properly sending anti-MDC exo waves<br />
**Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the report<br />
<br />
* Waves sent against minor factions now make an effort to become threat against that minor faction, instead of just going for you after spawning<br />
** I think this has been reported by several people but I don't know who (if you'd like credit for bug reports, putting them on Mantis is the best way to make sure you are attributed)<br />
<br />
* Add the ability to hold down a button to suppress the 'Are you sure?' tech upgrade prompt. Having the prompt on in case of mistakes, but an easily done override is a nice little QoL improvement.<br />
** Suggested by ParadoxSong on mantis.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Beam Cannons could fail to hit fast moving ships.<br />
<br />
* Improve the beginner science/engineering objectives.<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for contributing the text<br />
<br />
* Allow the player and minor factions to target AI defensive structures build from the Zenith Trader<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the bug report<br />
<br />
* If the AI has planned to send a wave against a target, but between the wave planning and the time you are alerted something happens to the target, the AI will silently reroute the wave to a new target<br />
** The practical upshot of this is that when a wave notification appears, it will always be for a reasonable target<br />
** Thanks to zoutzakje<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Altered the AI Mark Level AIP Requirements.<br />
** For Difficulty 7, it was: 100, 220, 340, 470, 580, 700.<br />
** For Difficulty 7, is now: 100, 275, 450, 650, 880, 1,100.<br />
** For Difficulty 8, remove 10 from each level, Difficulty 9 remove 20, and Difficulty 10 remove 30.<br />
** For each Difficulty below 7, add an extra 10 as you go down.<br />
*** Response to some conversations with Peter Ebbesen about high AIP styles in this game in general.<br />
*** Still keeps some values low for lower AIP play, while freeing up the middle and higher ones, for people who prefer and can manage that type of gameplay.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate beam range 15,000 -> 12,000. Triple Beam variant damage 7,500 -> 4,000. Other variant beam damage 7,500 -> 6,000. Reduced shields of all slightly.<br />
<br />
==== Player Defenses ====<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Turret reload time 12s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Focused Gravity Generator durability, and increased the range of the effect from 6,000 to 7,100.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Tractor Array durability.<br />
<br />
* Minefields are no longer one use, and are back to firing 5 times before being destroyed.<br />
** However, this is a cleaner version, where there are no weird effects from how many targets are being hit, how much damage it did, is there a Military Command, Mark level, etc.<br />
** Instead they take 20% of their maximum health in damage with every attack, regardless of anything else.<br />
** Mine effects and damage have been reduced to 25% of old values, but as they detonate 5 times, it's in the end a boost to their maximum potential, and of course no more Mines being wasted on a single unit.<br />
** As a last note, normal Minefields are probably actually viable now!<br />
<br />
* Increased minimum count of normal Turrets in Global Command Augmenters by 1 (so from min 2 to min 3).<br />
** This puts the spread of min and max to the same as most Strikecraft in Fleets (i.e the max is 1.6x the min).<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 4,000, 5,500, 7,000, 8,500<br />
** Now: 2,000, 3,750, 3,750, 4,250<br />
*** The scaling here uses only the Stations damage, and ignores everything else for now, as the cap doesn't increase for these.<br />
*** The damage bonus is pretty much considered "free", as you have already paid some costs for even having a Military Station (no nearby vision, no economy, so on).<br />
*** In-case someone wonders why two costs are the same, that's due to the damage gained for each of those Marks being identical. This doesn't appear in things that take cap into account.<br />
*** That's actually the same reason the Hull Techs cost the same - they're priced for a unit going from MK5 to MK6, then to MK7. Just so happens the benefit is identical for each step.<br />
<br />
* Citadel Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 2,000, 3,000, 4,000<br />
** Now: 1,500, 2,625, 2,625, 3,000<br />
*** Same thing for above, just uses the damage.<br />
<br />
* Deprecated the Tractor Beams Tech. Tractor Arrays are now included in Sentries.<br />
** These are both a bit...too niche. Sentries was just detection and Gravity Generators, Tractors was...well, Tractors. It makes some sense to just combine the two, as they both fill defensive utility roles, and neither were really bought.<br />
<br />
* Sentries Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 500 ,750, 1000, 1250<br />
** Now: 750, 1500, 3250, 3500<br />
*** Note that since Tractor Beams are included in this now, the cost is up from the previous one, but is cheaper than the Tractor Beam Tech was originally anyhow, which just followed the same scaling that Weapon Techs do, so now you get both for cheaper than the old price of Tractors.<br />
*** Changed the scaling to be one based on health and cap, rather than damage and cap, because naturally nothing here actually attacks.<br />
<br />
* Minefield Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 1,500, 2,750, 5,000, 6,750<br />
** Now: 1,000, 1,850, 3,250, 4,500<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 3,000, 5,500, 10,000, 13,500<br />
** Now: 2,500, 4,750, 10,500, 11,500<br />
*** Mostly bringing it in line with the same scaling used for Sentries. Was surprisingly close.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station shots per salvo 8 -> 12, now gains 4 extra shots per Mark. Damage increased 50%.<br />
** The extra shots is an experimental thing, and newly added with this Station primarily in mind.<br />
** Like the damage bonus, the Tech Cost for these completely ignores it - the cost is paid already in choosing to use a Military.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon damage and reload time halved.<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen.<br />
** It appears the changes from StarKelp to beams have greatly improved their performance, but there's still some consistency issues. Doing this should, like the Spire Frigates, help to counteract some of the bad shots.<br />
** When it's decided they're in a more reliable place, can then investigate their power.<br />
<br />
* Doubled durability of Battlestations. They now also have guns.<br />
<br />
* Citadels damage consoldiated into fewer shots per salvo, now gain 25% more shots per salvo per Mark.<br />
<br />
==== Economy ====<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvester Techs cost the same amount (4,000) for each Mark.<br />
** The benefit of these is purely linear, so the cost should probably be linear too, else an odd case results in which there just becomes a point it's not worth ever getting, so why have that level?<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations now increase energy by 100k per Mark, instead of 50k.<br />
** 50k is kind of pitiful if you only have a few. 100k should hopefully make it worth the investment, combined with below.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station Techs cost the same amount (4,000) for each Mark.<br />
** Same reasoning as the Metal Harvesters. They gain some durability, but it's so little it's not included.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Stations now increase energy by 50k per Mark, instead of 25k.<br />
** Yep, a buff to Logisticals! Mainly to provide some benefit to upgrading these. Economicals are still the top producer, and are more efficient to upgrade for Energy, out of the two.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Station Techs cost the same amount (3,000) for each Mark.<br />
** Same as above.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.013 Menacing Messages From The Machine ==<br />
(Released December 6th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Make Major Data Center exos a bit less frequent<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* When you have marked intel entries as high priority or low priority, it now shows H1, H2, etc, on the left for however many high priority objectives are at a planet on the galaxy map. For all the low-priority ones, it shows L1, L2, etc.<br />
** Potentially the formatting could use some work in the future, but for now this really seems to get the job done in terms of making the importance of the intel items translate onto the galaxy map and not just on the intel sidebar.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* A new "skip_adding_to_seed_lists" tag has been added to fleet designs, which lets us keep them around for existing savegames but prevent them from showing up in the lobby or in seeding in new galaxies.<br />
** This has now been applied to the "Bomber Fleet" starting fleet for players, as that was supremely overpowered and let some players cheese things on the highest difficulty levels.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for inspiring this change, and Badger and Puffin for figuring out the actual conundrum here.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The planet Murdoch will still appear in all games as an Easter Egg, but it is no longer your default starting planet<br />
** Badger prefers some variety, and a number of people have been making muttered complaints about this for a while<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we were showing the wrong colour for tech level upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting<br />
<br />
* Exiting and reopening the load game menu will now abort any selecting game to delete state, to prevent accidental deletes.<br />
** Thanks to StarKeep for reporting and donblas for fixing.<br />
<br />
* On battlestation fleet leaders, it had a duplicated-feeling "battlestation" bit of text in the tooltip, which just felt off. That's been removed.<br />
<br />
* Setting the border colors for sub-factions of the AI (warden, hunter, and praetorian guard) now actually works properly.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for figuring out what the problem was. Thanks to Zoreiss, Ryulong, and NB_FlankStrike for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a super-longstanding bug where if you were hovering over an item in a dropdown list and getting a tooltip for it, then closing the dropdown would sometimes leave that item "stuck" on. Now it detects this case and auto-fixes itself before you can really notice it.<br />
** Thanks to lots of people reporting the stuck tooltips that could happen in the factions tab in particular. Including but not limited to Ovalcircle (most recent repro), AnnoyingOrange, ParadoxSong, vinco, and donblas.<br />
<br />
* Showing the debug info for ship types now shows the fleet category on them of what fleet they're in.<br />
<br />
* On load of a savegame, the game now detects player ships that are in the "loose" fleet (which is bad), and tries to correct them.<br />
** At the moment it can only correct ships that should be part of the planetary fleet.<br />
<br />
* Fixed metal harvesters to properly have a fleet membership of planetary so that they can take advantage of this auto-correction.<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_scrapping_by_player_to_turn_unclaimed xml tag that, when turned to true, lets you override something that is non-scrappable and have it be killed.<br />
** At the moment this lets us scrap metal harvesters but keeps them from just disappearing completely, and thus lets us test for them going into the unconnected fleet improperly.<br />
<br />
* When ships are claimed, if they are not a flagship they are now properly added to the planetary command fleet at the local planet.<br />
** This lets things like metal harvesters properly be added back into the planet's fleet (and thus get related upgrades, if any) after being destroyed.<br />
** There's a mild chance that this might have some strange secondary consequences on some ship that SHOULD have been in the "loose player fleet," but I can't think of any specific examples. All those sorts of things are typically flagships with their own fleet and use a different code path. Worst case is that they'll appear as a member of that planet's fleet and get bonuses from it if there are science upgrades at that planet.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the onload process can't fix whatever ships that are in PlayerLoose for some reason, it now also gives a list of which ships those are.<br />
<br />
* Any ships that did not have fleet_membership="Planetary", but ARE immobile now automatically get set to be a membership of planetary unless they are also a fleet leader (aka things like the AI Overlord Phase 1).<br />
** This makes it so that capturing such buildings puts them into the fleet of the planet and not the "player loose fleet," and also allows for them to be properly re-linked if need be from the onload fixing process.<br />
** This is affecting things like IGCs, MDCs, and so on. It remains to be seen if things of this sort will still properly come back to the planet fleet without a savegame load if they die to remains and then get recaptured (for anything of this sort where that's even a possibility), but fingers crossed.<br />
** Thanks to deo for the report that let us find this one.<br />
<br />
* Also with some of these changes, it's possible that things that were turrets for a specific battlestation or citadel might incorrectly go to the planet fleet after they get shot up and rebuild. Please let us know with a savegame repro if you find that happening.<br />
<br />
=== Audio And Journal Work ===<br />
<br />
* The audio setting "Music: Play Tracks from AI War Classic" now defaults to on instead of off.<br />
** While it's nice to hear the new music from the sequel, there's four and a half hours of music that was gated-off in here that made things repetitive at times without it on.<br />
** A lot of people weren't even aware this setting existed, so thought there was far less music than there was (1 hour rather than 5.5 hours, roughly).<br />
<br />
* Added a new audio setting: "Allow Funny Voice Clips" (defaults to off)<br />
** Humor is subjective, and for some folks can even be a mood-killer in a game like this about galactic stakes. Some of the AI voice taunts err on the possibly-mood-breaking side, and those are disabled by default. If you're in a lighter mood and would like to have those included, feel free to turn this on.<br />
<br />
* When AI taunts play, they now also drop a chat-style message for you to see them.<br />
** If you have voices turned off, then these won't show up at all. If you have just turned the volume way down on the voice channel or AI taunts channel, then you WILL still see these.<br />
** It is colorized and identifies itself as either being from the overlord, hunter, or warden as the case requires.<br />
** We had been planning on this, but thanks to a lot of people for requesting it, including Apthorpe, Asteroid, Thotimx, and Orelius.<br />
<br />
* Added a new JournalMessages object on the world, which lets us store a history of messages from chat, AI taunts, and other sources. It can also be used to store story-specific things in campaigns.<br />
** To save space, it will only save the 50 most recent entries in the journal when you save your game. BUT it first discards normal-priority stuff, then keep-longer stuff if it has to, and then there's always-keep stuff that it will never remove no matter what and so can make it store more than 50. That last category is good for campaign-specific instructions, hopefully of which we won't be having too many things.<br />
** These are temporarily just shown at the bottom of the escape menu, but later will be in their own interface that you can get to via the bottom left corner of the screen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where a variety of AI taunts were imported as ambisonic, and thus threw a harmless warning when we tried to play them back in a standard fashion.<br />
<br />
* 171 new Chief of Staff voice lines (51 categories) have been integrated into the game files, although they're not being triggered yet. <br />
** This is in addition to the 89 lines (14 categories) that were previously in the game from this actress, Alicia Harris.<br />
** A lot of these have to do with alerts for situations relating to the various factions, or other specialized situations that had no voice prompt previously.<br />
<br />
* New voice lines that are actually wired up to trigger:<br />
** Brownouts.<br />
<br />
=== Fleet Naming ===<br />
<br />
* You now select name lists for fleets just like planets (Added by donblas)<br />
* You can add custom name lists of your own as well!<br />
* Create a new folder in GameData\Configuration\FleetNames in the AI War directory<br />
* Add a file with preferrably at least 50 entries, one on each line.<br />
* Edit AIWar2\GameData\Configuration\FleetNameType\CMP_FleetNameTypes.xml and add an entry for your new pack<br />
* Consider opening a bug (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/) with your list if you want to share<br />
<br />
== Version 1.012 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released December 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* If the game fails to load the InstancedRenderer for some reason, it will now tell you which ship it's failing on and what the error was.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units trying to split stacks was causing lots of nasty errors and game slowdown<br />
** Reported by Everyone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where some flagships could have no units in them<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AIs in civil war mode were sending waves against undefended planets<br />
** Thanks to ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed up some of the resource icon alignment and sizing in the top bar of the game.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.011 SuperCat Swats Back ==<br />
(Released December 3rd, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Polish and Gameplay Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of the "List of remote ships you might destroy" list in the Fleets popup<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Allow citadels with engineers to autobuild those engineers<br />
** Requested by deo<br />
<br />
* All new code for group-move thanks to new volunteer Eagleheart. His notes:<br />
** Reworked the speed group / group move system.<br />
** Rather than all units in the group just moving at the speed of the slowest unit in the group, each unit now has its own individual speed limit based on its starting location and the target location of a move command.<br />
** The speed limit will be set to make that unit arrive as close as it can to the arrival time of the unit that will arrive at the destination last. This means that if a unit is far away from the other units in the group while those units are near the destination, the far-away unit will now move at its max speed to catch up.<br />
** Speed groups are now recreated on move orders in addition to when the button is clicked in order to adjust these distance calculations / speeds. This has the added benefit of behavior more closely matching what you would expect. If issuing individual unit or subgroup orders to units of a larger group, they will now be broken out into their own speed group and won't move slowly just because of the previous group limit.<br />
** Similarly, original groups will now move faster if all the slower units of the group have been given a new move command. As an additional side-effect, you can now no longer issue move commands to an overall selection of units that contains units not in a group and have them not have any speed limit enforced. That behavior was a bit confusing.<br />
** For now, units will still not move any slower than the speed of the slowest unit so that they never move imperceptibly slow. This is also necessary at the moment to not make group/pursuit combo mode any worse since ships can only move faster.<br />
** Units will also be removed from their speed group if tractored or stunned so they don't slow the rest of the group down.<br />
** This resolves part of this bug: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=20658<br />
** I hope to implement the second part of group target calculations, so that units move and fight as a group when both group and pursuit mode is enabled. But that will be a bit more tricky.<br />
** Thanks to Eagleheart for coming up with the idea as well as implementing it!<br />
<br />
* Re-order the Intel Menu a bit (including putting Beginner objectives near the top). Note that you can hide/unhide the beginner objectives through the UI. <br />
** Add new Beginner objectives to remind the player to capture their first Flagship, GCA and ARS<br />
*** From some comments on one of the podcasts Chris appeared on (I think the SGJ podcast)<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to disable repairing allied units<br />
** Note that this will need to be revisited for multiplayer for a proper implementation<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty (and others) for requesting<br />
<br />
* Attempt to make crippled flagships more desirable repair targets. I'm not sure if it's enough, so if people continue to see problems then a save game to help me reproduce the issue is needed.<br />
** Thanks to deo for suggesting<br />
<br />
* When choosing an Instigator Base planet, make a good faith effort to choose an explored planet. Instigators will only use an unexplored planet if they can't find a good explored planet.<br />
** Thanks to a discussion on Steam started by KDR_11k<br />
<br />
* When a bunch of drones have been produced for combat, they are reabsorbed into their flagship when all the enemies are dead.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for requesting this originally, and thanks to ArnaudB for pointing out the performance issues that were happening without a feature like this<br />
<br />
* Things such as Coordinators and Augmenters are now considered critical infrastructure for the purposes of the "planet under attack" notifications.<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for pointing out.<br />
<br />
* Eyes now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Puffin was reluctant to add things like this in, because it could kind of be a bit crowded already and it was purely a local thing to him, while galaxy icons should be for things with strategic impact.<br />
** Then the realisation occurred that they impact deepstriking choices, and so they now fit strategic impact.<br />
** Things like Mass Drivers will remain as is however, because of how many of these things can be on a single planet potentially (Peacemaker AI), even though they do kind of affect deepstriking.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Zenith Power Generators and Matter Converters now properly die if Perma-Death is enabled for them.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong and Venger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Stored Hive Golem Wasps now persist across save/reload<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* The player can no longer murder the antagonized dyson sphere<br />
** Reported by Ovalcircle <br />
<br />
* Fix several bugs with potentially capturable units not being shown in the tech menu<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference in debug-mode entity display code <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where killing a reconquest command station might incorrectly charge you AIP<br />
** Thanks to deo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Non-Allied Marauders no longer announce they have conquered planets that you can't see. Allied Marauders are more chatty.<br />
<br />
* You will no longer rebuild remains if they would put you into brownout<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now correctly alert nearby AI ships. They also print a message saying "Alarm Post has been triggered"<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Planet text boxes weren't being appropriately suppressed even when the "suppress text" button was held<br />
** Thanks to Astilious for finding the bug and also for coding the fix!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the Linked Rings generator that was causing the math to essentially infinite-loop until the game ran out of planet names (or similar) and generate *thousands* of planets instead of the desired number.<br />
** Also fixed the "moon" rings from disappearing on larger map sizes.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for finding a repro case.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked Swirl and Bubbles maps to have a bit more spacing between planets.<br />
** Primarily done by placing fewer planets on each orbit/loop/ring (<code>radius * Pi * 2 / desired_space_between_planets</code>). Swirl is always going to be tight, though. More space just makes the map larger, which then gets scaled down due to zooming, resulting in no appreciable difference.<br />
** Swirl's generator rewritten to operate outside-in instead of inside-out. So the central area is less likely to be cramped and the total number of planets ends up being more accurate (the number is always going to be more of a suggestion, than exact, simply due to how each ellipse is generated and how much room is left).<br />
*** Before if you asked for 150 planets and it got up to 149, it would add another ellipse around the outside, adding 20, 30, or 60 more planets. Now it will be adding a ring of only 5 or 7. If there isn't room, but is currently under the desired amount, it will generate a single planet in the exact center.<br />
** Boosted Swirl's connectivity slightly<br />
** Added a random call that changes the Swirl direction<br />
** Added a random call to slightly adjust the number of planets in each ellipse to prevent same-y-ness (and it also helps prevent near-collisions between planets in separate ellipses).<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fix battlestation/planet confirmation dialog showing the wrong science cost (was correctly charged however).<br />
** Thanks to donblas for his first fix.<br />
* Fix multiple locations showing wrong turret counts (showing 5x too many).<br />
** Thanks Volatar for the report<br />
* Fix multi-beam description typo<br />
** Thanks donblas for the report and fix.<br />
<br />
* Fix to the bug where hitting the escape key while in certain windows (like the fleet management window, hack choices, fleet ship line swapping, etc) was not just closing the window, but was also opening the escape menu.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting, for finding the fix, and for fixing it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Give the higher-difficulty AIs some stronger defenses and a bit more income<br />
<br />
* Increase the strength of the AI anti-marauder and anti-nanocaust waves<br />
** Suggested by zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Tripper now has an engine_gx bonus similar to the Agravic Pod. This replaces the secondary speed related bonus it had.<br />
** Said bonus was meant to replace the original, but apparently isn't now, leading to stupidly high damage values as they multiplied each other.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigates (and their variants) are now found in higher numbers whenever they appear. Also increased cloaking points (starting and amount gained) by 50%.<br />
** The basic one also shows up in ARS' now, and there are 3 in the Raid Starting Fleet instead of 2.<br />
*** Prompted by an unfavourable mention on Steam, and some discussion with zeusalmighty.<br />
<br />
* Added "Greater Metabolism" and applied it to Bounty Hunters.<br />
** This lets them be the specialist in getting large amounts of metal (max 50% or 50,000) off single targets, while things like Gangsaws and Yellow Jackets are good at swarms.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tanks "Bunker Buster" bonus is applicable for 12 seconds, rather than 5.<br />
** This hopefully lets you shuttle them in a Transport to something, unload, wait for the firing delay to elapse then still get the bonus.<br />
** Preferable to having them ignore the unload firing delay, as that would somewhat bring back the problem the delay was meant to solve (unload, fire, and load at every single Guard Post, avoiding all damage).<br />
** The cost of these for the AI is increased slightly, to offset the fact they're much more likely to get the bonus against you in a wave, though thankfully you can stop these being sent.<br />
** Prompted by a few unfavourable mentions on Steam.<br />
<br />
* Added a Turret Hull Tech.<br />
** Using the old cost of the other Hull Techs (7,500) for now. This lets you get Turrets to MK6 and 7 without needing the local Command Station upgrades, and is a way to just upgrade most of your defenses everywhere, rather than doing it purely through Weapon Techs (some of which don't have Turrets in them).<br />
<br />
* Battlestations/citadels can now be upgraded by spending science, like planetary fleets can.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin and a variety of other players for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Replaced Eyebots damage bonus. They now gain more damage based on how much energy the target uses. The higher the energy consumption, the more damage.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira Ark range 5,600 -> 8,000.<br />
** Apparently the bubble on this thing would get so large it couldn't attack something without pushing it away.<br />
** Thanks to Hyde on Discord for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Halved Marauder Drone Frigate drone count and build rate.<br />
<br />
* AI Grenade Launcher Turret and Fortified Tesla Turret range is now 75% and 100% of normal player Turrets respectively.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for bugging Puffin repeatedly.<br />
<br />
* Stalker durability increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Assault Frigate shield bypass no longer increases with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Added the "Suppressor" Frigate to help shore up Disruptive Tech.<br />
<br />
* Medic Gunboats repair rate now increases with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Increased Ion Disruptor durability by 30%.<br />
<br />
* Strikecraft, Frigates and normal Guardians have had their hull/shield ratios standardised, to a 2/1 ratio. There are occasional exceptions where it's desirable for a unit to be very shield heavy, such as the Vanguards, which are 1/2.<br />
** This is part of a change to fixing the problem with Fusion Bombers basically being really good against everything by skipping most of their durability, rather than mostly structures and things specified to be weak to them.<br />
** There aren't any changes to Bombers yet - anything will be done slow and this is a notable change in some areas. However, as noted above, Assault Frigates (and Muggers by extension) no longer gain improved bypass per Mark, as they would result in having the same problem inspiring this change.<br />
** This'll likely be extended to other areas, such as Dire Guardians and faction units, but for now the majority of the player/AI units are done.<br />
<br />
* Combed through all the Fleet Design stuff, and made some fairly wide changes.<br />
** Added several new Designs, such as the SniperMix and DisruptiveMix.<br />
** Everything *should* be in ARS' now, rather than a few being totally missed for whatever reason.<br />
** The rare/odd units, such as Daggers or Medic Gunboats, are now set to a lower chance in ARS than normal units, because over time a lot of the rare finds were creeping up to be too common in ARS'. A good number of them show up in the new designs, and of course the ones that weren't in ARS at all now show up, so this shouldn't be too bad.<br />
** Altered the general distribution and chances of all the unit types to make each Tech far more equal (Fusion was notably far above the others). This was something Puffin hadn't thought about until recently, and oof, there was a problem. They're still not perfect, but at this point the options available of what to tune are really running low without making some very strange changes.<br />
** Fixed some random values being out of place as well, particularly with the FrigatesWithSupport Strikecraft options.<br />
** Lastly, fixed some units being in strange Designs, such as the new Eyebots being in AntiSmaller, despite their new bonus not being relevant at all versus that type of target.<br />
*** Prompted by some grumbling in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Implemented some code changes from StarKelp that improve performance of the lance weapons be 12-15% in heavy usage based on his tests, and they now hit all targets in a line. This may have some balance implications based on a code review, so please let us know what folks think about this change. It's a small enough change that it's easy to revert or alter if need be, and the performance boost is certainly welcome when it's a big battle of these sorts of ships.<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for investigating and implementing this.<br />
<br />
==== Major Data Center Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Since AIP reduction is now so strong with the Major Data Centers, the AI will now generate Exogalactic Strikeforces against players who own Major Data Centers<br />
** Only happens if there are AIs at difficulty >= 7<br />
** This can be disabled via an in-game Setting, so players who are mid-game can disable it if it's too much of a balance swing.<br />
** Thanks to everyone who is still beating the game at difficulty 10, in particular Astilious<br />
<br />
==== Wormhole Invasion Nerfs ====<br />
* Wormhole invasions get less budget<br />
* You will have more warning before they start sending troops through<br />
* Exogalactic Wormholes can no longer be used to send regular waves<br />
** From a discussion on discord led by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* If the AI would send a wormhole invasion but it has no valid targets, it will continue to retry every few minutes, instead of only checking again in another couple hours.<br />
** This should reduce the number of times when players have giant wormhole invasions "Out of nowhere"<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report and save game to test the fix<br />
<br />
== Version 1.010 Extracting Those Archives ==<br />
(Released November 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Modding Support ===<br />
<br />
* If someone were to mod nanocausting guns onto the Devourer, the nanocausted ships will now wander the galaxy if their current planet has no real threats, instead of always staying on the same planet<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Add a Notification for brownouts<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The Metal Flow Planning popup window now consolidates essentially identical flows. So if there are 3 engineers doing something it will now show as a single line saying '3 engineers are doing ....' instead of 3 separate lines. <br />
** The list is now sorted by planet from "Most metal spent on a planet" to "Least", and gives a nice header line with the total spent per planet before the details<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the excellent suggestion and ongoing critique<br />
<br />
* Allow for the energy consumed screen to show data sorted by 'overall usage' or by Planetary Fleets and Mobile fleets sorted separately<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for a hacking notification now reminds the player that the hack can be cancelled by clicking<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* Hacking information from the top bar when hovered over now explains only hacking structures owned by that AI count.<br />
** Suggested by VengefulWight.<br />
<br />
* Fix a whitespace problem with the planet hovertext<br />
** Reported by alocritani<br />
<br />
* Fixed typo in the Devourer beacon, and one with some Astro Train text.<br />
** Reported by Ryulong and VengefulWight respectively. <br />
<br />
* Improve some tooltips<br />
** Reported by Histidine<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Hopefully this actually fixes the "AI Reserves spawning outside of gravwell" problem<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the base-oriented Warden Fleet wasn't properly constrained to camping at bases<br />
<br />
* Fix a couple hacks that weren't correctly setting the Hacking History<br />
** Thanks to alocritani for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive Extraction hack now only takes 5 minutes at base, rather than 15.<br />
** With higher difficulties getting longer durations, this could lead to...well, on Diff 10, an hour long hack. Yeah.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty and donblas for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Units under construction take bonus damage from being shot. This should alleviate the frustrating case where the AI is distracted trying to kill Under Construction Frigates/Turrets instead of things that are actually shooting back<br />
** Note that this makes long-build-time things from the zenith trader very fragile before they are finished.<br />
** Mentioned by ussdefiant60 on discord<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian damage 1,500 -> 500, reload time 6s -> 4s, swapped outdated damage bonus to match the Fusion Bombers.<br />
** The 6s reload time was allowing these to recloak while still firing. The outdated bonus had weird Mark interactions and was missed.<br />
** Damage in general was a bit high for a unit that bypassed 90% of shields, so a large drop, both for that and to account for the new bonus.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Black Widow Golem Ark hull into shields.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some Guardian costs.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.009 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the last patch where sometimes threat wasn't being correctly counted.<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists and others for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.008 Golems And Arks Come Marching In ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart from Nuc Temeron<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Science icon in the resource bar now shows the history of the Techs you have unlocked. Note that this only applies to techs unlocked after this patch is applied.<br />
** This is mostly to have behariour that matches with the AIP and Hacking histories, but also allows for a new player to look at a save from an experienced player and learn from what they did with science.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug option to increase or decrease the difficulty of all the AIs in the game<br />
** It occurs to me that people sometimes start games and think "Man, this isn't challenging enough" or "I'm getting crushed". Well, now you can adjust the AI difficulty on the fly! Yet another feature for improved sandboxing.<br />
** This code includes a framework to allow other settings on other factions to be changed.<br />
<br />
* Add a tip explaining that unit stats have no inherent mechanical impact, they only matter insofar as their numbers relate to weapons systems<br />
** This caused some confusion<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
* Fix a typo in the metal popup<br />
** Thanks to alocritani for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI Reserves to spawn a bit further from the gravwell edge; they were getting stuck sometimes<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where sometimes minor factions would incorrectly cause AIP increases when killing warp gates. <br />
** Thanks to MasterGeese for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with Global Command Augmenters where they used the Turret type count for how many OtherDefense types they had.<br />
** Normally, a GCA has 1 Turret type, with 25% chance for a second. It then has a 33% chance for a single "OtherDefense" type (things like Minefields). If it has only 1 unit type after this, it gets a second Turret type, so in general they're pretty likely to get 2 Turret types.<br />
** Because of the OtherDefense logic actually using the Turret count, it meant since it always has at least 1 Turret, it would also always have 1 OtherDefense, regardless of the 33% chance.<br />
** This meant the "add a second Turret type so we have at least 2 types total" logic never occurred, making it so most GCAs had just 1 Turret type, when in fact the majority were meant to have 2.<br />
** It seems like this has changed it from around 25% of GCAs having 2 Turret types, to 75% (!) of GCAs having 2 Turret types.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Dark Spire Ward description<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste on discord for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Strikecraft and Turret Coordinators were both increasing Strikecraft and Turret caps once you had both effects.<br />
** If you had only one, it would work completely fine. Once you had two, it would combine the effects, leading to a 1.7x cap multiplier for both, instead of 1.3x.<br />
** This probably leads to some late game nerfs as a consequence.<br />
*** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting an oddity with some MLRS Turrets, leading to this discovery.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer was causing all the ships to rush out of the AI Guard Posts and get eaten<br />
** I hope this also alleviates a bug where some minor factions could still stir up AI units to attack you<br />
<br />
* The Tech Menu now shows ships in ARSs under the set of things that you can upgrade, not just the things in Fleets on the map that you haven't captured yet<br />
** I think a number of people have wanted this but I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* The Tech menu now shows entries for techs that you could unlock from ARSs but don't have in a fleet (either owned or capturable)<br />
** I think this confused some people on Steam who could see something in an ARS but couldn't see the Tech for it<br />
<br />
* Fixed several possible but rare index out of range exceptions that could happen in the vis layer simulation due to cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif, KazeSasso, and Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the ReevaluateUnitOrders code that would sometimes have background-coarse planets not run the logic for their ships at all. Now those ships only use the secondary "SimCycleGroup_Slow" logic if this is on a "tier 1" planet that gets processed every frame.<br />
** The intent of the sim frame processing was to split it out across multiple frames, which works great on those tier 1 planets, but for planets that are already being split across multiple frames it could mean that their ships might not get new orders ever until the player visited the planet. This could greatly nerf engineers, for example.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this!<br />
<br />
* The forcefield protection planning was being run only intermittently on tier 2 planets, which include player forces that are not being monitored right now. Now it ONLY runs those intermittently on tier 3 planets (no players), and runs them continuously otherwise, so as to never run into cases where enemies could get off a few shots at something of a player that was being protected by a forcefield.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this, and Chthon and folks on discord for reporting it.<br />
<br />
* Silenced some harmless errors about trying to render a ship when its RelatedEntity became null during the process, via cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare nullref exception that could happen in the target list planning because of cross-threading stuff.<br />
** Thanks to vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tentatively prevent the Devourer from shooting force field generators (the ones you can build at your planets)<br />
** A number of people have complained about it. I'm not sure if I caught all the cases, so please let me know if there are any issues.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Hacking Difficulty Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* The goal of this is to make hacking easier early and harder late.<br />
<br />
* Increase up the Hacking Points Spent required to trigger new hacking difficulty levels.<br />
** Some larger hacks could move you up 2 levels of difficulty under the wrong circumstances, which was quite excessive <br />
<br />
* Add some new tiers of hacking difficulty to allow us to make late game hacking scarier. The hacking difficulty now goes<br />
** Very Easy<br />
** Easy<br />
** Indifferent (old Moderate)<br />
** Slothful (old Hard)<br />
** Moderate (old Extreme)<br />
** Hard (old Terrifying)<br />
** Extreme (new, and harder)<br />
** Terrifying (new, and harder)<br />
***From a conversation on discord where people wanted higher difficulty tiers<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hacking difficulty levels used were one tier harder than they should have been<br />
** A number of people noted this<br />
<br />
=== Other Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Tractor Arrays in Global Command Augmenters a bit.<br />
<br />
* Added Raiders and Daggers to ARS'.<br />
<br />
* AI Sentry Frigate now decloaks much slower (from 2s for MK1 vs MK1 cloaked units, to 8s), damage 600 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Added an AI Ship Group consisting of the Classic Trio Strikecraft (V-Wing, Fusion Bomber, Concussion Corvette).<br />
<br />
* Added the V-Wing into a few groups.<br />
<br />
* Weaken Turret and Weaken Guard Post hacks are slightly cheaper. Can also be done remotely (i.e without a Flagship present).<br />
** The remote hack is an experiment.<br />
<br />
* The logic for officer fleets (those with Arks and Golems) used to be that they couldn't be more than a certain number of hops away from an AI homeworld. Now it doesn't care how far away they are, except that they must ideally be at least 3 from the AI homeworld and (same as before) 6 from player homeworlds. This makes it a lot more likely for you to actually see officer fleets in the mid-game (or at all, depending on how far you're getting).<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for inspiring this change while doing a podcast with Chris (https://explorminate.co/chris-park-of-arcen-games-podcast-interview/), and Badger for suggesting the specifics.<br />
** Note that Lone Wolf flagships have also had their seeding locations updated in an analagous but not identical fashion<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette damage 340 -> 280, stack damage multiplier 3x - > 2x.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tank augmented weapon range 8,000 -> 10,100, base damage multiplier 2x -> 3x, visual changed to a red laser pulse.<br />
<br />
* Removed Fusion Bombers damage bonus improving with Mark.<br />
** The bonus was only meant for them to automatically target anything with enough shields to be worth bypassing.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette damage 96 -> 130.<br />
<br />
* Kite now uses the same damage as the Concussion Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod damage 100 -> 125.<br />
<br />
==== Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Ripper reload time 3s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate damage 20,000 -> 24,000.<br />
<br />
==== Outguard ====<br />
<br />
* Removed Hacking cost of hiring Outguard.<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased base values of Outguard strength.<br />
<br />
* Those Outguard groups that did not have a Flagship now do.<br />
<br />
* Some Outguard groups can be hired twice rather than once.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate beams max targets 30 -> 10, damage 5,000 -> 7,500, reload time 2s -> 1s.<br />
** Same DPS as before, but more likely to hit enough targets to get all of it. Fire rate offsets the occasional beam that mostly misses.<br />
** This appears to be a somewhat decent improvement.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed 600 -> 1,000, AIP cost 20 -> 15, hull 750,000 -> 1,250,000.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse weapon damage 2,500 -> 4,500.<br />
<br />
* Railcannon weapon damage 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Golems ====<br />
<br />
* Note: AI Golems are currently untouched. There is very little data on them currently - most feedback is about the player ones, which the below concern.<br />
<br />
* AIP cost (for non Lone Wolves) 20 -> 15.<br />
<br />
* Golem Speed 600 -> 1,000, Black Widow Golem speed 1,000 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem main weapon damage 2,000 -> 5,000, Sabot damage 3,000 -> 8,000, total durability 2,500,000 -> 4,000,000.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem reload time 9s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Regenerator Golem shots per salvo 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem shots per salvo 20 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 2,000 -> 3,000, hull 1,000,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem hull 1,800,000 -> 2,800,000, damage 350 -> 800, range of both weapon and tractor beams 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Hive Golem has 300 Yellow Jackets, up from 250.<br />
<br />
==== Arks ====<br />
<br />
* AIP cost 15 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos range 5,600 -> 9,000, Parasite Bolt damage 900 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira forcefield size increased 25%, damage 7,000 -> 15,000, shields 1,250,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Ark One shots per salvo 20 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Gryn now launches Saboteur, Decoy and Scrap drones. Also produces some energy.<br />
<br />
=== Expansion and Mod Loading Work ===<br />
<br />
* XMLLoadingOrder.txt, which lets you specify the loading order of mods that you choose to install, has been updated with some notes on exactly how that's intended to work.<br />
** They read: <br />
*** //note that this is for determining the order that mods are loaded.<br />
*** //any mods not specified in here will be loaded in alphabetical order according to the OS.<br />
*** //the base game content, and then the expansions in numerical order, are ALWAYS loaded first.<br />
*** //to add an mod to your mod order list, just place them each on a single line here.<br />
*** //unless a mod depends on another mod, you don't even need to do that, though. Usually mods don't touch each other.<br />
<br />
* The game now handles mod loading slightly differently, in that it makes a central table of all the mods that it finds in the XmlMods folder and allows for other parts of the game to reference them as-needed later.<br />
** Overall we're not doing TOO much with this yet, but it does make things faster.<br />
** As part of this, the actual xml mod loading order is now handled far better, and doesn't require loading the same file over and over again dozens of times.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoPostInitializationAndSortingLogic method onto ArcenDynamicTable, which allows us to do things like export the list of installed mods.<br />
<br />
* As part of the boot sequence for the game, it now logs which mods are installed, and in what order. This is pretty useful for any debugging that anyone might need to do.<br />
** It also lists all of the expansions that it's aware of, and if they are installed or not.<br />
<br />
* Under the hood since the start of the project, we've had the ability to have expansions that are enabled or disabled in worlds. This has now been fleshed out with our modern requirements for it, though.<br />
<br />
* Some various old parts of the code under the hood were still assuming that we could sometimes reload some of the xml after initial game load (that's never been true in this game, what a mess that always was when we tried it).<br />
** Some also assumed that we would use the old-style Language localization files, which gave false hope for localization to anyone poring through the code and also had a mild waste of time in there.<br />
** All of this has been cleaned out.<br />
<br />
* When there are exceptions in processing in the xml from the base game, an expansion, or a mod, it's now a lot clearer what the file is and some other bits of data about it.<br />
<br />
* In the folder for any expansion, there is an "ExpansionInstallation.txt" file. Removing that will cause the game to act as if the expansion isn't there, which is useful for testing.<br />
** In past games, we called that Version.txt, but this is a less confusing name. <br />
<br />
* Mods are now automatically loaded -- in whatever order -- simply by existing in the XmlMods folder. You can override their order by using the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file as noted above, but they'll automatically load in alpha order without that requirement.<br />
** However, there is also now a new file called "ModIsDisabled.txt" that can be placed in the folder of each mod. If it is there, then the mod will not load EVEN IF it is in the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file. This is basically a way to make really super sure that the example mods don't load without someone wanting them to.<br />
** The fact that mods are auto-loaded makes them a lot easier to install just by dragging and dropping them.<br />
<br />
* Several example mods had really outdated bits that made them unable to load. Those have now been cleaned up a bit.<br />
<br />
* A lot of subtle changes have been made in the code to how expansions and mods are loaded, which gives them more capabilities than before in things like overwriting core constants or adding to them, etc.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.007 The Player/AI Arms Race Intensifies ==<br />
(Released November 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* You can now see the number of empty slots in your fleet in the fleet management screen, and you can swap other things IN to the empty slot of a fleet, rather than having to go to the other location and swap them OUT only.<br />
** This is the more natural workflow in a lot of cases, and now both workflows are possible at any rate.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== AI Reserves: Anti-Deepstriking ====<br />
<br />
* Add new AI Reserves, basically an HRF for the AI against deepstriking players. The response strength is greater at higher difficulties and the further away from one of your planets you are. Will not trigger unless you are more than 3 hops from your planets.<br />
** Once arrived, AI Reserves are limited to that planet and will hang out for a few minutes, then vanish again.<br />
** It shouldn't trigger easily on Flagships in transport mode, only once you deploy the units.<br />
*** As with all new code, there will probably be a need for some QoL improvements once people have figured out what's fun/frustrating about them<br />
<br />
* Added a new "auto_add_one_of_faction_if_missing_on_save_load" xml tag on factions that allows us to automatically add the AI Reserve into existing quick starts if they weren't already there.<br />
** We definitely don't want to be in a position for constantly recreating the quick starts every time we add a new under-the-hood-always-there faction.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Tweak the logic that calculates the hacking cost increase for a number of hacking types to make the increase less aggressive<br />
** This had already been done for the science extraction hacking, but I hadn't also updated the generic cost increase function because we weren't using it until very recently<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The following hacks no longer get more expensive (in hacking points) based on repeated attempts:<br />
** Neutral Planet Science Extraction<br />
** Grant Technology<br />
** Convert Tech Vault to Science<br />
** Grant Ship Line<br />
** Convert ARS to Science<br />
** Double Ship Line Cap<br />
** At this point, most of the things that increase with repeat usages are things that are hackinng something that you can also get the benefit of via capturing, or covert science extraction, etc.<br />
** It's useful to have some things increase with repeat usages, but for a lot of the main goodies that are on the map that you can ONLY get via hacking, having them increase that way felt punitive.<br />
<br />
* Most of the very common hacks have had their durations reduced from 120-300 seconds to more like 30-120 seconds instead.<br />
** Given things happen once-per-second as hacking progresses, this was a bit on the punishing side for sure.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of players on Steam for pointing out how much harder this had made things, not in a fun way.<br />
<br />
* There is now an increase in hacking times required based on the highest difficulty of any AI faction in the game you're playing (living or dead).<br />
** This only applies to hacks that take more than 5 seconds to begin with.<br />
** On difficulty 5 and down, it's the same as it always has been (with the new nerfs in placing making it far less than it used to be, actually).<br />
** On diff 6, it's now multiplied by 1.25x.<br />
** Diff 7 is 1.5x (so an ARS hack is 45 seconds here instead of the new 30, still better than the older 120 of the last two builds).<br />
** Diff 8 is 2x, diff 9 is 3x, diff 10 is 4x.<br />
** This should help put in some nice gradation for people who feel like hacking should be on the harder side with people on other difficulties not getting absolutely stomped by them.<br />
** Thanks to various discussions on the steam forums making it clear that different people expected/wanted a different amount of hassle out of these, and this led to us feeling like it needed to vary by AI difficulty. A harder-to-hack higher-difficulty AI is super thematically appropriate, anyway.<br />
<br />
==== Economy ====<br />
<br />
* Cheapened the metal cost of Transport Flagships to around 27% of previous.<br />
** An unwelcome penalty for constructing empty Flagships for unit groups, as well as repairing them.<br />
<br />
* 25% increase in Engineer repair rate.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of rare exceptions that could happen based on copying orders from one entity to another after it had already been returned to the pool or otherwise been made invalid. Was something that could happen during stack splits, evidently.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting; it seems he has ridiculously bad luck in getting more exceptions than anyone.<br />
<br />
* The save and load menus now have better sized and spaced text, so long names no longer overlap the stats about them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of cross-threading exceptions that could be hit if the waves composition changed while you were iterating over them.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The "Danger! CurrentFrameNumber changed" error message has been removed from the game and won't bother people anymore.<br />
** This was exceedingly rare for most people, but common for a few specific people. The best theory on this is that these people had exceedingly fast CPU cores, because on inspection of this code it was actually able to detect an "improper" state change that was really just "unlikely but fine." All of the improper cases would have been a lot more common to see, and seen across many clients. In this case it seems to have been a race condition between "work's done" and "make sure the frame didn't change," which were happening on a nanosecond scale.<br />
** The worst case with someone having this change in an actual problematic way would be a multiplayer desync of some varying severity, but given that we already have network desync repair planned as a core key feature this isn't exactly a big deal. Originally this was also code that was defensively checking to see about single-player cross-threading issues, but those are all long-since fixed (2+ years ago).<br />
** Basically this was a case of some false positive popping up in interrupting you for no good reason if your processor was fast enough.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exceptionally rare error that could happen with multiple ships pulling the same order out of the pool if your machine is just really too excellent at multithreading for some reason. Now instead of complaining at you, it just fixes itself. Originally the complain-at-you code was in case we made some code mistakes that would cause this, but the rarity of this error pretty much shows we don't have any such errors. But man, cross-threading stuff on a few particular machines really is popping out some interesting cases.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where astro train depots weren't tracking the number of trains that arrived between save/reload. Whoops.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* When you load a quick start, it now sets the first player name to be whatever your local profile's name is, and then the ones after that (if any) become "Player 2," "Player 3," etc.<br />
** This solves a lot of the underlying names still being "Puffin" or various people who contributed quick starts.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.006 Freedom Of Fleet Line Combination ==<br />
(Released November 7th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== The Ability To Have Duplicate Ship Lines In One Fleet ===<br />
<br />
* The game now allows for duplicate ship lines in a single fleet. This was something that people REALLY wanted, and we get why, but it was a tricky technical thing. Our first idea for this today wasn't valid for multiplayer it turned out, but thankfully we came up with something that is.<br />
** This also includes the ability for initial fleet designs to add more than one copy of a fleet line to itself, whereas before it would just combine them. So you could have two bomber lines in a single fleet design now, for example.<br />
** Note that this will NOT work for drones in fleets at the moment. Those can't be swapped around by players anyway, and there didn't seem to be any reason to make this part work. It could be extended later if we really need to, but it seemed pointless.<br />
** Only the player mobile fleets have this new ability. Command stations, NPC fleets, battlestations/citadels, and so forth all still combine their fleet lines if the type matches. Those can't be swapped around, and it makes much more sense for them to work like they always have.<br />
** It's possible there may be some bugs with this (mainly of the sort of something not building when it's a secondary ship line in a fleet, or things not being able to swap properly when there are duplicate lines), but if so please do report those to us and bear with us.<br />
** Thanks to nas1m, Asteroid, and many others for requesting this -- rather forcefully at times in the case of some steam reviewers or folks on discord, but we got the message. This was tricky as heck to implement, and may cause a few bugs for a bit, but it's clear how important this is to people.<br />
<br />
* When hacking for dark spire ships, it now always puts each new ship you get in its own ship line rather than ever adding to an existing line.<br />
** Additionally, it checks to make sure you have enough empty slots before it will work.<br />
<br />
* Dyson hacks seem to have been assuming that you'll increase the ship cap on existing lines, so for now we've left that working as it always has.<br />
<br />
* ARSes now CAN grant duplicate ship lines to a fleet, and instead of merging they now stay as separate ship lines.<br />
<br />
* Doing a hack to double the cap of a ship line SHOULD work properly in cases where you have multiple ship lines inside a single fleet, only doubling one of them and then allowing the other one to be doubled later if you want.<br />
** This needs testing, though, as it was kind of complicated.<br />
<br />
==== New Bomber Starting Fleet ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Bomber Fleet as a starting option, which includes two different identical lines of Fusion Bombers, plus also Parasitic Bombers. This helps to highlight the fact that you can have very-thematic fleets for anyone just perusing these things from the lobby, so that hopefully this is a teaching moment.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the tooltip showing the number of ships an ARS granted didn't factor in Mark Level increases. Note it still doesn't factor in any additional multipliers like ICGs<br />
<br />
* Fixed some more Frigates being seeded as Strike options in ARS.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an ArgumentOutOfRangeException that could happen in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations P2 because of a race condition. It's harmless and no longer puts up an error message in your face.<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a pretty nasty memory leak that could happen around planned metal flows, particularly given that they were being used from a single pool but for two different threading areas.<br />
** This was something that would affect things even when the metal flows UI wasn't open, because of race conditions between two threads. It was also causing some errors and other race conditions in general, all of which are now fixed.<br />
** It was a very unusual sort of situation with a very special-case data structure (the time-based pool), and that was just... really an edge case thing. It also was not really causing errors or a memory leak in all cases, even though it was in some. Why it would be particularly severe for the one player who reported it, while nobody else had crashes related to this, is mildly baffling. But that's the nature of race conditions for you, honestly.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of memory leaks and other things that caused excessive memory churn while actively viewing the metal flows interface. These were things that would be given back to the player and thus not truly a memory leak in general; it was leaking on the heap and then coming back later.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The last of the memory-leaky-type things related to metal flows is now fixed. This one was introduced possibly as far back as September 2018 by Chris, or possibly more recently when changing another bit of code to make a copy per list instead of having a reference in another list. At any rate, we were creating a metric ton of extra metal flow data that was then getting churned out of the memory pool by the garbage collector, and generally wasting some CPU time and efficiency. Now things properly get returned to the pool.<br />
** On the metal flows screen, there is still some climbing RAM that you see for a while, but then it stabilizes and eventually drops. That seems to be mostly related to temporarily cached sprite quads being used by TextMeshPro, and with such large amounts of text that changes frequently that's probably unavoidable. It's not a true memory leak anymore, and doesn't spike more than something like 60mb at peak in our current tests, where it was hundreds of mb in the same tests previously.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the Threat tooltip to say that the Visible Threat reported is only from Watched planets<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx of reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a couple of changes that may fix custom flagships being placed at a higher mark level than their base should be if the planet they are on is a higher mark.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an invisible nullref exception that could happen on quitting the game program in some rare circumstances.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Show Fleet Ship Line Numbers" settings option to the Debug section that is for helping us root out problems with multiple ship lines of the same type within a fleet.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen inside LazyLoadSquadWrapper when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare indexing exception that could happen inside GetEntityByID when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Phenomphear for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Reduced firepower and health of Instigator and Warden Fleet Bases.<br />
** People liked it when shown the values before the release, but it seems to have caused issues elsewhere. For deepstriking defense, probably need to be another method.<br />
** Also lowered the range a tad of both and removed the forcefield from the Warden Fleet Base.<br />
<br />
* Upped Parasite damage slightly, doubled the zombification damage amount.<br />
** So now they zombify in 5 shots, and 1 at MK7.<br />
<br />
* Bumped up starting metal storage to the maximum value.<br />
<br />
* Home Human Settlements gain 260 metal per mark, up from 120.<br />
<br />
* Reduced metal cost of Plasma Turrets and Beam Cannons by half.<br />
<br />
* Human Home Command metal income 900 - > 2,200, increase by 400 per mark.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations now benefit from the Citadel Technology.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Citadel Tech from 3,000/4,500/6,000 to 2,000/3,000/4,000.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Sentries Tech from 1000/1500/2000/2500 to 500/750/1000/1250.<br />
<br />
* Watchman Frigate energy usage 7,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.005 Answering Your Top Requests ==<br />
(Released November 5th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some code to dump the current state of the Hunter Fleets in threat popup display window. Only enabled with the Debug_Tooltip setting. <br />
** Intended for debugging/internal testing.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Line And Count Revisions ===<br />
<br />
* There are now a maximum of 5 ship lines (other than drones, things like hydra heads, and the fleet leaders) that any fleet can have. Previously it was 6 for some fleets, 7 for others.<br />
** This applies to the ARS and other ships.<br />
** This is defined in central xml so that we can tune it if need be.<br />
<br />
* ALL strike fleets are now considered to have 5x slots for strikecraft and frigates, and their "empty slots" are no longer a "physical thing" (people reporting oddness on how these custom fleets worked will know what this means).<br />
** This lets you take any fleet that you capture and swap stuff around so that it has a full 5 slots of stuff on it, which is really handy.<br />
** This also makes the interface for empty slots a lot more condensed and easy to read when you're swapping something else to them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an oversight that was causing players to be able to build more than a single copy of each of the empty flagships in the game.<br />
** This in turn caused various issues, such as trying to move empty slots between two Stealth Alpha fleets would not work, etc. That was never supposed to let you have more than one in the first place! Go figure.<br />
<br />
==== ARS Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* You are no longer allowed to hack an ARS for a ship line if that fleet already has the ship line<br />
** If there is any way to merge ship lines then people will want full ability to merge/split ship lines, which is not something Chris wants to allow. So for consistency's sake, this is being removed.<br />
** Fleet Capacity Extenders have been added as a replacement for this mechanic, and those are both clearer as well as being WAY more powerful.<br />
<br />
* When you find an ARS, it now works much differently. Rather than having just ONE ship type available at it, it has five. It will always have 4 strikecraft and 1 frigate type.<br />
** When you click the "Grant Ship Line" hack on the ARS, it no longer just does the hack -- instead, a new popout sidebar window appears, asking you which of the lines you wish to have granted to the fleet in question.<br />
** This shows you the fleet in question, what ships it has, and reds out any options that are invalid for that particular fleet because they happen to be invalid.<br />
** This gives you a TON more control over how you grow your fleets via ARS, without you having to do a bunch of expenditures of hacking points on re-rolls of the ARS.<br />
** This also gives us the framework for having hacks in general that let you make a sub-choice in them after choosing to do the hack itself, which is a powerful new ability for hacks. We'll be using this again super soon for upgrading specific ship line ship caps in a fleet via a new structure.<br />
** The fact that there are five options now is reflected in the text and will affect existing savegames.<br />
<br />
* If you DO choose to re-roll an ARS, it will give you five fresh ships. They may or may not have overlap with the prior batch or with your current fleet's contents.<br />
<br />
==== The Arrival Of Fleet Capacity Extenders ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new structure that you can find throughout the galaxy in new savegames: Fleet Capacity Extender<br />
** Hacking this structure doubles the ship cap for one of the fleetship types belonging to the Fleet that did the hacking (your choice as to which type).<br />
** This DOES show up in existing quick starts, but won't seed in savegames you're actively playing.<br />
** This new structure essentially is a far-more-powerful version of the secondary function that people used to like on ARSes (that we removed in this build).<br />
*** The fact that it was confusing to merge ship lines via the ARS was a good reason to remove that function, but this new structure is more powerful and doesn't have the strangeness of being a sometimes-thing. It always works like it works.<br />
** About the same number of these are seeded as ARSes, except not one on the adjacent planet to your start. The richness of what you can conquer is now a lot higher.<br />
<br />
* To prevent a lot of exploits that people would have started doing immediately, the upgrades from Fleet Capacity Extenders can no longer be applied to the same ship line in the same fleet more than once.<br />
<br />
==== Custom Fleet Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* The custom fleets, which previously had a max cap of 7, now only have a max cap of 5 like everything else.<br />
** It's possible that these fleets, or other fleets that got upgrades to 6 from an ARS, are over the new cap in old savegames. That won't harm anything.<br />
<br />
* Rather than having 9 explicit custom fleets (three regular, three cloaked, three speedy), the game now has a single type of custom fleet (regular) that you can build 9 of.<br />
** This makes the menu way less overwhelming down in the custom fleets section, and it doesn't give any special fleet leaders (speedy or cloaked) that are better than what you find out in the galaxy.<br />
<br />
=== EXP Revamp And Spending Science To Upgrade Specific Planets ===<br />
<br />
* The non-turret defenses, and command stations in general, no longer get mark levels based on EXP going up on their fleets.<br />
<br />
* Mobile player offensive fleets are still able to gain EXP like they always have been, and in the main it is still very useless for most of them (since only their flagships upgrade, for the most part; very useful for things with a powerful flagship but otherwise not much).<br />
** Note that this will get more useful in the future as we start adding in perks for these types of fleets that will affect other ships as you level up. That's just a TBD item.<br />
** The goal with these is still to have a bit of that flair of "hero stuff" that people have been asking for since the early days of AI War 1. We're proceeding somewhat cautiously with it, keeping it more on the useless end of the spectrum rather than something that takes over the game.<br />
<br />
* All the other kind of fleets are no longer able to gain EXP at all. This means battlestations and command stations, mainly, for you.<br />
** This was, by contrast, super duper useful to the point of being an absurd exploit. But it also wasn't a fun thing, requiring grinding rather than actual strategy of any sort.<br />
** This was one of the really big ways that people could force a victory far faster than they should have been able to, and really mess up the economy of things.<br />
** Existing savegames will lose all their unspent EXP, but WILL keep their existing added levels from this source, simply because a ton of games would have economies in the toilet without these levels remaining for now. But those savegames with leveled-up command stations are definitely overpowered in the player's favor, now.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting and inspiring this and many of the other related changes here.<br />
<br />
* When calculating how many fleets there are on a planet for EXP penalty purposes, it now ONLY counts mobile player fleets. It DOES include support fleets, but not battlestations/citadels, and not command stations.<br />
** So this is something that makes it so that you're penalized a lot less rapidly for having many fleets on a planet.<br />
** For the "max mark level" calculation that it does, it's now only based on the mark level of the mobile offensive fleets, too.<br />
<br />
* A new button has been added in place of the fleet EXP stuff for planetary (command station) type fleets. It's hovertext reads:<br />
** Planetary fleets can be upgraded (all ships within them) by directly spending science. This can be a very science-cost-effective way to get more metal income or energy production.<br />
** Changing the type of command station you're using, or losing the planet and recapturing it, won't cause you to lose your upgrades on this planet.<br />
<br />
* By clicking the above button, you can spend science in a whole new way an upgrade ALL the ships within the planetary fleet by one mark level (regardless of whether normally those would have been upgraded by EXP -- this isn't EXP, and you're paying science for it).<br />
** The cost is pretty cheap for the first added mark, at only 1000 science. The next is 3k, then 6k, then on to the absurd with 9k, 18k, and 36k. So you CAN upgrade one of your planets like crazy if you really want to, but it's prohibitively expensive to do so.<br />
** All of this gives you a lot more flexibility and allows you to do spot-upgrades for purposes of getting a better economy of having better defenses at a location.<br />
** This is pretty important for high level play with the removal of the EXP for command stations (and battlestations/citadels, although they aren't gaining the science unlock ability).<br />
** We may need to tweak the costs of these at some point to think about if we want the first upgrade to be even cheaper, to really tempt you. It's hard to say if this is tempting enough, as we want you to have strong defenses but be weighing that against the more generalized science expenditures that benefit offense AND defense. This of course also benefits your economy in a major way, so we may have to revisit how much more metal generators and the command stations generate as their mark levels go up if we reduce the science costs here. We shall see. For now, conservative steps. Anyone who isn't already a fairly advanced player may not even notice the difference here.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Teams ===<br />
<br />
* It is now possible for minor factions to have alliances amongst themselves to take down the Player and AI. In the game lobby, several factions can now join "Team Red", "Team Green" or "Team Blue". All factions on the same Team are allied against everyone else in the game.<br />
** Supported minor factions: Marauders, Nanocaust, Devourer, Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart to "Fun With Factions" demonstrating this mechanic<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Toggling objective importance is now done with a Right Click. Left click keeps the old behaviour (usually centering you on the planet in question)<br />
** This was suggested by a few people on discord I think? I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* Fix a surprising bug where the AI wasn't correctly generating threat when attacked by a player if the respective strength ratios were within certain ranges.<br />
** This might have some actual balance implications<br />
*** Thanks to zeus for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Death effect damage is no longer a strangely high number. Actually, this change allows for a lot more diversification in how effective units are at applying it. The start of this is done, with more tuning to follow.<br />
** This is most likely a somewhat large shift in the balance of it, which feels a tad necessary? Quite a few stories of mass hordes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference when calculating energy usage<br />
** Reported by Edmaniac<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the experimental pursuit mode implementation that could cause issues in "normal" mode where your units would not shoot at things properly.<br />
** Reported by a number of people<br />
<br />
* Structures that are under construction shouldn't generate AIP anymore if killed<br />
** reported by Chthon and zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Fix some confusion about killing reconquest command stations if you haven't paid the AIP price for that planet yet. It now correctly charges you AIP and lets you scout. The tooltip for such a reconquest command station tells you what's happening<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Destablilize Exogalactice Wormhole hack wasn't correctly killing the wormhole<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for the bug report<br />
<br />
* On particularly large maps (> 120 planets), increase the places that Officer Fleets are allowed to spawn<br />
<br />
* Fix an exciting bug where AOE shots with > 10 potential targets were doing 10% damage to each potential target. So if there were 20 targets each taking 10% damage, that's 200% of allowed damage done. 50 targets would be 500% damage.<br />
** This was particularly obvious for high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AOE shots were doing too much damage when killing lots of stacked units<br />
** Again obvious with high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Reported by Puffin<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with the tooltip on Alarm Posts; it had the ratios reversed<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow marauders to build outposts if the significantly outnumber the enemy; this prevents a single cloaked ship from stymying them.<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make the Cloaking hovertext a bit more obvious with colour<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the tooltip for uncaptured flagships where it was showing the Strength if all its units were at level 1, instead of reflecting your actual mark levels<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the bug report<br />
<br />
* In the science screen, the Ship Types You Could Capture now show the mark level for that ship line<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Your ships will now target down Eyes automatically in pursuit mode, once you've disabled their invulnerability<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The Objective tooltip for an ARS now shows the ship line in the colour of the mark level you have for it<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for reporting<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for a notification of a wave against one of your planets now tells you your defensive strength. <br />
** Suggested by NB_FlankStrike<br />
<br />
* Improve the tooltip for hacks that increase the cost for the next hack of that type to improve clarity<br />
** I think someone on steam got confused about this<br />
<br />
* Maybe improve the spacing for the X map. No promises.<br />
** Thanks to gigastar and cthonic_one for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Slight tweaks to the AIP hovertext to improve readability<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where several minor-faction specific hacks were not showing the hacking points used correctly in the hacking log<br />
** Thanks to Interloper for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of the distribution node hovertext<br />
** Suggested by Cyber-Kun<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for an upgrade in the Science Menu now tells you approximately how much Strength increase there would be to your fleets<br />
** Thanks to donblas and Phenomphear for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference related to the Spire Objective<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip to explain about automatically building engineers and factories and so on.<br />
** From a comment by donblas<br />
<br />
* Hovering over a save game in the Load menu will tell you how many times that save game has been loaded. So if you're stuck at a particularly hard spot then you'll get some feedback as to how hard it is<br />
<br />
* The intel tab entries for the hacks for the tech vault and the ARS and the FCE are now three different colors, so that you can tell them apart at a glance if you have a huge galaxy completely explored. This way you can see at a glance what is what, now that it's sorting (rightfully so) by how easy or hard it is to get to each one.<br />
<br />
* Any sidebar build items that would be uncategorized are now invisible instead. These are assumed to be things that exist for legacy purposes but that we don't want to build.<br />
** It sometimes also winds up including random stuff like gravitic battlestations or whatnot that could be constructed but should not have been.<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, it no longer shows the ship cap for command stations (that was spurious, anyway).<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, for flagships that you can construct it now shows the total of that kind that you have in the galaxy as well as what the galaxy count is for them.<br />
<br />
==== Instigator Polish ====<br />
<br />
* Instigators now have a permanent notification (like wave notifications)<br />
** Note this reuses the Wormhole Invasion icon for the notification for the moment<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Instigators no longer show a Cumulative Effect, just a description of what the effect does and how many times it has fired.<br />
** The units for Cumulative Effect weren't meaningful to anyone who wasn't a developer, and it just confused people<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the ship-spawning instigator base had a bunch of decimal points in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for bringing this to my attention<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Zombification no longer works on Dyson ships, Dire Guardians and such things. It was kindof OP.<br />
** The old behaviour can be enabled as a Galaxy Setting<br />
<br />
* Different AI Difficulties now increase the mark level at different AIP amounts. As a result of this, different AIs can be at different mark levels.<br />
** Suggested by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* The Hunter and Warden fleets now get decloaking ships, in the hopes of preventing permanent scouting by cloaked units<br />
** From a discussion on discord I think?<br />
<br />
* If your fleet outnumbers the AI "enough" on a planet then all the Guard Posts will release their ships so the ships can run away<br />
<br />
* Allow units spawned from Guard Posts to run away more quickly from an overwhelming attack<br />
<br />
* Buffed Astro Train durability and damage a bit, albedo 0.3 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Increased self construction rate of Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon reload time 4s -> 6s, damage 1,810 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Gave Forcefield Frigates the same priority as Forcefield Generators.<br />
** So the AI will ignore it in general if there are unprotected targets to go after.<br />
** Might cause a weird thing with Siphoners, but see how it goes?<br />
<br />
* Increased Hull Tech cost by 2,500.<br />
<br />
* Increased durability of things like Raid Engines, Alarm Posts, Data Centers, and Co Processors.<br />
<br />
* Major Data Center only reduces AIP by 60, and increases by 90 on death.<br />
<br />
* Increased chance of wormhole Tachyon Sentinels.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now has Pulsar Tanks in place of MLRS Corvettes, and Vanguards in place of Grenade Launcher Corvettes. Also removed 1 of the starting Siege Frigates.<br />
** This Fleet had an issue in that it had crazy synergy, with it being mostly Splash and Heavy Tech, plus not really fitting the Doorkicker name much. Both Pulsars and Vanguards have Doorkicker like abilities, and since these units can properly attack single targets, 1 Siege Frigate can be safely removed without impacting the Fleet too much, as these were apparently their own issue.<br />
<br />
* AIP Floor is now increased by 35% of AIP gain, up from 20%.<br />
<br />
* Metabolizing Gangsaw engine_gx 14 -> 13.<br />
<br />
* Reduced minimum and maximum unit type counts in the more thematic Fleets (i.e the ones with mass Fusion Bombers).<br />
** Incredibly synergistic inherently, with far more units in general too.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the count of some of the "flat upgrade" units, like Heavy and Parasitic Fusion Bombers.<br />
<br />
* Buffed the damage output of most of the normal Guard Posts as well as a few of the Dire.<br />
<br />
==== Economy And Engineering ====<br />
<br />
* Drastically reduced the assist construction and repair rate of Engineers.<br />
** It was possible for these to eventually end up assisting Factories to absurd amounts - actually a good bit more than the Factory.<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvesters income 80 -> 60, amount gained per mark 40 -> 30.<br />
** This might not be enough, come to think of it. Player unit costs never increase unlike Classic, which means late game costs to rebuild after a fleetwipe are pretty low compared to here, leading to the below "slapping" event.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station income gained per mark 400 -> 150.<br />
** While the player does have less income, the rate at which it can be spent is also much lower, so it's likely the player would start to noticeably lose a battle and retreat a good while before depleting their reserves.<br />
** Also, while we don't want people to be sitting around for ages waiting after a fleetwipe for it to replenish, it was also rather silly that you could do things like, to quote someone "Bleed out the praetorian guard by slapping it with wads of cash".<br />
<br />
* Reduced energy cost of Turrets a bit.<br />
<br />
==== Eyes ====<br />
<br />
* Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships<br />
** This makes Eyes pretty useless against minor factions. Unclear what (if anything) should be done about that.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid.<br />
<br />
* Eyes are now MK7.<br />
** Mostly important for the Ion Eye.<br />
<br />
* Tripled range of Plasma Eye.<br />
** Is now planet wide range, like the Ion Eye. No more sneaking about out of range.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Eye damage tripled, max targets hit before spreading damage reduced to a third.<br />
** Means it can focus a lot more on single targets than before.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now works on albedo of 0.4.<br />
** Yes, this means it can target most Frigates now. Eyes check Fleets, and not units, so this is possible. Also lets it target a few more Strikecraft.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now has splash damage on each shot. Radius of 1,000, hitting 5 targets.<br />
** Done this way instead of just increasing shot count, as that many shots could be a bit too bright and painful to look at. Simple enough to change.<br />
<br />
* Both Eyes now have tachyon systems.<br />
<br />
==== Flagships ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly reduced Transport Flagship priority.<br />
** AI should focus more on killing the actual combat units around rather than chasing an unarmed ship and getting shot to bits during it.<br />
** Combined with the far weaker Engineers reducing the fleet replenishment rate to more...reasonable speeds, hopefully this prevents a lot of attritioning?<br />
<br />
* Reduced durability of Transport Flagships.<br />
** Mostly applicable during deepstrikes.<br />
<br />
* Differentiated the Transport Flagship types:<br />
** Normal ones are the same (including the above).<br />
** Cloaked ones are now a good bit slower.<br />
** Fast ones now have less health.<br />
<br />
* Ships unloaded from a transport now have a delay before firing.<br />
** Hopefully should make the "Unload units, snipe target, load again, run away" strategy less OP. Further changes may be necessary.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Hacks now define if they work based on the closest hacker or not, using a new tag use_closest_hacker_for_check.<br />
** Before it was inferring if it should do that, which was potentially going to be confusing down the line.<br />
<br />
* A variety of bugfixes and improvements to the internal hacking logic.<br />
<br />
* Flagships now move much more slowly when hacking<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting that you could just run away from the nanocaust hack response<br />
<br />
* Increased Cost of Intra-Galactic-Coordinator Hack (120 if owe AIP, 60 without).<br />
<br />
* More hacks now have an escalating cost to them (1.2x what it was last time).<br />
<br />
* Shortened and cheapened the Ion Cannon and Mass Driver hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased cost of Grant Ship Line and Grant Tech hacks.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully increased the difficulty of the Super Terminal.<br />
** This seriously'll need more feedback. There are so many variables in it that whatever test games Puffin has is probably missing something else.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Convert ARS to Science.<br />
<br />
* Some minor duration changes to a few.<br />
<br />
* Added Exo-Waves on completion to a few hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased response strength of quite a few AI hacks.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.003 Sortable Objectives ==<br />
(Released October 28th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where ARS hacks were allowing you to get 7 ship lines instead of 6<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix an OBOB where we were reporting inconsistent stack numbers in the hover entity info text<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* New installations of the game now save 3 autosaves instead of 1<br />
** Suggested by yupyip<br />
<br />
* Flagships in Hold Fire Mode no longer deploy drones<br />
** SUggested by CWW256 on discord<br />
<br />
* Clicking on an Objective will now tag it with an Importance. Clicking once makes an Objective High importance, putting it at the top of the displayed list. Clicking again will make it Low importance, putting that objective at the bottom. Clicking a third time makes it Normal.<br />
** Suggested by Greeniguana<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to hoverEntity and fix a possible null reference<br />
** Thanks to kerzain for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tutorial 4 now mentions you can hover on the AIP amount on the top bar for some more information.<br />
** Thanks to Potkeny in Discord for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology hack now mentions not increasing the cost of unlocking it with Science.<br />
<br />
* Hack Intra-Galactic Coordinator and Hack Global Command Augmenter now note exactly what the reduced cost is if you have paid the AIP cost for that planet.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Science resource bit at the top now has the same blue colour for all the amounts, rather than being a light green, so it's consistent with every other mention.<br />
<br />
* Metal section of the top bar now has actual proper colouring.<br />
<br />
* Cost to fully extract all the science from a planet is now in green, like most hacks are.<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Sabotage Hack now mentions it doesn't cause an AIP increase for destroying structures which would normally do so.<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved the Experience tooltip information to have the correct logic and perhaps read a little bit better.<br />
<br />
* The "Ally to AI" setting description now explicitly says that all player-allied factions are also allied.<br />
** From a discussion with Astra on discord<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Hacking resource hovertext on the top bar now has the hacking point amounts in green rather than a red.<br />
<br />
* AIP hovertext on the top bar has some minor colour additions, as well as an explanation of what the AIP Floor actually is, as well as stating reduction is never wasted.<br />
** Thanks to Nuc_Temeron, Halfshell cat, right01, amblingalong and Pexpy in Steam Discussion for prompting this.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines now show on the galaxy map.<br />
** Suggested by gigastar in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Hunter Waves option is renamed to Threat Waves, and description updated to be clearer.<br />
** They never actually joined the Hunter Fleet immediately - they were threat, so it was rather in error.<br />
<br />
* Added some information about how threat is generated, and it eventually joining the Hunter Fleet to the info displayed by hovering over the top bar area.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Decoy Drone damage halved, tripled build time, health reduced 25%.<br />
** Puffin was finding these were a bit absurd in extended practice. More testing required.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology Hack cost increased to 20.<br />
<br />
* The Engineer and Factory changes from previous, as those were missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.002 ARSes, Instigators, and Tech Vaults, Oh My ==<br />
(Released October 25th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* ALL of these changes are thanks to Badger and Puffin. Chris was working on the world's longest AMA for some reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/dmhlu6/ama_i_am_chris_park_founder_of_arcen_games_and/<br />
<br />
* Add some new Quick Starts by community member zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Experimental Targeting Change<br />
** Under Galaxy Settings -> Units there's now a setting to enable/disable a new pursuit mode.<br />
** This mode makes ships prefer to kill all nearby units before moving on; hopefully it will make Drones less apt to go aggro guard posts everywhere.<br />
*** Looking for player feedback on this<br />
*** This also will affect the way AI ships will fight, so I'm loooking for feedback on that aspect as well<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagships now cost very little energy.<br />
** This was originally so they would be hurt more by Nucleophilic units, but you can usually just micro them around and that's...not really fun or interesting. So just greatly reduce it, since you were otherwise being penalised for using the custom ones.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and seemingly others for bringing up.<br />
<br />
* The Human Resistance Fighters now help less often in battles, so it feels more rare/special when they do. They also can't go back to a planet for at least 15 minutes after their last time there.<br />
** I forget who asked for this (sorry). They used to attack about 60% of the time, now it's more like 30%<br />
<br />
* Macrophages now need more metal to do things on Hostile To Players Only mode. Also decrease base telium income when that telium has harvesters on the map; harvesting should be the primary form of income<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Crippled flagships now have a 5 minute delay until they are eligible to be repaired. This is to make crippling a Bigger Deal in battles where you might have engineers<br />
** Note that taking the crippled flagship out of combat (ie to another planet where there are no enemies) will reset the repair delay<br />
*** From a discussion about flagships on discord<br />
<br />
* Engineers and Combat Engineers have less health, and are also much higher target priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories are much higher priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a few problems with quickstarts<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Dark Spire could give errors after it has killed all the players and AIs in the game.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for bringing about the triumph of the Dark Spire<br />
<br />
* Fix a strange null reference exception in some findHumanKing code in the game lobby<br />
** Spotted by Nuc_Temeron on stream<br />
<br />
* Fixed Mini Cluster Bombs being swappable. Woops.<br />
** Thanks to Mayheim on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Launching with OpenGL instead of DirectX11 can be problematic for some people, so on GOG the default launch is now DirectX11. On Steam it still shows you the option of which you want, but starts with DirectX11 as the default.<br />
** Thanks to Ronin Storm and Pheespud for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Replace a few mentions of FRD with Pursuit Mode in the Settings<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Auto-Kite setting<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx<br />
<br />
* The button in the lower left that just said "Coming Soon" now says "Chat Menu. Coming Soon" so it's clear what it is.<br />
* Include mention of the shortcut for toggling between the galaxy map/planet screen in the tooltip for the planet name in the top left.<br />
* Improve the tooltip for the clock to mention the buttons that control game speed<br />
* Add more colours to the incoming wave tooltip<br />
** From a remarkably uncivil and poorly written screed on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the explanation for the Praetorian Guard<br />
** Thanks to unicurse for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window available when you click on the Threat icon in the resource bar now shows threat in traditional Strength units (with the raw value divided by 1K).<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx and Puffin for pointing this out<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window now shows the total visible hunter/warden strength in the galaxy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Nanocaust ships were winding up being counted as Threat incorrectly<br />
<br />
* Improve the colouring in the science tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* Some tutorial improvements. Includes a bunch of colour.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for pointing it out.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the AIP history display when claiming structures<br />
<br />
* If a wave is against a minor faction that owns a planet, the game now tries harder to show the faction name in the tooltip. <br />
* If a wave is not against a player planet, the icon will turn grey more consistently.<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Pretty neat idea.<br />
** Thanks to Jaridan on Steam for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Add some colour to the counterattack notification hovertext to improve readability.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hacking description for local watch hacks<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Show better colours for zombies in tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip, Apthorpe and darkarchon<br />
<br />
=== ARS Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'cant hack due to too many ship lines' message for the ARS hack to explicitly call out which fleet you are using, and mention that the hack is done by the closest flagship<br />
** Some people on Steam were finding this confusing.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where custom fleets couldn't hack ARS for more ship lines<br />
** Thanks to zeus and Chromatism for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Lone Wolf Fleets could hack ARS<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where things like Hydra Heads were being counted as ship lines for the purposes of an ARS hack<br />
** This bug has popped up in so many places, fixing it is like, well, killing the heads on a hydra<br />
*** Thanks to yupyip for reporting this one<br />
<br />
* ARS Reroll hacks cost less Hacking Points but have a stronger response<br />
<br />
* ARS to Science conversion hack now grants more science<br />
<br />
* ARSs are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to ARS hacks, given that every other changes constitute a buff to the player<br />
<br />
=== Instigator Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to Instigators; decrease their power and make the bases spawn less frequently<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Instigator Bases weren't correctly tracking their cumulative effect<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting I look at this<br />
<br />
* Fix some punctuation issues with Instigator Base descriptions<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases now report how many times the effect has triggered<br />
<br />
=== Tech Vault Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The "Turn Tech Vault into Science" hack now grants a bit more science<br />
<br />
* Add a "Reroll Tech granted by Tech Vault" hack<br />
<br />
* Hacking a Tech Vault for science no longer increases the cost of the next upgrade<br />
** It seems like everyone wants this<br />
<br />
* Tech Vaults are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to Tech Vault hacks, given that every other changes constitute a strong buff to the player<br />
<br />
== Version 1.001 Official Game Launch! ==<br />
(Released October 21st, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some Tips with a brief explanation of what the AI sub-fleets (Warden, hunter etc) do.<br />
<br />
* The first time you click the Single Player menu (after this build), it gives you a modal prompt asking you if you'd like to do the tutorials first, or if you'd like to just play. This should help prevent people from missing that there are tutorials.<br />
** We did NOT add the tutorials to the Single Player menu, however, as that just gets very cluttered and makes the whole menu harder to read.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The Tutorials button on the right side of the main menu is now colorized and flashes very subtly every half second between two almost-identical colors. This should be much more noticeable without being obnoxious, and without cluttering up something like the single-player menu.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and Badger for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the hovertext for a command station in the sidebar reported the wrong number of turrets<br />
** Thanks to Wurfell on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The AIP history for games begun from Quick Starts will now show AIP change from you as from your username, not "Puffin"<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that can happen in EmitOnAOEParticles.<br />
** It will now log more info, and just do so silently, and not actually impede play like it previously did.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Super Terminal now mentions the Exo-Galactic Strikes.<br />
** Thanks to kocur4d for prompting.<br />
<br />
* Don't let the AI launch mini-waves after exploration/watching hacks<br />
** It was confusing. Thanks to Puffin for report.<br />
<br />
* The Metal launch option on OSX has been removed, as that was still launching under OpenGL anyway.<br />
<br />
* Non-Steam builds no longer try to log into Steam and complain in the log if they can't, and nor do they show "Not logged into Steam" on the main menu.<br />
** This gave the impression that the Steam client was required, when it definitely in no way is. These behaviors do still exist for Steam copies of the game, but just so that you can tell if you're not logged in right for whatever reason.<br />
<br />
* Improve the Instigator Base description to explicitly state that the base effect ends with the death of the base<br />
** Suggested by Apthorpe and Echthelon<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The Dark Spire Ward now instantly blows up any DS ships that enter the planet. The Ward's description has been updated to match<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the report.<br />
<br />
* Doubled range of Devourer Golem.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for bringing up the Devourer.<br />
<br />
* Doubled drone count of the basic Combat Factory.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Repair units now repair shields at the same rate as hull.<br />
** Outdated change from when personal shields cost metal to repair.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked cost of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
==== Golems and Arks ====<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem damage 1,000 -> 2,000, Sabot damage 2,000 -> 3,000, range 8000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem damage 700 -> 1,250, Sabot damage 1,500 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem speed 600 -> 1,000, damage 200 -> 350.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem damage 100,000 -> 200,000.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 450 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 50 -> 80, can only target mobile units, can't target high mass targets, costs 50 AIP to capture instead of 20, and is a Lone Wolf like the Hive Golem.<br />
** AI Botnet Golem has a lower chance to spawn on AI planets as well.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
** Note existing ones will still have their Fleet, and will kind of look a bit odd in the Intel Tab saying it's a Lone Wolf, even though it's still got a Fleet with it. New ones will be normal.<br />
<br />
* Standardised AI Golems to be 3x the durability and damage of a player Golem.<br />
** They were pretty close as is, apparently.<br />
** Also gave them proper costs now.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira damage 3,000 -> 7,000, now takes half damage for 5 seconds after using a wormhole, does bonus damage to shields and also has vampirism, similar to the Siphoner unit. <br />
<br />
* Thanatos single shot weapon damage 6,000 -> 12,000, Parasite Bolt damage 600 -> 900.<br />
<br />
* Ark One damage 350 -> 1050.<br />
<br />
* Orchid damage 7,000 -> 14,000, repair rate increased 50%, repair range doubled.<br />
<br />
* Gryn damage 6,000 -> 16,000, increased fleet unit construction rate 33%.<br />
<br />
* Ark AIP cost reduced from 20 to 15.<br />
<br />
* Reduced AI counterattack bonus for crippling some player Fleet centerpieces.<br />
<br />
==== Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Mass Combat Engineer starting Support Fleet design now uses the Rejuvenator Combat Factory instead.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting replacing this, as it was really unappealing.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.954 Hacking Log! ==<br />
(Released October 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* When you click on the Hacking icon in the resource bar you get a history of all the hacking points you've spent.<br />
** Nota Bene: This will only apply to hacks you do after you install this patch<br />
<br />
* Tweak the helping hands tooltip to mention leaving the marauders their own planets<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* For the hover planet info, explicitly call out if taking the planet would cause AIP, and show the AIP in Red to make it stand out. Also more explicitly call out minor faction owners<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the game was showing incorrect colours for enemy strength on galaxy screen if the planet was owned by a minor faction.<br />
** Thanks to Genrazian for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having partially claimed or hold-firing flagships could prevent building things<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bunch of typos all over the place<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for hunting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the tooltip for GCAs was lying to you about how many turrets they granted<br />
** Reported by RockyBst, Democracy and probably others<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Helping Hands quickstart to make sure the Nanocaust is your ally<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the fix and Genrazian for the impetus<br />
<br />
== Version 0.953 Hotfixes For Certain Linux + Hardware Combinations ==<br />
(Released October 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* On Vulkan on Linux in certain circumstances, there was some form of shader error in the Amplify Bloom rendering. That issue should now be fixed.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Just like windows has launch options allowing you to select between OpenGL and DirectX11, Linux now lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Vulkan - Experimental, and macOS lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Metal - Experimental.<br />
** This needs testing, and is a Steam client update only, not actually a change to the game.<br />
<br />
* Completely rebuilt the asset bundles and their projects to be based on Unity 2019.1.7, same as the main project has been for some time, and to make sure that they explicitly have Vulkan and Metal shader support built into themselves now that the game supports those new platforms.<br />
** This should hopefully solve the issues that we were still seeing with a few people using Vulkan on Linux, as well as potentially some "shader not compiled for this platform" issues with OpenGL on Linux for certain ships that were compiled against an older version of Unity.<br />
** This MAY also fix the Gyrn refractive glass not appearing in-game on any platform, although we haven't test this yet. It may be that we need to write our own shader for that, or update the one from Circonia Studios that we were using previously. Most likely it was an issue that was coming across because of different unity versions, though, we're not sure.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tutorial fix from Craig.<br />
<br />
* Enable strength icons with borders on the galaxy map. (I find it makes a big difference in readability when they overlap links of a similar color.)<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for implementing!<br />
<br />
* Updated a whole bunch of our shaders that were not going to properly work with Metal or Vulkan simply because they were being compiled with exclusive platforms set to directx11 and opengl.<br />
** These should now work, and include things like the icons for ships, and many of the ships themselves. But it hasn't been tested yet. It certainly won't hurt anything, anyhow.<br />
<br />
* The Ciconia Studio glass shaders that we were using for the Gyrn bubble have been updated to their latest version, which should provide better compatibility and hopefully have those actually show up again in-game.<br />
** Why those were showing up in the prep projects but not the actual game is something of a mystery. If this doesn't work, we'll just have to create our own refractive shader with rim lighting, but we'd rather not waste the time if this simple update works. Please do let us know!<br />
<br />
* Fixed one backer name in the credits (Kevin A Munoz), which did not translate over well into pure basic-ascii characters when we ran it through a handy processor (https://pteo.paranoiaworks.mobi/diacriticsremover/) to get rid of unicode characters not supported by our fonts.<br />
** If other folks find that their name got a bit mangled, please do let us know! There were SO many people's names that it was impossible to go through them all manually.<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the shaders for the Gyrn glass bits so that it uses a refractive shader based on Amplify Shader Editor and thus should actually render in these newer unity builds.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.952 A Little Help From Scary Friends ==<br />
(Released October 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Create a tip that points to the instructions in the wiki for how to create your own planet name list. I figure people will want to do this at some point.<br />
<br />
* Spelling/grammar and clarification improvements to some tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Craig and Badger for pointing things out.<br />
<br />
* We FINALLY have all of the kickstarter and backerkit backers thanked in the credits for the game. It's... um... a lot.<br />
<br />
* The credits screen has been split into three scrolling panels, rather than one giant one that scrolls everything. It's also now in two columns rather than three.<br />
** The left column is the same as it was before.<br />
** The center column now has just the top kickstarter backers, aka those at Mark III or higher levels of backing. That's the first 784 people, all backing at $44 or more.<br />
** The right column now has the Mark II and down backers, which is the remaining 2,264 people out of the 3,048 total backers.<br />
** These splits make it so that the scrollbars are actually sensitive enough that you can find what you're looking for. AND we alphabetized the backer names in each category, so that if you know your category you can find your name now.<br />
** Yeah this isn't really a top priority for the game in some ways, but it's a matter of showing respect for the people that made it possible in the first place. There are other kickstarter rewards for specific tiers, and some kickstarter stretch goals, that will happen post-1.0. But this is one of those basic "this needs to be in there for people on day 1 of launch" things.<br />
<br />
=== New "Helping Hands" Quick Start ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Quick Start to the Basics category, called Helping Hands. This really weighs the settings in the players favour, and is intended as an easy to win scenario that just lets you experience things with little stress.<br />
** Badger came up with this.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some changes to the out-of-date planet info representation<br />
** Thanks Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Some changes were made to make sure a player knows which Flagship is hacking (and doesn't try to make that flagship leave the planet)<br />
** Put in a line between the Hacker and the Target to really remind the player visually that the hacker is bound to the target (a great suggestion from Asteroid)<br />
** Add some text to the Hacking Notification reminding the player that the hacking flagship can't leave the system. <br />
*** Thanks to a bug report from kmunoz<br />
<br />
* Improve the hacking resource bar tooltip to show the number of hacking points spent per AI faction and the number of hacking points that will increase the hacking response level<br />
** This is something people have wanted for a while<br />
<br />
* Rather than confusingly opening a multiplayer submenu with little "coming soon" tooltips, the multiplayer button on the main menu now pops up a lengthy text note directly from Chris which explains the backstory and what is coming and a bit about the development process that led us here.<br />
** Big thanks to Craig for suggesting this.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting for showing an entity's world location.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug command to give all your fleets 1K Exp. Good for impatient people.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "level up" message for Planetary Fleets<br />
** Suggested by ArquebusX<br />
<br />
* Fix a nasty bug where the AI killing stacks could cause counterattack strength to increase enormously<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix an off by one error when showing the "What Level a Fleet will level up to next" message in the Fleet tab<br />
<br />
* Extra defensive entities seeded for the AI (like Golems for the Golemite) now patrol their planets in an imposing fashion, instead of just sitting in one spot.<br />
** Only affects new games<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when scrapping a command station<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debug handling in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations for a crash that could apparently happen during one of the tutorials for some people, and also put in extra debugging logic so that if it does happen again we'll know more precisely what the problem is. It should also no longer halt gameplay in general if such an error does happen.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer, related to GameCommands being null.<br />
** This is probably a problem with how GameCommands are being used somewhere, and might rear its head in the form of some desyncs in multiplayer when we get back to reimplementing that. Just one more reason why the desync auto-repair work we have planned is going to be so essential. It's hard to know if a bug like this comes from something a modder was doing, or a mistake on our own part, or what; but either way, the game needs to be resilient to that in both single player and multi player, and that's a good example of why our upcoming hybridized approach to lock-step versus sync-correcting the game (RTS versus action game styles, blended) is going to be well worth the wait.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game will prioritize Combat Fleets over Support Fleets when choosing the hacker. It will only use support fleets when there are no combat fleets on a planet<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Tutorial tweaks ====<br />
* Tutorials no longer display 'homeworld under attack' notifications, which aren't pertinent to any existing tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Autobuild settings no longer apply to tutorials; this is mostly so developers can test tutorials the way a new player would see them<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Threat Interactions ===<br />
* Some minor factions generate Threat that winds up just annoying players, in particular Anti-AI zombies.<br />
** Add an XML field that can be applied to any Faction that says 'any threat provoked by this faction will just go back to sleep once the enemies are gone'<br />
** Current factions with that field:<br />
*** Zombies<br />
*** Devourer<br />
*** Dyson Sphere<br />
*** Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Note that putting this field on the Human faction would make for an entertainingly confused AI, like fighting Guy Pearce from Memento.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The AI's planetary reinforcement cap can now increase as AIP increased (otherwise planets never really got stronger than they are at the beginning of the game except if Threat or subfleets wander through).<br />
** At difficulties <= 5, no change. At 6, the AI gets a 10% power increase per 100 AIP. At 7, 20%, difficulty 8-10 a 30% increase.<br />
<br />
* Cost of hacking Global Command Augmenter if you haven't paid the AIP for the planet reduced from 120 to 60.<br />
<br />
* Cost of Reroll ARS reduced from 80 to 20.<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to control AIP generation from allied factions<br />
** When you have allied factions like the Marauders or Nanocaust, when they kill command stations and so on it generates AIP. This is a balancing mechanism to keep these games from being too easy.<br />
** This can now be disabled mid-game. Disabling this makes the game much much easier, but should help in making some beginner-level quickstarts<br />
<br />
== Version 0.951 Hotfixes ==<br />
(Released October 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix typo in metal popup window<br />
<br />
* Don't let structures generate energy while you are still building them<br />
<br />
* Fix galaxy map possible/incoming wave animation being displayed for links between the AI and another faction than the player, even for unknown worlds and during map generation.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Fix null Reference when holding R on the C-view of a fleet you haven't captured yet. As a side-effect, the units highlighted in the R-view are now the ones on the currently selected planet, not necessarily the one the unit being viewed is on.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* When attacking an AI homeworld, killing all the guard posts is enough to cancel the counterattack, you don't also have to kill the AI King<br />
** Reported by zeusalmight and Nuc_Temeron on Steam<br />
<br />
* Further differentiate the lower AI difficulties by increasing their overconfidence ratio a good amount<br />
** This should make them much more willing to attack and fail.<br />
<br />
* Internally improved some of the documentation on why the sound effects play quite like they do when there's a voice effect and a sound effect playing at near the same time. This should solve some confusion that devs and modders could have.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== OS Compatibility ===<br />
<br />
* We've disabled "graphics jobs" in unity, as that may have been causing some problems on a very few machines (certain older intel cards, mainly not windows boxes).<br />
<br />
* We've updated linux to now default to using Vulkan rather than OpenGLCore.<br />
** Vulkan is only able to be triggered by directly having it be the default, and not by the command line, so this is how we had to do it.<br />
** On linux, you can use the command line -force-glcore to make it use OpenGL again if Vulkan is giving you trouble. But now you have a choice about it.<br />
<br />
* On OSX, we now support Metal, although it still uses OpenGLCore by default (and actually in this case we can't give any definite assurances that Metal will work completely correctly).<br />
** But if you want to give it a shot for whatever reason, you can enable that with force-gfx-metal in the command line to make it use metal instead of the default OpenGLCore. Previously that command line prompt would fail.<br />
<br />
* More info: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html<br />
<br />
=== Audio tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the 'ai wave arrives' taunt wasn't being played for some code paths<br />
* warden and hunter only taunt when they think they will win.<br />
* Correctly play the AI killed your command station taunt (the game will 80% of the time choose a taunt and 20% will choose the old 'planet lost' audio).<br />
* Don't spam the game with 'player command station under attack' notifications <br />
* Don't play more than one 'player ship constructor killed' message per planet per attack. This taunt currently only triggers on the death of a Factory. Previously you could get 3 taunts from the 3 factories on a military command station planet, which seemed a bit excessive especially since you also usually get the taunt for the command station too.<br />
** Possibly these messages should be changed to be for the crippling of a combat factory instead of killing a factory.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the AI taunts so that a specific taunt group can't play more frequently than every 30 seconds, as opposed to every 4.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.950 First Press Build ==<br />
(Released October 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* More work on adding support for numStacksKilled when handling death effects. Should get most everything now<br />
** Including Dark Spire, Metabolization, Zombification, etc...<br />
<br />
* Slightly tweak the Dyson Antagonizer warp in time<br />
<br />
* The Dyson Antagonizer now prefers to spawn on lower mark planets until the AIP is reasonably high<br />
** This behaviour now matches Instigator Bases<br />
<br />
* If you have a fleet in Load Mode but some elements of that fleet are on remote planets, those elements will try to find the Flagship and load themselves, instead of just sitting there<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures and don't want to click more than necessary<br />
<br />
* Non-Combatants like Engineers and Transports no longer cause Guard Posts to release their ships<br />
** So if you have a fleet in Transport mode with all ships transported, flying through AI planets should no longer cause the AI to generate Threat. I believe this was really confusing players, since the game encourages Deep Striking, but Deep Striking was releasing tons of Threat from planets you never attacked<br />
<br />
* Add a quickstart from community member Nuc_Temeron.<br />
** His description:<br />
*** In this scenario there are two level 7 AIs (Thief and Ensnarer) with Shark B enabled, which gives the Hunter fleets a quick surge of strength whenever you lose a base. Defend your territory well! You will have to depend on your allies, the Human Resistance Fighters (Intensity 8), to overcome these greedy swarms! The AIs are also supported by shipments from Astro Trains at Intensity 8 so you can't stay on defense for long.<br />
*** The Macrophage has also infested this zone at Intensity 6 and is hostile to all.<br />
*** The player starts with the Doorkicker Fleet, the Minelayer Battlestation and the Overloader Combat Factory in an 80-star Octopus zone.<br />
<br />
* Some Tutorial tweaks from Puffin<br />
<br />
* Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet<br />
<br />
=== Newly integrated AI taunts ===<br />
* 16 for AI Destroys player Command Station.<br />
* 13 for AI Destroys Player Golem.<br />
* 5 for AI Recaptures Planet.<br />
* 9 for AI Sends Wave.<br />
* 2 for Player Frees Dyson Sphere.<br />
* 10 for Hunter Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 8 for Overlord Transforms.<br />
* 12 for Player Claims Flagship.<br />
* 10 for Player Claims Golem.<br />
* 14 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (High Mark Planet).<br />
* 16 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (Low Mark Planet).<br />
* 5 for Player Destroys Warden Fleet Base.<br />
* 4 for Player Finds AI Overlord.<br />
* 5 for Player Fortress Destroyed.<br />
* 12 for Player Home Command Station Under Attack.<br />
* 7 for Player Stationary Constructor Destroyed.<br />
* 19 for AI Launches Counterattack.<br />
* 14 for Warden Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 1 for Warden Fleet Retreats (unused for now).<br />
** This is a total of 174 voice lines in 18 categories!<br />
** Thanks to Nathan Frisson for his awesome job voicing the AI in these clips; to a variety of players and staff for contributing fun lines for him to say; to Pablo Vega for processing this out so that he sounds wonderfully menacing, as well as splitting the files, removing mouth sounds and breaths and so on that would make it not sound like an AI; to Badger and Puffin for selecting the best takes and organizing them properly so that we could get them into our sound pipeline; and to Badger for actually wiring up the parts of the code that trigger these.<br />
<br />
* This obviously needs additional testing; if you think a line should be playing and it's not then a mantis report + save game would be appreciated!<br />
<br />
* There is now a dedicated audio bus to the AI taunting you, and it has its own gain settings and so on that are a bit louder than the "routine voices" that you hear elsewhere.<br />
** This also now will let us mix the AI voice in however we choose to do so.<br />
** We have a separate voice mixer for the AI voice lines now, and since those are much more complicated in terms of effects we have those coming in as a barely-compressed PCM stereo track. Downsampling, adaptive sampling, and/or mono makes it muddy fast.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* When unloading ships from a Transport, they inherit "time spent on planet" from the Transport so you can't cheese First Few Seconds On Planet bonus effects<br />
** Thanks to Smaug on Steam for reporting and Puffin for testing the fix<br />
<br />
* Remove some outdated text in the Scouting objective tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Telkir for reporting<br />
<br />
* Prevent Astro Train objectives from leaking the location of trains you shouldn't be able to see<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where for non-AI homeworld planets, the AI was spawning extra Guard Posts instead of Dire Guardians<br />
** This should make things much more interesting. Note that dires are still limited to high mark planets<br />
<br />
* Fix an Off by One Error when the game was telling you what level a fleet was<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference when ships would try to join the Praetorian Guard (ie the AI overlord is being attacked)<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the "metal income per planet" display was showing inaccurate information<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where it was much harder than necessary to maneouver flagships in tight spaces. If you wound up clicking on an allied unit the flagship's rebuild metal flow would make it try to assist, which is ... unhelpful.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fleets in Load Mode no longer deploy drones. This enables you to sneak combat factories past high-mark planets without the drones triggering lots of threat<br />
** Requested by overzot on steam<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the visual line for ships claiming other ships was not displaying. Turns out an image that was once white that we were using as part of its material got changed to black at some point, thus making it effectively invisible because of the math of how the shader was run.<br />
** We took this change to go ahead and make the claim lines more attractive in general, and they now have a cyan-greenish look to them, but double-beamed, so that they look kinda like the repair lines but still distinct.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and BadgerBadger for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Added in an OnLoad from savegame fix that should prevent stationary ships from being twitchy and thinking they should pursue you. This bit is untested.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game no longer gives a harmless "Could not do Shutdown for network, the engine network interface was null" message if the game is shutting down prematurely for whatever reason.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor issue where the game was reporting that your target framerate and vysnc count were being set right before they were, rather than right after. If it was failing, you'd have had no idea.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs the system info about itself far earlier in the load process, to help with cases where potentially we're unable to load things for some reason; we'll still get the system info in the debug files from now on.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The game's bootup log now is all-inclusive about all the steps that it takes, inside ArcenDebugLog.txt, so that in the event of a problem we now find out when that happens.<br />
** This makes for a much longer log every time you start up the game, but it's not something that is visible to players unless they go into their debug logs for whatever. And the information from it is definitely useful.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs what version it is on as soon as it can, but NOT before it can (heh), which it was temporarily doing on an internal build when we started logging system data really super early.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoNotShowAndAlsoDoNotSendToUnityLog verbosity level that lets us skip showing certain things in the unity log but still send it to the ArcenDebugLog.txt file. This is a big deal for us in terms of not having our unity editor logs flooded with stuff that we'd want to collect in a bug report but don't need to see every last time.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of selection issues on the galaxy map with fleets not always deselecting properly and instead sometimes being additive, etc.<br />
** It's actually a number of bugs all in one, because basically there was some older per-planet logic that was still being used here (and on planets) from back when cross-planet selection was only kinda-sorta a thing. Now it all works consistently galaxy-wide, or at least should. But if you see any remaining (or new) bugs, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif and Asteroid for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, hitting the escape key would just clear your selection on the current planet. Now it clears the selection on all the planets, as it should.<br />
** We didn't see the "when a fleet traverse a wormhole, it's selection is lost. This issue only occurs if the selection was made in the planet view. If you select the fleet on the galaxy map, it works correctly." issue, but probably what it really was was the above one. Or something fixed in the batch right before that. If it's still something anyone else sees, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with the planet links where their collision capsules were intersecting with the collision boxes of planets and ship icons on the galaxy map.<br />
** This was having the effect of making it so that quite often you couldn't select specific ships except at certain zoom levels, or couldn't click planets or ships reliably in general (zoom level and scale of icons did play a role here also).<br />
** Basically, the solution was to make it so that we first raycast to find ONLY the planets and ships/fleets, if there are any under the mouse cursor. These use one set of physx layers.<br />
** Only if we don't find anything with that first raycast do we then do a second raycast against the new physx layer that the links now use. Now it doesn't matter if the capsules for the links overlap with planets or ship icons (no way to stop that, really), because it will ALWAYS give preference to the other icons first, and only go for the links between planets if the icons fail.<br />
** Thanks to Smaug, I-KP, and Pat for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Energy Usage bar now gives detailed feedback for what is consuming your energy (broken down by fleet) and what planets are generating the most energy<br />
** Requested by darkarchon<br />
<br />
* The Tooltip for Tech Vault objectives now list which ship lines will benefit from hacking the tech vault<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* For the Flagship/GCA objectives, show the count of ship lines before listing the ship lines so I don't have to count them<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* Improvements to the R-Click "Strong Against" view:<br />
** Fixed damage bonuses listed in this view not always matching the mirror "weak against" view.<br />
** Show only units you discovered on the map, leading to a lot less clutter early-game.<br />
** Sort units that are in the same system as the friendly unit you're examining at the beginning of the list, and bold them.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the code and kmunoz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* CPAs always now give 10 minutes warning; given how impactful they are, a long warning period is justified. Previously they were getting less warning time than a regular Wave by default<br />
<br />
* When a Fleet levels up, only say "Some ship types may level up with the fleet" if the fleet actually contains ship lines that will level up<br />
** This was annoying Badger, since most ship lines don't level up anymore but the game made you think they did.<br />
<br />
* New icons for the Tech Menu!<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
* Better alignment for hotkey indicators on standing order buttons and for the icons in the build sidebar<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
=== Changes for lower AI difficulties (<= 5) ===<br />
<br />
* There were some complaints that there wasn't enough differentiation between high and low mark AIs, so we're making some changes to make lower mark games have an easier feel in a number of ways<br />
* Seed extra ARSs and Tech Vaults in the galaxy<br />
* Seed more low-mark planets near the player<br />
* Nerf AI income <br />
* Nerf AI defenses<br />
* Make the Hunter and Warden fleets dumber by allowing them to trickle into a battle piecemeal instead of waiting for reinforcements<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with hazxan on Steam<br />
<br />
== Version 0.900 Custom Fleets With Empty Slots ==<br />
(Released October 11th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Instead of spawning instantly, a Dyson Antagonizer now warps in over time, giving the player a chance to destroy it before the Sphere gets Antagonized.<br />
** Requested by zeus almighty. You'd think he could have just struck it with a lightning bolt or seduced it in the form of a goose...<br />
<br />
=== Tutorial and Tips Work ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Tutorial 99", which is even in its description just a note to be sure and check out the "How to Play" section of the game and other resources.<br />
** Since various people seem to miss those other resources but easily see the tutorials list, having this always be the last tutorial in the list no matter how many other tutorials we add seemed like a good idea.<br />
<br />
* Also got rid of the "Example Tutorial" that was junking up the tutorials screen, since now there are plenty of much more involved examples that are also actually fully-functional tutorials.<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip under the Modding section to explain how to make your own Quick Starts<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units sometimes were waiting out of range instead of closing to firing distance<br />
** Reported by kmunoz and Telcontar on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where flagships could just wander away from where you told them to go<br />
** Reported by kmunoz.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen in the wave notifications.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really rare nullref that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debugging to fix ships not rendering right in some rare circumstances and thus causing a cascade of all things not rendering. Now it should fail gracefully if it fails at all, and give us more information on where it failed, then let you keep playing without making everything disappear.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== "Custom Fleets", Aka The Remedy For Control Groups ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed things up so that fleet flagships can be constructed from the build sidebar, or other self-constructing means. This was never possible before in the engine, turns out.<br />
<br />
* There are 9 possible fleets that you can create at any of your command stations, now. Each one has 7 empty ship lines in it, and they are 3x cloaked, 3x velocity (fast flagship), and 3x workhorse (normal flagship).<br />
** These can be constructed at any point and you can start putting some of your specialized ships into them via ship swapping. The interface makes this clear and suggests it, as well. Basically for people who wanted to pull aside just their melee ships or cloaked raiders or whatever, now you can do that; this lets you control "sub fleets" in effect, by splitting your existing ship lines among more fleets, exchanging empty slots for ship lines you find elsewhere.<br />
** This was something that Chris went back and forth on a lot of times in terms of how to handle control groups that were more specific than 1+ fleets at a time. Ultimately the display and automation benefits of having control groups always stay linked to just 1+ fleets outweighed the benefits of changing that; but in order to allow for players to have smaller custom fleets as they may desire, activated by control group as they may desire, here's this new feature.<br />
** This is, of course, in addition to the hotkeys for quickly selecting units of specific criteria a while ago (cloaked units, melee units, whatever). This is for when you want to make a permanent or semi-permanent sub-grouping of ships for whatever reason (of which there are many valid ones to have).<br />
** Thanks to a lot of people, including Nameless Terror, ulu, Asteroid, and others for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== UI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Standing order buttons now display their key shortcut on the button itself, provided it can be expressed in a single letter (so X and V are displayed, Delete isn't).<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Science bar now has icons for the various techs.<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Wave progress indicator on galaxy map links now animates smoothly instead of once every second. (No associated visual at the moment, Chris didn't find the proposed particle effect good enough.)<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* For all mobile flagships and citadels (not lone flagships, though), there is a new "Flagship Movement Mode" in their fleet status window.<br />
** Your flagships are usually precious enough that you don't want them to roam around in pursuit mode or attack-move mode. HOWEVER, you will often want to set them into those modes in order to make any ships they construct pop out in those modes.<br />
** When this is set to"Stay Put Unless Direct Order", it acts as you might expect and causes the flagship to ignore things like Pursuit mode, but for ships it creates to be put in that mode (and obey it).<br />
** When this is set to "Roam If Instructed" mode, the flagship will pursue when in pursuit mode, attack when in attack-move mode, and so on. This can be useful for Arks and Golems in some cases, or even for things like Combat Factories (on peaceful worlds).<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Refinement of Fleets]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Pre-And-Post_Launch_Polish&diff=37409AI War 2:Pre-And-Post Launch Polish2019-12-19T05:02:42Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Cheating Is Perfectly Ok But Doesn't Give Achievements */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
The game is solid at this point and something we're really proud of and that players are having fun with. But inevitably, the more people we have playing it, the more things get brought to our attention to refine and make as smooth and fun as possible. This is basically a period we've set aside for doing that sort of thing, rather than focusing on any major new content drops or other major new features.<br />
<br />
There may still be the odd major new thing, who knows -- sometimes the volunteers or modders wind up creating something and we're certainly not going to turn that down! But by the start of this phase the game was mature and really huge already, so focusing on polish seems like the way to best serve the largest group of people.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.022 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
== Version 1.018-1.021 Methodical Achievement ==<br />
(Released December 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* If your allies are off fighting without you, you don't get galaxy map information about their battles unless you are Watching the planet<br />
<br />
* Units deprioritize targets they dramatically overkill<br />
** Hopefully a slight buff to artillery golems and the like. Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for a bug report<br />
<br />
* Very firmly prevent exogalactic wormholes from wormhole invasions from being used to send regular waves<br />
** This isn't a great solution, but it will work for now. Thans to Peter Ebbessen for reminding me<br />
<br />
* Both the campaign-world itself, and all of the factions within it, can now store "historical data" in the form of arbitrary strings, integers, and booleans that have getters/setters that take a string parameter to find them.<br />
** This lets us elegantly and simply and centrally track... whatever needs tracking. This can be used by mods, DLC stuff, the core game, achievements, and everything in between. It can be working data for the UI that needs to be serialized for whatever reason (so NumARSsHacked_ForUI could have been used in this if this had existed, for example), and so on.<br />
** The nice thing is that all of the code that can use this can absolutely be ignorant of each other, but it also allows for cross-mod reading of data if need be, without any sort of serialization problems that we might normally run into.<br />
** This also neatly solves the problem of "we need to store some data for a new achievement or whatever other purpose, but to do so would require incrementing the game version number and messing with serialization in a potentially dangerous way when there are many cooks in the kitchen." Now no version number incrementing is required, and the serialization of this sort of thing will "just work."<br />
** A word to the wise: absolutely filling this with huge amounts of data or with really long string descriptors will have an adverse effect on savegame size, so please use responsibly. ;)<br />
<br />
* All of the cheat-style helper things in the debug menu should now block achievements from being logged, although this is not tested.<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip explaining that selecting units and right-clicking on an enemy unit will make your selected units prefer to kill the unit type you clicked on<br />
** Thanks to overzot for a bug report <br />
<br />
* The game now has capabilities of noticing the steam overlay is open (though we don't do anything with that yet -- do we need to with the way focus is handled, can anyone confirm?).<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where 'Random Any' AI Difficulty could return the Tutorial difficulty<br />
** Reported by Ampersand on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a crash with Marauders<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo, Endovior, and Rigellian for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where if code tried to look for a setting by name, and that setting did not exist, it would look instead to a "null setting" value that would be of an indeterminate value.<br />
** For instance, in some cases it could set a bool null setting to true during some set operation, and then other times it would try to read that back out and get true as the response for something that should be defaulting to false because the setting only existed in (for example) DLC files that are not present.<br />
** It's possible that for missing settings that code checks for we should be more aggressive and outright throw an error, but for now it just is always doing nothing on sets or returns the system-default values per type on gets (bool=false, int/float/fint=0).<br />
** Thanks to a Badger for helping us accidentally discover this with players and a DLC-only fireteam setting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some debug logging for when it's trying to log achievements on game victory.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where some Objective Importance flags weren't being cleared when the objective was completed, leading to galaxy map clutter<br />
** Thanks for alocritani for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The number of seconds played (in game time) is now properly logged to the statistic sets.<br />
<br />
=== Methodical Pursuit Mode ===<br />
<br />
* The default targeting mode for Pursuit Mode (FRD) now does a better job of choosing targets that aren't being overkilled (so each shot can be more effective), and also de-prioritizes units that can't shoot it.<br />
* The practical upshot of this is that your units will prefer to Methodically take out a planet piece by piece, instead of spreading out and trying to hit a lot of targets simultaneously. This is particularly valuable when attacking AI planets with lots of Guard Posts with ranges that don't support eachother.<br />
** This new approach will make your forces win some close battles they were losing before when attacking the AI, but also will make them win a fight more slowly if you have a significant advantage. I think the "winning close battles" should be the default <br />
** The player, minor factions and AI difficulty >= 7 have access to this.<br />
* Methodical Pursuit Mode can be disabled (for all factions) via a Galaxy Setting<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Player units start to take longer to build as their Mark increases. Not an increase in cost, just in production time.<br />
** Currently this is linked directly to their health multiplier. Mark 2 is 1.25x, so it takes 125% of normal time to build. Mark 7 is 4x, so it's 400% of normal time.<br />
** Why? Well, thanks to units not increasing their cost as they Mark up, your units get more efficient in terms of "how long it takes to build" and "how much health it has". Essentially, the "health per second" you can input into a fight increases a lot as you improve your ships.<br />
** Eventually this could lead to things like a single Military world worth of Factories, plus a Combat Factory building Mark 7 units fast enough that the "health per second" was notably greater than the Overlord Phase 2 could DPS!<br />
*** Some numbers. A single Factory would produce a Vanguard every 2 seconds. Said Vanguard at Mark 1 has 24k health, so this Factory is inputting 12k health per second into a battle.<br />
*** If that Vanguard was Mark 7, that factory would be outputting 48k health per second. Then add in the other Factories on your planets, the Combat Factories, and the Engineers in the above example with the Overlord, and you would have 384k health-per-second. This is not including shield regeneration, repairs, drones, zombification, etc.<br />
**** This is fairly experimental, but is also a large nerf to the players ability to "throw wads of cash" to solve every problem, so will be keeping an eye on it, particularly in case it brings back the "Netflix Time" problem of Classic, although the build times here are already far shorter, and the increase less, plus the metal costs don't change.<br />
<br />
* Increased most Frigate durability 50%.<br />
<br />
==== Cloaking ====<br />
<br />
* It now takes 10 seconds for cloaking to return after being depleted.<br />
** This is so it plays nicer with the below changes, else some units will constantly recloak while attacking, due to their reload time being longer than the recloak time.<br />
** As the below changes make it so cloaked units do far more damage before the cloak wears off, hopefully the micro requirement will be drastically reduced so that this added delay isn't a problem.<br />
<br />
* Increased the damage and reload time of most cloaked units by a fair bit.<br />
** This means they do much more damage before the cloak wears off, generally making them better at assassination and opening volleys.<br />
<br />
* Revealer Battlestation tachyon range now covers the entire planet.<br />
** A benefit to it over other decloaking sources.<br />
** From a mention sometime ago in Discord, forget who.<br />
<br />
* Tachyon Array range increased 25%, now decloaks twice as fast.<br />
** Gives a reason to use these over Sentry Frigates (beyond just cost), which have enormous range and in general were just superior.<br />
<br />
* Doubled the cloaking points at Mark 1, and amount gained per Mark for most units.<br />
** This means there is a notable delay before something is revealed, meaning there's some benefit to having higher Mark decloakers.<br />
** This also makes it easier for the player to do stealth ops, even if there's a bit of detection around.<br />
<br />
* All 5 starting Battlestation designs have 5 Tachyon Arrays.<br />
** So early on you have some extra decloakers to hand around, particularly for any early economic worlds and against the Ghost AI type.<br />
** Thanks to Donblas for suggesting sometime recently.<br />
<br />
* Increased the cost for the AI to purchase most cloaked units.<br />
** With the above changes these will probably have an enormous jump in power (which is seemingly needed, based on comments on cloaking in general). So, there will be less of them. If you can reveal them in time, great, less to kill! If you can't...<br />
<br />
=== Achievements! ===<br />
<br />
'''TLDR: These are presently Steam-only, and we're still entering the data for them. But you can earn them even before they can be logged to Steam or GOG and it will log them later. We'll have the data for these up shortly, but it's a manual data-entry process to do these. You'll be able to see the list of achievements as they are added, and later on can see them in a list in-game (but cannot yet). Next build, probably.'''<br />
<br />
* The game now properly logs achievements to Steam, and also locally. It's possible to use the debug menu to clear your local achievements to redo them if you want to, but that won't clear them on Steam.<br />
<br />
* If you have achievements locally-earned but not on Steam for some reason, then starting up the game program while logged into Steam will sync those achivements onto there. So you don't lose an achievement that you got while in offline mode or similar.<br />
<br />
* There are a bunch of achievements (uh... 139 of them??), but the data for those haven't been fully put into Steam yet. Anything you earn prior to it being on Steam or GOG will sync up with those platforms when they have the data in question.<br />
<br />
* Note that GOG achievements are coming soon. The data from them gets imported from Steam, which is handy, so we want to get the data in first. But we also need some code updates to integrate with their things prior to that.<br />
<br />
* Achievements now immediately log themselves to disk after you achieve them, so that if you don't get to a saving point or exit gracefully you don't lose that having been logged. This applies whether or not it logs to Steam or GOG or what have you, for your own personal records. This does so in an intelligent way with minimal disk calls even if you have a bunch of achievements all tripping at once and getting logged.<br />
<br />
==== Cheating Is Perfectly Ok But Doesn't Give Achievements ====<br />
<br />
'''Bear in mind, though, that tons of this game is open source and easy to compile. If someone wants to make a button that literally just gives them an achievement, the code is right there to do it. Kind of a spoilsport thing to do, but people have ways of granting themselves achievements directly via the Steam API anyway, when it comes to that. So even if we encrypted our game and did no open source work, Steam is already vulnerable to anything that supports client-side achievements. Some people will cheat, that's unfortunate, but without using an external Steam-targeted tool or recompiling parts of the game you can't do it with ease. So there's that.'''<br />
<br />
* If you use the cheat-style debug menu items, then it will skip granting you achievements in the campaign in which you did that. It will note that you would have gotten an achievement but that that was skipped at the time-of, because otherwise we'd have confused bug reports.<br />
** The non-cheaty debug menu options (or ones that make it harder for YOU, like increasing AIP) don't cause achievements to not work in the campaign in question.<br />
<br />
* If you use the debug menu to change the AI difficulty up or down after 60 seconds of gametime have elapsed, then that counts as a cheat for achievement purposes. If you do it in the first 60 seconds (plenty of time if you're paused, and have just loaded a quick start, for instance), then it will not consider it a cheat and let you go about your tweaking.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.017 Random AI Types ==<br />
(Released December 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where cancelling a wave when fighting AIs in Civil War Mode could softlock the game<br />
** In Civil War Mode, the AI is allowed to send waves at other AIs planets that are neutral but still have turrets. This was done to prevent the case where the AIs were just sniping eachothers command stations but not actually destroying all the defenses with waves. This was not playing nicely with the code that was trying to silently reroute waves to new targets if the old target had died. So the game was queueing a Civil-War style wave, then immediately trying to re-route it each time.<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Improve the Notification for Raid Engines to remove some weirdly long text<br />
** Thanks to a save game from Sigma7 for making me notice this<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Dyson ships were getting stuck on cloaked units, or units inside guard posts<br />
* Fix a bug where Dyson ships were killing warp gates, increasing AIP<br />
** Thanks to Starkelp for reporting<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Various Weapons" fleet name styling to the game.<br />
** Description: Weapons from other games. Can you recognize the references? (Created by DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY)<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for providing these!<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Wormhole Invasions weren't actually sending any ships<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste and Peter Ebbessen for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Random AI Types And Nicer AI Type Lobby Display ===<br />
<br />
* Add Random AI Types to the game. There is a "Totally Random", and also Random based on how hard the AI Type is, so "Random Easy", "Random Hard", "Random Brutal", etc...<br />
** When hitting "Esc" to bring up that menu in game, a randomly chosen AI Type, just will say "Random". There's a setting to actually reveal the random AI type if you'd like<br />
** This has been requested by a lot of people across mantis, discord and steam. This basically matches AIWC behaviour, which I think people liked.<br />
<br />
* The dropdown in the lobby for the AI difficulties now shows what difficulty category each one belongs to, nicely-colorized.<br />
** It also sorts by difficulty category and then by name of the difficulty (with the default showing up first in its respective category as the one difference there), and with the random option for each difficulty type preceding it.<br />
** Big thanks to Badger for suggesting that we implement in such a much nicer way like the first game had it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Outguard hacking response nerfed by ~25%, and final response by 50%.<br />
* Outguard tertiary wave now fires every 75 seconds instead of every 50 seconds.<br />
<br />
* Some AI Reserves units will now join the Hunter Fleet instead of warping out. Higher AI Difficulties mean more units join the hunter.<br />
** Thanks to VengefulWight for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Reduced Impactor Citadel range to levels similar to the other Citadels (excluding Interceptor).<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for reporting a case of this thing wiping an entire AI planet of Posts almost immediately.<br />
<br />
* Reduced target priority of Citadels.<br />
** Hopefully this'll help reduce the potential for them to be the top priority of the AI over everything else.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the counterattack multipliers of Golems/Arks and Lone Wolves.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting an ow case.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigates, Arks and Golems (excluding Rorqual Hegira) now use a 2/1 hull/shield ratio.<br />
<br />
* Buffed the Dyson a little.<br />
<br />
* Astro Train projects that are only enabled at > Intensity 5 no longer require their Trains to go near the player.<br />
** Led to Trains never really completing projects and being infinite resources instead.<br />
<br />
* AI Homeworlds should now always have 8 Posts, instead of ranging from 5 to 8.<br />
** This could cause wide swings in how difficult they were, across all difficulties. This allows some standardisation, while keeping most of the variance in the AI difficulty values.<br />
<br />
* The wormholes on AI homeworlds are all on the edge, similar to the player ones.<br />
<br />
* Replaced the NastyPick set up that was used to seed things like Ion Cannons, Eyes, so on.<br />
** Instead, now there are 4 different things that work similarly:<br />
** BigGunNastyPick (Mass Drivers, Ion Cannons)<br />
** EyeNastyPick<br />
** SupportStructureNastyPick (Magnifiers, Troop Accelerators, etc)<br />
** WildCardNastyPick (Mass Drivers, Ion Cannons, Fortresses)<br />
** This means there can be more variance in what a planet has, plus some potential nasty combinations.<br />
** It also means certain things can be flat out turned off for certain difficulties (like Eyes at low ones), and per-difficulty tuning of each thing.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.016 Back From Beta ==<br />
(Released December 13th, 2019)<br />
<br />
'''There were a number of fixes that we also pushed directly into the 1.015 build without updating the version number, while that was in beta. So some of the things that would have been part of this build already went out and were tested because they were game-breaking in some fashion. All is well now, that we can tell from our testing and player feedback so far. Knock on wood!'''<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units pulled through a wormhole by a tractor beam could wind up outside the gravwell.<br />
** Reported by zeusalmighty and chthon<br />
<br />
* Add voice lines for Dark Spire Vengeance Strikes, and when a Dark Spire Locus spawns<br />
<br />
* Add a tip giving a very brief explanation of wave compositions<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbessen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Status debuffs like paralysis, engine stunning and weapon reload time increases will decay faster on stacked squads <br />
** Intuitively this makes sense, since the effect is in theory split across multiple units)<br />
<br />
== BETA Version 1.015 Testing The Outguard Waters ==<br />
(Released December 12th, 2019)<br />
<br />
'''To play this version, you need to go into Steam's properties for the game, and then the betas tab, and enable the 'current_beta' branch. If you're not worried about potential bugs or broken balance, then please do so -- we could use lots of eyes on the new Outguard changes, but we don't want to inflict those on everyone without more testing first. If we can get enough people testing this out, we can promote this out of beta tomorrow, which would be ideal since there are some important bugfixes in here in other areas of the game.'''<br />
<br />
* You can prevent your ships from pathing through specific planets by right-clicking the planet name in the resource bar (at the top left of the screen)<br />
** This is intended for cases like "I don't want my fleets to travel through that scary Eye planet by mistake"<br />
** The primary UI feedback for this is to hover a given planet and it will tell you if you've asked to not path through it. It would be nice to have a planet icon flair or something someday?<br />
*** This is a longstanding request from many people, including Astilious and Democracy. As a piece of trivia, this is actually the second time badger has done the UI portion of this feature.<br />
<br />
* Removed the limit of 1 Non-Turret Defense per Guard Post, and replaced it with a limit for each individual unit type it could pick (i.e only 2 Forcefields, but can have 3 Gravity Generators) for the entire planet.<br />
<br />
* Added a new way of writing timespans that writes minutes and seconds if it's less than 1 hour, and hours and minutes if above that. This keeps them a consistent length, and is particularly useful for the journal listing so that really old things just show the hours and minutes ago they were, rather than bothering you with being down to the second.<br />
<br />
* Hacking response decreased for AI difficulty 8-10<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Make Anti-AI Zombies less likely to get stuck by small groups of cloaked enemy units<br />
** Thanks to Dunno for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a concerning and nonsensical bug where the same ship was attempting to be added to a fleet more than once on creation, but then not winding up in the fleet at all from its own point of view, thus spewing errors.<br />
** This may ultimately be part of some much larger issue with pooling of units -- potentially one that happens specifically when the simulation is running agonizingly slowly for whatever reason.<br />
** Thanks to razgrizh for the report.<br />
<br />
* It is possible to get ships trying to set a pursuit target for a higher weapon system index than they actually have, mainly if the ship somehow changes type while maintaining its ID between the autotargeting and the finalized logic. This again shouldn't be possible, but seems to happen now in the same savegame where the other concerning bug just was. Now it won't complain about these, but will just ignore the bad data.<br />
<br />
* Put in some new counts in the escape menu's performance section that show the number of drones deployed and recalled, and the number of ships added into fleets and taken back out of them, as well as the number of failures of each.<br />
** As it turns out, in the strange savegame with bad performance of marauders, there are TONs of ships that are failing to be re-added properly, and drones popping in and out constantly. So this gives us something to work with on why it's so slow.* Put in some new counts in the escape menu's performance section that show the number of drones deployed and recalled, and the number of ships added into fleets and taken back out of them, as well as the number of failures of each.<br />
** As it turns out, in the strange savegame with bad performance of marauders, there are TONs of ships that are failing to be re-added properly, and drones popping in and out constantly. So this gives us something to work with on why it's so slow.<br />
<br />
* Removed the always_deploy_drones tag, since there is logic that causes drones to auto-recall if there are no enemies nearby. This was causing drones of marauder outposts to go in and out of the outposts constantly and rapidly, tanking performance previously. Anyone else who used the same logic was going to run into the same thing.<br />
** The savegame that previously ran SUPER slowly, aka about 2% of normal, now runs at 70-80% of normal instead.<br />
** This fixes a number of reported "Very Slow" saves, including reports from razgrizh,deo and NRSirLimbo <br />
** Thanks to Badger for finding and fixing this.<br />
<br />
* Fixed the AI never building Non-Turret Defenses.<br />
<br />
* AI types such as the One Way Doormaster and Turtle, which spawn more of certain structures, will no longer spawn the Trader versions of them.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where most of the planets in the galaxy could be named Murdoch<br />
** Thanks to Orelius for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make sure the AI taunt for "wave arrived" only plays when the wave is hitting a player planet<br />
** Thanks to deo for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Voice Line Work Continued ===<br />
<br />
* Instigator Bases now play a voice line when they spawn<br />
* "Homeworld Under Attack" now has its own line. This fixes a bug report from DevoutHaruhiist<br />
** There's now a line that plays when a bubble shield protecting your Home Command Station is under attack. If the AI actually takes down the shields and hits your Command Station itself then it plays a Taunt at you.<br />
* "Critical Planet under attack" is played if a planet with some Critical Infrastructure (like a GCA) is attacked<br />
* There's now a line for "Regular Player Planet Is Under Attack"<br />
* "Combat on Border World" now plays if you are in combat on a planet owned by an allied faction (allied human? allied faction?)<br />
* When a notification for "Wave targeting home planet" appears, you now get a voice line to make sure you don't miss it<br />
* When a notification for "Wave targeting planet with Critical Infrastructure" appears, you now get a voice line to make sure you don't miss it<br />
* Add voice lines for Macrophages Enraging and new Telia spawning<br />
<br />
=== Outguard Rework ===<br />
<br />
* Outguard Rework - Reworked to be cooldown based, more customization options in xml, and added in 3 more groups.<br />
** Huge thanks to StarKelp for designing and implementing this whole piece!<br />
<br />
* Gameplay Changes<br />
** Each Outguard now comes with a number of summons.<br />
** These summons scale with the total amount of earnt AIP.<br />
** After use, you must wait a period of time before summoning the same one again.<br />
** In addition, as long as it is under capacity, it will slowly rebuild its used fleets, giving you further uses in the future.<br />
** Base values are as follows;<br />
*** Offensive/Utility: 5 minute cooldown, 15 minute recharge, 10 minute duration<br />
*** Defense/Stationary: 5 minute cooldown, 20 minute recharge, 10 minute duration<br />
*** Donated To Player: 5 minute cooldown, 30 minute recharge, infinite duration<br />
** Outguard units now inherit techs properly.<br />
** Turret spawning mercs are now spawned between your command station and a hostile wormhole on a friendly planet.<br />
** Turret spawning mercs are now spawned near the center of the planet on a hostile planet.<br />
** Turrets will now spawn around each other instead of on each other.<br />
** Hacking the Beacon must again be done by a Fleet on the same planet. It also lasts 150 seconds, and costs 10 Hacking Points and 10 AIP (upon completion). These hacks will result in brutal AI response, far higher than most other hacks, so be prepared.<br />
<br />
* Code Changes<br />
** Unit tags will now attempt to search by tag first, and internal name second as a backup.<br />
** A multitude of new xml tags to configure nearly all of the changes.<br />
** (Many older Outguard units retain some older, no longer used values, for compatibility's sake.)<br />
<br />
==== New Outguard ==== <br />
<br />
* Spire Archivist, potent forcefields and beams<br />
<br />
* Democratic Demolitionists, grenade launcher turrets and ships<br />
<br />
* Hydran Hobbyist, an extremely redundant hydra starship with low damage and high disabling capabilities<br />
<br />
== Version 1.014 High AIP Playstyle Viability ==<br />
(Released December 10th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Continued work on voice lines:<br />
** Human Resistance Fighters warping in and out has voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Marauders attacking have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Risk Analyzers firing have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Astro Train depot spawn/train spawn have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Low on Metal, Metal Exhausted, Low on Power, Brownout (no power) are in<br />
<br />
* Improve readability of unit hovertext by suppressing the Exp section unless the player wants detailed tooltips<br />
** I for one almost never care about this information. Suggested by Dekar on discord<br />
<br />
* Tweak the prompt when exiting the game to make it harder to confuse the Exit to Desktop button with the Quit to Main Screen.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "Delete or Keep Campaign" prompt so it doesn't run off the edge of the button<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Hopefully fix a bug where waves were still spawning after being disabled<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI Reserves would never spawn on difficulty 10<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting<br />
<br />
* Hovering a planet in verbose mode will tell you whether the AI Reserves can respond to a deepstrike there<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference in fleets code<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the having multiple AIs meant that the game wasn't properly sending anti-MDC exo waves<br />
**Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the report<br />
<br />
* Waves sent against minor factions now make an effort to become threat against that minor faction, instead of just going for you after spawning<br />
** I think this has been reported by several people but I don't know who (if you'd like credit for bug reports, putting them on Mantis is the best way to make sure you are attributed)<br />
<br />
* Add the ability to hold down a button to suppress the 'Are you sure?' tech upgrade prompt. Having the prompt on in case of mistakes, but an easily done override is a nice little QoL improvement.<br />
** Suggested by ParadoxSong on mantis.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Beam Cannons could fail to hit fast moving ships.<br />
<br />
* Improve the beginner science/engineering objectives.<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for contributing the text<br />
<br />
* Allow the player and minor factions to target AI defensive structures build from the Zenith Trader<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the bug report<br />
<br />
* If the AI has planned to send a wave against a target, but between the wave planning and the time you are alerted something happens to the target, the AI will silently reroute the wave to a new target<br />
** The practical upshot of this is that when a wave notification appears, it will always be for a reasonable target<br />
** Thanks to zoutzakje<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Altered the AI Mark Level AIP Requirements.<br />
** For Difficulty 7, it was: 100, 220, 340, 470, 580, 700.<br />
** For Difficulty 7, is now: 100, 275, 450, 650, 880, 1,100.<br />
** For Difficulty 8, remove 10 from each level, Difficulty 9 remove 20, and Difficulty 10 remove 30.<br />
** For each Difficulty below 7, add an extra 10 as you go down.<br />
*** Response to some conversations with Peter Ebbesen about high AIP styles in this game in general.<br />
*** Still keeps some values low for lower AIP play, while freeing up the middle and higher ones, for people who prefer and can manage that type of gameplay.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate beam range 15,000 -> 12,000. Triple Beam variant damage 7,500 -> 4,000. Other variant beam damage 7,500 -> 6,000. Reduced shields of all slightly.<br />
<br />
==== Player Defenses ====<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Turret reload time 12s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Focused Gravity Generator durability, and increased the range of the effect from 6,000 to 7,100.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Tractor Array durability.<br />
<br />
* Minefields are no longer one use, and are back to firing 5 times before being destroyed.<br />
** However, this is a cleaner version, where there are no weird effects from how many targets are being hit, how much damage it did, is there a Military Command, Mark level, etc.<br />
** Instead they take 20% of their maximum health in damage with every attack, regardless of anything else.<br />
** Mine effects and damage have been reduced to 25% of old values, but as they detonate 5 times, it's in the end a boost to their maximum potential, and of course no more Mines being wasted on a single unit.<br />
** As a last note, normal Minefields are probably actually viable now!<br />
<br />
* Increased minimum count of normal Turrets in Global Command Augmenters by 1 (so from min 2 to min 3).<br />
** This puts the spread of min and max to the same as most Strikecraft in Fleets (i.e the max is 1.6x the min).<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 4,000, 5,500, 7,000, 8,500<br />
** Now: 2,000, 3,750, 3,750, 4,250<br />
*** The scaling here uses only the Stations damage, and ignores everything else for now, as the cap doesn't increase for these.<br />
*** The damage bonus is pretty much considered "free", as you have already paid some costs for even having a Military Station (no nearby vision, no economy, so on).<br />
*** In-case someone wonders why two costs are the same, that's due to the damage gained for each of those Marks being identical. This doesn't appear in things that take cap into account.<br />
*** That's actually the same reason the Hull Techs cost the same - they're priced for a unit going from MK5 to MK6, then to MK7. Just so happens the benefit is identical for each step.<br />
<br />
* Citadel Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 2,000, 3,000, 4,000<br />
** Now: 1,500, 2,625, 2,625, 3,000<br />
*** Same thing for above, just uses the damage.<br />
<br />
* Deprecated the Tractor Beams Tech. Tractor Arrays are now included in Sentries.<br />
** These are both a bit...too niche. Sentries was just detection and Gravity Generators, Tractors was...well, Tractors. It makes some sense to just combine the two, as they both fill defensive utility roles, and neither were really bought.<br />
<br />
* Sentries Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 500 ,750, 1000, 1250<br />
** Now: 750, 1500, 3250, 3500<br />
*** Note that since Tractor Beams are included in this now, the cost is up from the previous one, but is cheaper than the Tractor Beam Tech was originally anyhow, which just followed the same scaling that Weapon Techs do, so now you get both for cheaper than the old price of Tractors.<br />
*** Changed the scaling to be one based on health and cap, rather than damage and cap, because naturally nothing here actually attacks.<br />
<br />
* Minefield Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 1,500, 2,750, 5,000, 6,750<br />
** Now: 1,000, 1,850, 3,250, 4,500<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 3,000, 5,500, 10,000, 13,500<br />
** Now: 2,500, 4,750, 10,500, 11,500<br />
*** Mostly bringing it in line with the same scaling used for Sentries. Was surprisingly close.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station shots per salvo 8 -> 12, now gains 4 extra shots per Mark. Damage increased 50%.<br />
** The extra shots is an experimental thing, and newly added with this Station primarily in mind.<br />
** Like the damage bonus, the Tech Cost for these completely ignores it - the cost is paid already in choosing to use a Military.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon damage and reload time halved.<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen.<br />
** It appears the changes from StarKelp to beams have greatly improved their performance, but there's still some consistency issues. Doing this should, like the Spire Frigates, help to counteract some of the bad shots.<br />
** When it's decided they're in a more reliable place, can then investigate their power.<br />
<br />
* Doubled durability of Battlestations. They now also have guns.<br />
<br />
* Citadels damage consoldiated into fewer shots per salvo, now gain 25% more shots per salvo per Mark.<br />
<br />
==== Economy ====<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvester Techs cost the same amount (4,000) for each Mark.<br />
** The benefit of these is purely linear, so the cost should probably be linear too, else an odd case results in which there just becomes a point it's not worth ever getting, so why have that level?<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations now increase energy by 100k per Mark, instead of 50k.<br />
** 50k is kind of pitiful if you only have a few. 100k should hopefully make it worth the investment, combined with below.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station Techs cost the same amount (4,000) for each Mark.<br />
** Same reasoning as the Metal Harvesters. They gain some durability, but it's so little it's not included.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Stations now increase energy by 50k per Mark, instead of 25k.<br />
** Yep, a buff to Logisticals! Mainly to provide some benefit to upgrading these. Economicals are still the top producer, and are more efficient to upgrade for Energy, out of the two.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Station Techs cost the same amount (3,000) for each Mark.<br />
** Same as above.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.013 Menacing Messages From The Machine ==<br />
(Released December 6th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Make Major Data Center exos a bit less frequent<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* When you have marked intel entries as high priority or low priority, it now shows H1, H2, etc, on the left for however many high priority objectives are at a planet on the galaxy map. For all the low-priority ones, it shows L1, L2, etc.<br />
** Potentially the formatting could use some work in the future, but for now this really seems to get the job done in terms of making the importance of the intel items translate onto the galaxy map and not just on the intel sidebar.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* A new "skip_adding_to_seed_lists" tag has been added to fleet designs, which lets us keep them around for existing savegames but prevent them from showing up in the lobby or in seeding in new galaxies.<br />
** This has now been applied to the "Bomber Fleet" starting fleet for players, as that was supremely overpowered and let some players cheese things on the highest difficulty levels.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for inspiring this change, and Badger and Puffin for figuring out the actual conundrum here.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The planet Murdoch will still appear in all games as an Easter Egg, but it is no longer your default starting planet<br />
** Badger prefers some variety, and a number of people have been making muttered complaints about this for a while<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we were showing the wrong colour for tech level upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting<br />
<br />
* Exiting and reopening the load game menu will now abort any selecting game to delete state, to prevent accidental deletes.<br />
** Thanks to StarKeep for reporting and donblas for fixing.<br />
<br />
* On battlestation fleet leaders, it had a duplicated-feeling "battlestation" bit of text in the tooltip, which just felt off. That's been removed.<br />
<br />
* Setting the border colors for sub-factions of the AI (warden, hunter, and praetorian guard) now actually works properly.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for figuring out what the problem was. Thanks to Zoreiss, Ryulong, and NB_FlankStrike for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a super-longstanding bug where if you were hovering over an item in a dropdown list and getting a tooltip for it, then closing the dropdown would sometimes leave that item "stuck" on. Now it detects this case and auto-fixes itself before you can really notice it.<br />
** Thanks to lots of people reporting the stuck tooltips that could happen in the factions tab in particular. Including but not limited to Ovalcircle (most recent repro), AnnoyingOrange, ParadoxSong, vinco, and donblas.<br />
<br />
* Showing the debug info for ship types now shows the fleet category on them of what fleet they're in.<br />
<br />
* On load of a savegame, the game now detects player ships that are in the "loose" fleet (which is bad), and tries to correct them.<br />
** At the moment it can only correct ships that should be part of the planetary fleet.<br />
<br />
* Fixed metal harvesters to properly have a fleet membership of planetary so that they can take advantage of this auto-correction.<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_scrapping_by_player_to_turn_unclaimed xml tag that, when turned to true, lets you override something that is non-scrappable and have it be killed.<br />
** At the moment this lets us scrap metal harvesters but keeps them from just disappearing completely, and thus lets us test for them going into the unconnected fleet improperly.<br />
<br />
* When ships are claimed, if they are not a flagship they are now properly added to the planetary command fleet at the local planet.<br />
** This lets things like metal harvesters properly be added back into the planet's fleet (and thus get related upgrades, if any) after being destroyed.<br />
** There's a mild chance that this might have some strange secondary consequences on some ship that SHOULD have been in the "loose player fleet," but I can't think of any specific examples. All those sorts of things are typically flagships with their own fleet and use a different code path. Worst case is that they'll appear as a member of that planet's fleet and get bonuses from it if there are science upgrades at that planet.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the onload process can't fix whatever ships that are in PlayerLoose for some reason, it now also gives a list of which ships those are.<br />
<br />
* Any ships that did not have fleet_membership="Planetary", but ARE immobile now automatically get set to be a membership of planetary unless they are also a fleet leader (aka things like the AI Overlord Phase 1).<br />
** This makes it so that capturing such buildings puts them into the fleet of the planet and not the "player loose fleet," and also allows for them to be properly re-linked if need be from the onload fixing process.<br />
** This is affecting things like IGCs, MDCs, and so on. It remains to be seen if things of this sort will still properly come back to the planet fleet without a savegame load if they die to remains and then get recaptured (for anything of this sort where that's even a possibility), but fingers crossed.<br />
** Thanks to deo for the report that let us find this one.<br />
<br />
* Also with some of these changes, it's possible that things that were turrets for a specific battlestation or citadel might incorrectly go to the planet fleet after they get shot up and rebuild. Please let us know with a savegame repro if you find that happening.<br />
<br />
=== Audio And Journal Work ===<br />
<br />
* The audio setting "Music: Play Tracks from AI War Classic" now defaults to on instead of off.<br />
** While it's nice to hear the new music from the sequel, there's four and a half hours of music that was gated-off in here that made things repetitive at times without it on.<br />
** A lot of people weren't even aware this setting existed, so thought there was far less music than there was (1 hour rather than 5.5 hours, roughly).<br />
<br />
* Added a new audio setting: "Allow Funny Voice Clips" (defaults to off)<br />
** Humor is subjective, and for some folks can even be a mood-killer in a game like this about galactic stakes. Some of the AI voice taunts err on the possibly-mood-breaking side, and those are disabled by default. If you're in a lighter mood and would like to have those included, feel free to turn this on.<br />
<br />
* When AI taunts play, they now also drop a chat-style message for you to see them.<br />
** If you have voices turned off, then these won't show up at all. If you have just turned the volume way down on the voice channel or AI taunts channel, then you WILL still see these.<br />
** It is colorized and identifies itself as either being from the overlord, hunter, or warden as the case requires.<br />
** We had been planning on this, but thanks to a lot of people for requesting it, including Apthorpe, Asteroid, Thotimx, and Orelius.<br />
<br />
* Added a new JournalMessages object on the world, which lets us store a history of messages from chat, AI taunts, and other sources. It can also be used to store story-specific things in campaigns.<br />
** To save space, it will only save the 50 most recent entries in the journal when you save your game. BUT it first discards normal-priority stuff, then keep-longer stuff if it has to, and then there's always-keep stuff that it will never remove no matter what and so can make it store more than 50. That last category is good for campaign-specific instructions, hopefully of which we won't be having too many things.<br />
** These are temporarily just shown at the bottom of the escape menu, but later will be in their own interface that you can get to via the bottom left corner of the screen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where a variety of AI taunts were imported as ambisonic, and thus threw a harmless warning when we tried to play them back in a standard fashion.<br />
<br />
* 171 new Chief of Staff voice lines (51 categories) have been integrated into the game files, although they're not being triggered yet. <br />
** This is in addition to the 89 lines (14 categories) that were previously in the game from this actress, Alicia Harris.<br />
** A lot of these have to do with alerts for situations relating to the various factions, or other specialized situations that had no voice prompt previously.<br />
<br />
* New voice lines that are actually wired up to trigger:<br />
** Brownouts.<br />
<br />
=== Fleet Naming ===<br />
<br />
* You now select name lists for fleets just like planets (Added by donblas)<br />
* You can add custom name lists of your own as well!<br />
* Create a new folder in GameData\Configuration\FleetNames in the AI War directory<br />
* Add a file with preferrably at least 50 entries, one on each line.<br />
* Edit AIWar2\GameData\Configuration\FleetNameType\CMP_FleetNameTypes.xml and add an entry for your new pack<br />
* Consider opening a bug (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/) with your list if you want to share<br />
<br />
== Version 1.012 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released December 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* If the game fails to load the InstancedRenderer for some reason, it will now tell you which ship it's failing on and what the error was.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units trying to split stacks was causing lots of nasty errors and game slowdown<br />
** Reported by Everyone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where some flagships could have no units in them<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AIs in civil war mode were sending waves against undefended planets<br />
** Thanks to ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed up some of the resource icon alignment and sizing in the top bar of the game.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.011 SuperCat Swats Back ==<br />
(Released December 3rd, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Polish and Gameplay Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of the "List of remote ships you might destroy" list in the Fleets popup<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Allow citadels with engineers to autobuild those engineers<br />
** Requested by deo<br />
<br />
* All new code for group-move thanks to new volunteer Eagleheart. His notes:<br />
** Reworked the speed group / group move system.<br />
** Rather than all units in the group just moving at the speed of the slowest unit in the group, each unit now has its own individual speed limit based on its starting location and the target location of a move command.<br />
** The speed limit will be set to make that unit arrive as close as it can to the arrival time of the unit that will arrive at the destination last. This means that if a unit is far away from the other units in the group while those units are near the destination, the far-away unit will now move at its max speed to catch up.<br />
** Speed groups are now recreated on move orders in addition to when the button is clicked in order to adjust these distance calculations / speeds. This has the added benefit of behavior more closely matching what you would expect. If issuing individual unit or subgroup orders to units of a larger group, they will now be broken out into their own speed group and won't move slowly just because of the previous group limit.<br />
** Similarly, original groups will now move faster if all the slower units of the group have been given a new move command. As an additional side-effect, you can now no longer issue move commands to an overall selection of units that contains units not in a group and have them not have any speed limit enforced. That behavior was a bit confusing.<br />
** For now, units will still not move any slower than the speed of the slowest unit so that they never move imperceptibly slow. This is also necessary at the moment to not make group/pursuit combo mode any worse since ships can only move faster.<br />
** Units will also be removed from their speed group if tractored or stunned so they don't slow the rest of the group down.<br />
** This resolves part of this bug: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=20658<br />
** I hope to implement the second part of group target calculations, so that units move and fight as a group when both group and pursuit mode is enabled. But that will be a bit more tricky.<br />
** Thanks to Eagleheart for coming up with the idea as well as implementing it!<br />
<br />
* Re-order the Intel Menu a bit (including putting Beginner objectives near the top). Note that you can hide/unhide the beginner objectives through the UI. <br />
** Add new Beginner objectives to remind the player to capture their first Flagship, GCA and ARS<br />
*** From some comments on one of the podcasts Chris appeared on (I think the SGJ podcast)<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to disable repairing allied units<br />
** Note that this will need to be revisited for multiplayer for a proper implementation<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty (and others) for requesting<br />
<br />
* Attempt to make crippled flagships more desirable repair targets. I'm not sure if it's enough, so if people continue to see problems then a save game to help me reproduce the issue is needed.<br />
** Thanks to deo for suggesting<br />
<br />
* When choosing an Instigator Base planet, make a good faith effort to choose an explored planet. Instigators will only use an unexplored planet if they can't find a good explored planet.<br />
** Thanks to a discussion on Steam started by KDR_11k<br />
<br />
* When a bunch of drones have been produced for combat, they are reabsorbed into their flagship when all the enemies are dead.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for requesting this originally, and thanks to ArnaudB for pointing out the performance issues that were happening without a feature like this<br />
<br />
* Things such as Coordinators and Augmenters are now considered critical infrastructure for the purposes of the "planet under attack" notifications.<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for pointing out.<br />
<br />
* Eyes now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Puffin was reluctant to add things like this in, because it could kind of be a bit crowded already and it was purely a local thing to him, while galaxy icons should be for things with strategic impact.<br />
** Then the realisation occurred that they impact deepstriking choices, and so they now fit strategic impact.<br />
** Things like Mass Drivers will remain as is however, because of how many of these things can be on a single planet potentially (Peacemaker AI), even though they do kind of affect deepstriking.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Zenith Power Generators and Matter Converters now properly die if Perma-Death is enabled for them.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong and Venger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Stored Hive Golem Wasps now persist across save/reload<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* The player can no longer murder the antagonized dyson sphere<br />
** Reported by Ovalcircle <br />
<br />
* Fix several bugs with potentially capturable units not being shown in the tech menu<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference in debug-mode entity display code <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where killing a reconquest command station might incorrectly charge you AIP<br />
** Thanks to deo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Non-Allied Marauders no longer announce they have conquered planets that you can't see. Allied Marauders are more chatty.<br />
<br />
* You will no longer rebuild remains if they would put you into brownout<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now correctly alert nearby AI ships. They also print a message saying "Alarm Post has been triggered"<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Planet text boxes weren't being appropriately suppressed even when the "suppress text" button was held<br />
** Thanks to Astilious for finding the bug and also for coding the fix!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the Linked Rings generator that was causing the math to essentially infinite-loop until the game ran out of planet names (or similar) and generate *thousands* of planets instead of the desired number.<br />
** Also fixed the "moon" rings from disappearing on larger map sizes.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for finding a repro case.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked Swirl and Bubbles maps to have a bit more spacing between planets.<br />
** Primarily done by placing fewer planets on each orbit/loop/ring (<code>radius * Pi * 2 / desired_space_between_planets</code>). Swirl is always going to be tight, though. More space just makes the map larger, which then gets scaled down due to zooming, resulting in no appreciable difference.<br />
** Swirl's generator rewritten to operate outside-in instead of inside-out. So the central area is less likely to be cramped and the total number of planets ends up being more accurate (the number is always going to be more of a suggestion, than exact, simply due to how each ellipse is generated and how much room is left).<br />
*** Before if you asked for 150 planets and it got up to 149, it would add another ellipse around the outside, adding 20, 30, or 60 more planets. Now it will be adding a ring of only 5 or 7. If there isn't room, but is currently under the desired amount, it will generate a single planet in the exact center.<br />
** Boosted Swirl's connectivity slightly<br />
** Added a random call that changes the Swirl direction<br />
** Added a random call to slightly adjust the number of planets in each ellipse to prevent same-y-ness (and it also helps prevent near-collisions between planets in separate ellipses).<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fix battlestation/planet confirmation dialog showing the wrong science cost (was correctly charged however).<br />
** Thanks to donblas for his first fix.<br />
* Fix multiple locations showing wrong turret counts (showing 5x too many).<br />
** Thanks Volatar for the report<br />
* Fix multi-beam description typo<br />
** Thanks donblas for the report and fix.<br />
<br />
* Fix to the bug where hitting the escape key while in certain windows (like the fleet management window, hack choices, fleet ship line swapping, etc) was not just closing the window, but was also opening the escape menu.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting, for finding the fix, and for fixing it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Give the higher-difficulty AIs some stronger defenses and a bit more income<br />
<br />
* Increase the strength of the AI anti-marauder and anti-nanocaust waves<br />
** Suggested by zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Tripper now has an engine_gx bonus similar to the Agravic Pod. This replaces the secondary speed related bonus it had.<br />
** Said bonus was meant to replace the original, but apparently isn't now, leading to stupidly high damage values as they multiplied each other.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigates (and their variants) are now found in higher numbers whenever they appear. Also increased cloaking points (starting and amount gained) by 50%.<br />
** The basic one also shows up in ARS' now, and there are 3 in the Raid Starting Fleet instead of 2.<br />
*** Prompted by an unfavourable mention on Steam, and some discussion with zeusalmighty.<br />
<br />
* Added "Greater Metabolism" and applied it to Bounty Hunters.<br />
** This lets them be the specialist in getting large amounts of metal (max 50% or 50,000) off single targets, while things like Gangsaws and Yellow Jackets are good at swarms.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tanks "Bunker Buster" bonus is applicable for 12 seconds, rather than 5.<br />
** This hopefully lets you shuttle them in a Transport to something, unload, wait for the firing delay to elapse then still get the bonus.<br />
** Preferable to having them ignore the unload firing delay, as that would somewhat bring back the problem the delay was meant to solve (unload, fire, and load at every single Guard Post, avoiding all damage).<br />
** The cost of these for the AI is increased slightly, to offset the fact they're much more likely to get the bonus against you in a wave, though thankfully you can stop these being sent.<br />
** Prompted by a few unfavourable mentions on Steam.<br />
<br />
* Added a Turret Hull Tech.<br />
** Using the old cost of the other Hull Techs (7,500) for now. This lets you get Turrets to MK6 and 7 without needing the local Command Station upgrades, and is a way to just upgrade most of your defenses everywhere, rather than doing it purely through Weapon Techs (some of which don't have Turrets in them).<br />
<br />
* Battlestations/citadels can now be upgraded by spending science, like planetary fleets can.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin and a variety of other players for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Replaced Eyebots damage bonus. They now gain more damage based on how much energy the target uses. The higher the energy consumption, the more damage.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira Ark range 5,600 -> 8,000.<br />
** Apparently the bubble on this thing would get so large it couldn't attack something without pushing it away.<br />
** Thanks to Hyde on Discord for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Halved Marauder Drone Frigate drone count and build rate.<br />
<br />
* AI Grenade Launcher Turret and Fortified Tesla Turret range is now 75% and 100% of normal player Turrets respectively.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for bugging Puffin repeatedly.<br />
<br />
* Stalker durability increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Assault Frigate shield bypass no longer increases with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Added the "Suppressor" Frigate to help shore up Disruptive Tech.<br />
<br />
* Medic Gunboats repair rate now increases with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Increased Ion Disruptor durability by 30%.<br />
<br />
* Strikecraft, Frigates and normal Guardians have had their hull/shield ratios standardised, to a 2/1 ratio. There are occasional exceptions where it's desirable for a unit to be very shield heavy, such as the Vanguards, which are 1/2.<br />
** This is part of a change to fixing the problem with Fusion Bombers basically being really good against everything by skipping most of their durability, rather than mostly structures and things specified to be weak to them.<br />
** There aren't any changes to Bombers yet - anything will be done slow and this is a notable change in some areas. However, as noted above, Assault Frigates (and Muggers by extension) no longer gain improved bypass per Mark, as they would result in having the same problem inspiring this change.<br />
** This'll likely be extended to other areas, such as Dire Guardians and faction units, but for now the majority of the player/AI units are done.<br />
<br />
* Combed through all the Fleet Design stuff, and made some fairly wide changes.<br />
** Added several new Designs, such as the SniperMix and DisruptiveMix.<br />
** Everything *should* be in ARS' now, rather than a few being totally missed for whatever reason.<br />
** The rare/odd units, such as Daggers or Medic Gunboats, are now set to a lower chance in ARS than normal units, because over time a lot of the rare finds were creeping up to be too common in ARS'. A good number of them show up in the new designs, and of course the ones that weren't in ARS at all now show up, so this shouldn't be too bad.<br />
** Altered the general distribution and chances of all the unit types to make each Tech far more equal (Fusion was notably far above the others). This was something Puffin hadn't thought about until recently, and oof, there was a problem. They're still not perfect, but at this point the options available of what to tune are really running low without making some very strange changes.<br />
** Fixed some random values being out of place as well, particularly with the FrigatesWithSupport Strikecraft options.<br />
** Lastly, fixed some units being in strange Designs, such as the new Eyebots being in AntiSmaller, despite their new bonus not being relevant at all versus that type of target.<br />
*** Prompted by some grumbling in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Implemented some code changes from StarKelp that improve performance of the lance weapons be 12-15% in heavy usage based on his tests, and they now hit all targets in a line. This may have some balance implications based on a code review, so please let us know what folks think about this change. It's a small enough change that it's easy to revert or alter if need be, and the performance boost is certainly welcome when it's a big battle of these sorts of ships.<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for investigating and implementing this.<br />
<br />
==== Major Data Center Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Since AIP reduction is now so strong with the Major Data Centers, the AI will now generate Exogalactic Strikeforces against players who own Major Data Centers<br />
** Only happens if there are AIs at difficulty >= 7<br />
** This can be disabled via an in-game Setting, so players who are mid-game can disable it if it's too much of a balance swing.<br />
** Thanks to everyone who is still beating the game at difficulty 10, in particular Astilious<br />
<br />
==== Wormhole Invasion Nerfs ====<br />
* Wormhole invasions get less budget<br />
* You will have more warning before they start sending troops through<br />
* Exogalactic Wormholes can no longer be used to send regular waves<br />
** From a discussion on discord led by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* If the AI would send a wormhole invasion but it has no valid targets, it will continue to retry every few minutes, instead of only checking again in another couple hours.<br />
** This should reduce the number of times when players have giant wormhole invasions "Out of nowhere"<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report and save game to test the fix<br />
<br />
== Version 1.010 Extracting Those Archives ==<br />
(Released November 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Modding Support ===<br />
<br />
* If someone were to mod nanocausting guns onto the Devourer, the nanocausted ships will now wander the galaxy if their current planet has no real threats, instead of always staying on the same planet<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Add a Notification for brownouts<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The Metal Flow Planning popup window now consolidates essentially identical flows. So if there are 3 engineers doing something it will now show as a single line saying '3 engineers are doing ....' instead of 3 separate lines. <br />
** The list is now sorted by planet from "Most metal spent on a planet" to "Least", and gives a nice header line with the total spent per planet before the details<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the excellent suggestion and ongoing critique<br />
<br />
* Allow for the energy consumed screen to show data sorted by 'overall usage' or by Planetary Fleets and Mobile fleets sorted separately<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for a hacking notification now reminds the player that the hack can be cancelled by clicking<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* Hacking information from the top bar when hovered over now explains only hacking structures owned by that AI count.<br />
** Suggested by VengefulWight.<br />
<br />
* Fix a whitespace problem with the planet hovertext<br />
** Reported by alocritani<br />
<br />
* Fixed typo in the Devourer beacon, and one with some Astro Train text.<br />
** Reported by Ryulong and VengefulWight respectively. <br />
<br />
* Improve some tooltips<br />
** Reported by Histidine<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Hopefully this actually fixes the "AI Reserves spawning outside of gravwell" problem<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the base-oriented Warden Fleet wasn't properly constrained to camping at bases<br />
<br />
* Fix a couple hacks that weren't correctly setting the Hacking History<br />
** Thanks to alocritani for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive Extraction hack now only takes 5 minutes at base, rather than 15.<br />
** With higher difficulties getting longer durations, this could lead to...well, on Diff 10, an hour long hack. Yeah.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty and donblas for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Units under construction take bonus damage from being shot. This should alleviate the frustrating case where the AI is distracted trying to kill Under Construction Frigates/Turrets instead of things that are actually shooting back<br />
** Note that this makes long-build-time things from the zenith trader very fragile before they are finished.<br />
** Mentioned by ussdefiant60 on discord<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian damage 1,500 -> 500, reload time 6s -> 4s, swapped outdated damage bonus to match the Fusion Bombers.<br />
** The 6s reload time was allowing these to recloak while still firing. The outdated bonus had weird Mark interactions and was missed.<br />
** Damage in general was a bit high for a unit that bypassed 90% of shields, so a large drop, both for that and to account for the new bonus.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Black Widow Golem Ark hull into shields.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some Guardian costs.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.009 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the last patch where sometimes threat wasn't being correctly counted.<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists and others for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.008 Golems And Arks Come Marching In ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart from Nuc Temeron<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Science icon in the resource bar now shows the history of the Techs you have unlocked. Note that this only applies to techs unlocked after this patch is applied.<br />
** This is mostly to have behariour that matches with the AIP and Hacking histories, but also allows for a new player to look at a save from an experienced player and learn from what they did with science.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug option to increase or decrease the difficulty of all the AIs in the game<br />
** It occurs to me that people sometimes start games and think "Man, this isn't challenging enough" or "I'm getting crushed". Well, now you can adjust the AI difficulty on the fly! Yet another feature for improved sandboxing.<br />
** This code includes a framework to allow other settings on other factions to be changed.<br />
<br />
* Add a tip explaining that unit stats have no inherent mechanical impact, they only matter insofar as their numbers relate to weapons systems<br />
** This caused some confusion<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
* Fix a typo in the metal popup<br />
** Thanks to alocritani for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI Reserves to spawn a bit further from the gravwell edge; they were getting stuck sometimes<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where sometimes minor factions would incorrectly cause AIP increases when killing warp gates. <br />
** Thanks to MasterGeese for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with Global Command Augmenters where they used the Turret type count for how many OtherDefense types they had.<br />
** Normally, a GCA has 1 Turret type, with 25% chance for a second. It then has a 33% chance for a single "OtherDefense" type (things like Minefields). If it has only 1 unit type after this, it gets a second Turret type, so in general they're pretty likely to get 2 Turret types.<br />
** Because of the OtherDefense logic actually using the Turret count, it meant since it always has at least 1 Turret, it would also always have 1 OtherDefense, regardless of the 33% chance.<br />
** This meant the "add a second Turret type so we have at least 2 types total" logic never occurred, making it so most GCAs had just 1 Turret type, when in fact the majority were meant to have 2.<br />
** It seems like this has changed it from around 25% of GCAs having 2 Turret types, to 75% (!) of GCAs having 2 Turret types.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Dark Spire Ward description<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste on discord for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Strikecraft and Turret Coordinators were both increasing Strikecraft and Turret caps once you had both effects.<br />
** If you had only one, it would work completely fine. Once you had two, it would combine the effects, leading to a 1.7x cap multiplier for both, instead of 1.3x.<br />
** This probably leads to some late game nerfs as a consequence.<br />
*** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting an oddity with some MLRS Turrets, leading to this discovery.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer was causing all the ships to rush out of the AI Guard Posts and get eaten<br />
** I hope this also alleviates a bug where some minor factions could still stir up AI units to attack you<br />
<br />
* The Tech Menu now shows ships in ARSs under the set of things that you can upgrade, not just the things in Fleets on the map that you haven't captured yet<br />
** I think a number of people have wanted this but I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* The Tech menu now shows entries for techs that you could unlock from ARSs but don't have in a fleet (either owned or capturable)<br />
** I think this confused some people on Steam who could see something in an ARS but couldn't see the Tech for it<br />
<br />
* Fixed several possible but rare index out of range exceptions that could happen in the vis layer simulation due to cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif, KazeSasso, and Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the ReevaluateUnitOrders code that would sometimes have background-coarse planets not run the logic for their ships at all. Now those ships only use the secondary "SimCycleGroup_Slow" logic if this is on a "tier 1" planet that gets processed every frame.<br />
** The intent of the sim frame processing was to split it out across multiple frames, which works great on those tier 1 planets, but for planets that are already being split across multiple frames it could mean that their ships might not get new orders ever until the player visited the planet. This could greatly nerf engineers, for example.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this!<br />
<br />
* The forcefield protection planning was being run only intermittently on tier 2 planets, which include player forces that are not being monitored right now. Now it ONLY runs those intermittently on tier 3 planets (no players), and runs them continuously otherwise, so as to never run into cases where enemies could get off a few shots at something of a player that was being protected by a forcefield.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this, and Chthon and folks on discord for reporting it.<br />
<br />
* Silenced some harmless errors about trying to render a ship when its RelatedEntity became null during the process, via cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare nullref exception that could happen in the target list planning because of cross-threading stuff.<br />
** Thanks to vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tentatively prevent the Devourer from shooting force field generators (the ones you can build at your planets)<br />
** A number of people have complained about it. I'm not sure if I caught all the cases, so please let me know if there are any issues.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Hacking Difficulty Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* The goal of this is to make hacking easier early and harder late.<br />
<br />
* Increase up the Hacking Points Spent required to trigger new hacking difficulty levels.<br />
** Some larger hacks could move you up 2 levels of difficulty under the wrong circumstances, which was quite excessive <br />
<br />
* Add some new tiers of hacking difficulty to allow us to make late game hacking scarier. The hacking difficulty now goes<br />
** Very Easy<br />
** Easy<br />
** Indifferent (old Moderate)<br />
** Slothful (old Hard)<br />
** Moderate (old Extreme)<br />
** Hard (old Terrifying)<br />
** Extreme (new, and harder)<br />
** Terrifying (new, and harder)<br />
***From a conversation on discord where people wanted higher difficulty tiers<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hacking difficulty levels used were one tier harder than they should have been<br />
** A number of people noted this<br />
<br />
=== Other Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Tractor Arrays in Global Command Augmenters a bit.<br />
<br />
* Added Raiders and Daggers to ARS'.<br />
<br />
* AI Sentry Frigate now decloaks much slower (from 2s for MK1 vs MK1 cloaked units, to 8s), damage 600 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Added an AI Ship Group consisting of the Classic Trio Strikecraft (V-Wing, Fusion Bomber, Concussion Corvette).<br />
<br />
* Added the V-Wing into a few groups.<br />
<br />
* Weaken Turret and Weaken Guard Post hacks are slightly cheaper. Can also be done remotely (i.e without a Flagship present).<br />
** The remote hack is an experiment.<br />
<br />
* The logic for officer fleets (those with Arks and Golems) used to be that they couldn't be more than a certain number of hops away from an AI homeworld. Now it doesn't care how far away they are, except that they must ideally be at least 3 from the AI homeworld and (same as before) 6 from player homeworlds. This makes it a lot more likely for you to actually see officer fleets in the mid-game (or at all, depending on how far you're getting).<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for inspiring this change while doing a podcast with Chris (https://explorminate.co/chris-park-of-arcen-games-podcast-interview/), and Badger for suggesting the specifics.<br />
** Note that Lone Wolf flagships have also had their seeding locations updated in an analagous but not identical fashion<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette damage 340 -> 280, stack damage multiplier 3x - > 2x.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tank augmented weapon range 8,000 -> 10,100, base damage multiplier 2x -> 3x, visual changed to a red laser pulse.<br />
<br />
* Removed Fusion Bombers damage bonus improving with Mark.<br />
** The bonus was only meant for them to automatically target anything with enough shields to be worth bypassing.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette damage 96 -> 130.<br />
<br />
* Kite now uses the same damage as the Concussion Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod damage 100 -> 125.<br />
<br />
==== Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Ripper reload time 3s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate damage 20,000 -> 24,000.<br />
<br />
==== Outguard ====<br />
<br />
* Removed Hacking cost of hiring Outguard.<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased base values of Outguard strength.<br />
<br />
* Those Outguard groups that did not have a Flagship now do.<br />
<br />
* Some Outguard groups can be hired twice rather than once.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate beams max targets 30 -> 10, damage 5,000 -> 7,500, reload time 2s -> 1s.<br />
** Same DPS as before, but more likely to hit enough targets to get all of it. Fire rate offsets the occasional beam that mostly misses.<br />
** This appears to be a somewhat decent improvement.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed 600 -> 1,000, AIP cost 20 -> 15, hull 750,000 -> 1,250,000.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse weapon damage 2,500 -> 4,500.<br />
<br />
* Railcannon weapon damage 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Golems ====<br />
<br />
* Note: AI Golems are currently untouched. There is very little data on them currently - most feedback is about the player ones, which the below concern.<br />
<br />
* AIP cost (for non Lone Wolves) 20 -> 15.<br />
<br />
* Golem Speed 600 -> 1,000, Black Widow Golem speed 1,000 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem main weapon damage 2,000 -> 5,000, Sabot damage 3,000 -> 8,000, total durability 2,500,000 -> 4,000,000.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem reload time 9s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Regenerator Golem shots per salvo 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem shots per salvo 20 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 2,000 -> 3,000, hull 1,000,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem hull 1,800,000 -> 2,800,000, damage 350 -> 800, range of both weapon and tractor beams 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Hive Golem has 300 Yellow Jackets, up from 250.<br />
<br />
==== Arks ====<br />
<br />
* AIP cost 15 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos range 5,600 -> 9,000, Parasite Bolt damage 900 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira forcefield size increased 25%, damage 7,000 -> 15,000, shields 1,250,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Ark One shots per salvo 20 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Gryn now launches Saboteur, Decoy and Scrap drones. Also produces some energy.<br />
<br />
=== Expansion and Mod Loading Work ===<br />
<br />
* XMLLoadingOrder.txt, which lets you specify the loading order of mods that you choose to install, has been updated with some notes on exactly how that's intended to work.<br />
** They read: <br />
*** //note that this is for determining the order that mods are loaded.<br />
*** //any mods not specified in here will be loaded in alphabetical order according to the OS.<br />
*** //the base game content, and then the expansions in numerical order, are ALWAYS loaded first.<br />
*** //to add an mod to your mod order list, just place them each on a single line here.<br />
*** //unless a mod depends on another mod, you don't even need to do that, though. Usually mods don't touch each other.<br />
<br />
* The game now handles mod loading slightly differently, in that it makes a central table of all the mods that it finds in the XmlMods folder and allows for other parts of the game to reference them as-needed later.<br />
** Overall we're not doing TOO much with this yet, but it does make things faster.<br />
** As part of this, the actual xml mod loading order is now handled far better, and doesn't require loading the same file over and over again dozens of times.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoPostInitializationAndSortingLogic method onto ArcenDynamicTable, which allows us to do things like export the list of installed mods.<br />
<br />
* As part of the boot sequence for the game, it now logs which mods are installed, and in what order. This is pretty useful for any debugging that anyone might need to do.<br />
** It also lists all of the expansions that it's aware of, and if they are installed or not.<br />
<br />
* Under the hood since the start of the project, we've had the ability to have expansions that are enabled or disabled in worlds. This has now been fleshed out with our modern requirements for it, though.<br />
<br />
* Some various old parts of the code under the hood were still assuming that we could sometimes reload some of the xml after initial game load (that's never been true in this game, what a mess that always was when we tried it).<br />
** Some also assumed that we would use the old-style Language localization files, which gave false hope for localization to anyone poring through the code and also had a mild waste of time in there.<br />
** All of this has been cleaned out.<br />
<br />
* When there are exceptions in processing in the xml from the base game, an expansion, or a mod, it's now a lot clearer what the file is and some other bits of data about it.<br />
<br />
* In the folder for any expansion, there is an "ExpansionInstallation.txt" file. Removing that will cause the game to act as if the expansion isn't there, which is useful for testing.<br />
** In past games, we called that Version.txt, but this is a less confusing name. <br />
<br />
* Mods are now automatically loaded -- in whatever order -- simply by existing in the XmlMods folder. You can override their order by using the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file as noted above, but they'll automatically load in alpha order without that requirement.<br />
** However, there is also now a new file called "ModIsDisabled.txt" that can be placed in the folder of each mod. If it is there, then the mod will not load EVEN IF it is in the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file. This is basically a way to make really super sure that the example mods don't load without someone wanting them to.<br />
** The fact that mods are auto-loaded makes them a lot easier to install just by dragging and dropping them.<br />
<br />
* Several example mods had really outdated bits that made them unable to load. Those have now been cleaned up a bit.<br />
<br />
* A lot of subtle changes have been made in the code to how expansions and mods are loaded, which gives them more capabilities than before in things like overwriting core constants or adding to them, etc.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.007 The Player/AI Arms Race Intensifies ==<br />
(Released November 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* You can now see the number of empty slots in your fleet in the fleet management screen, and you can swap other things IN to the empty slot of a fleet, rather than having to go to the other location and swap them OUT only.<br />
** This is the more natural workflow in a lot of cases, and now both workflows are possible at any rate.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== AI Reserves: Anti-Deepstriking ====<br />
<br />
* Add new AI Reserves, basically an HRF for the AI against deepstriking players. The response strength is greater at higher difficulties and the further away from one of your planets you are. Will not trigger unless you are more than 3 hops from your planets.<br />
** Once arrived, AI Reserves are limited to that planet and will hang out for a few minutes, then vanish again.<br />
** It shouldn't trigger easily on Flagships in transport mode, only once you deploy the units.<br />
*** As with all new code, there will probably be a need for some QoL improvements once people have figured out what's fun/frustrating about them<br />
<br />
* Added a new "auto_add_one_of_faction_if_missing_on_save_load" xml tag on factions that allows us to automatically add the AI Reserve into existing quick starts if they weren't already there.<br />
** We definitely don't want to be in a position for constantly recreating the quick starts every time we add a new under-the-hood-always-there faction.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Tweak the logic that calculates the hacking cost increase for a number of hacking types to make the increase less aggressive<br />
** This had already been done for the science extraction hacking, but I hadn't also updated the generic cost increase function because we weren't using it until very recently<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The following hacks no longer get more expensive (in hacking points) based on repeated attempts:<br />
** Neutral Planet Science Extraction<br />
** Grant Technology<br />
** Convert Tech Vault to Science<br />
** Grant Ship Line<br />
** Convert ARS to Science<br />
** Double Ship Line Cap<br />
** At this point, most of the things that increase with repeat usages are things that are hackinng something that you can also get the benefit of via capturing, or covert science extraction, etc.<br />
** It's useful to have some things increase with repeat usages, but for a lot of the main goodies that are on the map that you can ONLY get via hacking, having them increase that way felt punitive.<br />
<br />
* Most of the very common hacks have had their durations reduced from 120-300 seconds to more like 30-120 seconds instead.<br />
** Given things happen once-per-second as hacking progresses, this was a bit on the punishing side for sure.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of players on Steam for pointing out how much harder this had made things, not in a fun way.<br />
<br />
* There is now an increase in hacking times required based on the highest difficulty of any AI faction in the game you're playing (living or dead).<br />
** This only applies to hacks that take more than 5 seconds to begin with.<br />
** On difficulty 5 and down, it's the same as it always has been (with the new nerfs in placing making it far less than it used to be, actually).<br />
** On diff 6, it's now multiplied by 1.25x.<br />
** Diff 7 is 1.5x (so an ARS hack is 45 seconds here instead of the new 30, still better than the older 120 of the last two builds).<br />
** Diff 8 is 2x, diff 9 is 3x, diff 10 is 4x.<br />
** This should help put in some nice gradation for people who feel like hacking should be on the harder side with people on other difficulties not getting absolutely stomped by them.<br />
** Thanks to various discussions on the steam forums making it clear that different people expected/wanted a different amount of hassle out of these, and this led to us feeling like it needed to vary by AI difficulty. A harder-to-hack higher-difficulty AI is super thematically appropriate, anyway.<br />
<br />
==== Economy ====<br />
<br />
* Cheapened the metal cost of Transport Flagships to around 27% of previous.<br />
** An unwelcome penalty for constructing empty Flagships for unit groups, as well as repairing them.<br />
<br />
* 25% increase in Engineer repair rate.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of rare exceptions that could happen based on copying orders from one entity to another after it had already been returned to the pool or otherwise been made invalid. Was something that could happen during stack splits, evidently.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting; it seems he has ridiculously bad luck in getting more exceptions than anyone.<br />
<br />
* The save and load menus now have better sized and spaced text, so long names no longer overlap the stats about them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of cross-threading exceptions that could be hit if the waves composition changed while you were iterating over them.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The "Danger! CurrentFrameNumber changed" error message has been removed from the game and won't bother people anymore.<br />
** This was exceedingly rare for most people, but common for a few specific people. The best theory on this is that these people had exceedingly fast CPU cores, because on inspection of this code it was actually able to detect an "improper" state change that was really just "unlikely but fine." All of the improper cases would have been a lot more common to see, and seen across many clients. In this case it seems to have been a race condition between "work's done" and "make sure the frame didn't change," which were happening on a nanosecond scale.<br />
** The worst case with someone having this change in an actual problematic way would be a multiplayer desync of some varying severity, but given that we already have network desync repair planned as a core key feature this isn't exactly a big deal. Originally this was also code that was defensively checking to see about single-player cross-threading issues, but those are all long-since fixed (2+ years ago).<br />
** Basically this was a case of some false positive popping up in interrupting you for no good reason if your processor was fast enough.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exceptionally rare error that could happen with multiple ships pulling the same order out of the pool if your machine is just really too excellent at multithreading for some reason. Now instead of complaining at you, it just fixes itself. Originally the complain-at-you code was in case we made some code mistakes that would cause this, but the rarity of this error pretty much shows we don't have any such errors. But man, cross-threading stuff on a few particular machines really is popping out some interesting cases.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where astro train depots weren't tracking the number of trains that arrived between save/reload. Whoops.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* When you load a quick start, it now sets the first player name to be whatever your local profile's name is, and then the ones after that (if any) become "Player 2," "Player 3," etc.<br />
** This solves a lot of the underlying names still being "Puffin" or various people who contributed quick starts.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.006 Freedom Of Fleet Line Combination ==<br />
(Released November 7th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== The Ability To Have Duplicate Ship Lines In One Fleet ===<br />
<br />
* The game now allows for duplicate ship lines in a single fleet. This was something that people REALLY wanted, and we get why, but it was a tricky technical thing. Our first idea for this today wasn't valid for multiplayer it turned out, but thankfully we came up with something that is.<br />
** This also includes the ability for initial fleet designs to add more than one copy of a fleet line to itself, whereas before it would just combine them. So you could have two bomber lines in a single fleet design now, for example.<br />
** Note that this will NOT work for drones in fleets at the moment. Those can't be swapped around by players anyway, and there didn't seem to be any reason to make this part work. It could be extended later if we really need to, but it seemed pointless.<br />
** Only the player mobile fleets have this new ability. Command stations, NPC fleets, battlestations/citadels, and so forth all still combine their fleet lines if the type matches. Those can't be swapped around, and it makes much more sense for them to work like they always have.<br />
** It's possible there may be some bugs with this (mainly of the sort of something not building when it's a secondary ship line in a fleet, or things not being able to swap properly when there are duplicate lines), but if so please do report those to us and bear with us.<br />
** Thanks to nas1m, Asteroid, and many others for requesting this -- rather forcefully at times in the case of some steam reviewers or folks on discord, but we got the message. This was tricky as heck to implement, and may cause a few bugs for a bit, but it's clear how important this is to people.<br />
<br />
* When hacking for dark spire ships, it now always puts each new ship you get in its own ship line rather than ever adding to an existing line.<br />
** Additionally, it checks to make sure you have enough empty slots before it will work.<br />
<br />
* Dyson hacks seem to have been assuming that you'll increase the ship cap on existing lines, so for now we've left that working as it always has.<br />
<br />
* ARSes now CAN grant duplicate ship lines to a fleet, and instead of merging they now stay as separate ship lines.<br />
<br />
* Doing a hack to double the cap of a ship line SHOULD work properly in cases where you have multiple ship lines inside a single fleet, only doubling one of them and then allowing the other one to be doubled later if you want.<br />
** This needs testing, though, as it was kind of complicated.<br />
<br />
==== New Bomber Starting Fleet ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Bomber Fleet as a starting option, which includes two different identical lines of Fusion Bombers, plus also Parasitic Bombers. This helps to highlight the fact that you can have very-thematic fleets for anyone just perusing these things from the lobby, so that hopefully this is a teaching moment.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the tooltip showing the number of ships an ARS granted didn't factor in Mark Level increases. Note it still doesn't factor in any additional multipliers like ICGs<br />
<br />
* Fixed some more Frigates being seeded as Strike options in ARS.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an ArgumentOutOfRangeException that could happen in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations P2 because of a race condition. It's harmless and no longer puts up an error message in your face.<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a pretty nasty memory leak that could happen around planned metal flows, particularly given that they were being used from a single pool but for two different threading areas.<br />
** This was something that would affect things even when the metal flows UI wasn't open, because of race conditions between two threads. It was also causing some errors and other race conditions in general, all of which are now fixed.<br />
** It was a very unusual sort of situation with a very special-case data structure (the time-based pool), and that was just... really an edge case thing. It also was not really causing errors or a memory leak in all cases, even though it was in some. Why it would be particularly severe for the one player who reported it, while nobody else had crashes related to this, is mildly baffling. But that's the nature of race conditions for you, honestly.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of memory leaks and other things that caused excessive memory churn while actively viewing the metal flows interface. These were things that would be given back to the player and thus not truly a memory leak in general; it was leaking on the heap and then coming back later.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The last of the memory-leaky-type things related to metal flows is now fixed. This one was introduced possibly as far back as September 2018 by Chris, or possibly more recently when changing another bit of code to make a copy per list instead of having a reference in another list. At any rate, we were creating a metric ton of extra metal flow data that was then getting churned out of the memory pool by the garbage collector, and generally wasting some CPU time and efficiency. Now things properly get returned to the pool.<br />
** On the metal flows screen, there is still some climbing RAM that you see for a while, but then it stabilizes and eventually drops. That seems to be mostly related to temporarily cached sprite quads being used by TextMeshPro, and with such large amounts of text that changes frequently that's probably unavoidable. It's not a true memory leak anymore, and doesn't spike more than something like 60mb at peak in our current tests, where it was hundreds of mb in the same tests previously.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the Threat tooltip to say that the Visible Threat reported is only from Watched planets<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx of reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a couple of changes that may fix custom flagships being placed at a higher mark level than their base should be if the planet they are on is a higher mark.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an invisible nullref exception that could happen on quitting the game program in some rare circumstances.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Show Fleet Ship Line Numbers" settings option to the Debug section that is for helping us root out problems with multiple ship lines of the same type within a fleet.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen inside LazyLoadSquadWrapper when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare indexing exception that could happen inside GetEntityByID when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Phenomphear for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Reduced firepower and health of Instigator and Warden Fleet Bases.<br />
** People liked it when shown the values before the release, but it seems to have caused issues elsewhere. For deepstriking defense, probably need to be another method.<br />
** Also lowered the range a tad of both and removed the forcefield from the Warden Fleet Base.<br />
<br />
* Upped Parasite damage slightly, doubled the zombification damage amount.<br />
** So now they zombify in 5 shots, and 1 at MK7.<br />
<br />
* Bumped up starting metal storage to the maximum value.<br />
<br />
* Home Human Settlements gain 260 metal per mark, up from 120.<br />
<br />
* Reduced metal cost of Plasma Turrets and Beam Cannons by half.<br />
<br />
* Human Home Command metal income 900 - > 2,200, increase by 400 per mark.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations now benefit from the Citadel Technology.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Citadel Tech from 3,000/4,500/6,000 to 2,000/3,000/4,000.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Sentries Tech from 1000/1500/2000/2500 to 500/750/1000/1250.<br />
<br />
* Watchman Frigate energy usage 7,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.005 Answering Your Top Requests ==<br />
(Released November 5th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some code to dump the current state of the Hunter Fleets in threat popup display window. Only enabled with the Debug_Tooltip setting. <br />
** Intended for debugging/internal testing.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Line And Count Revisions ===<br />
<br />
* There are now a maximum of 5 ship lines (other than drones, things like hydra heads, and the fleet leaders) that any fleet can have. Previously it was 6 for some fleets, 7 for others.<br />
** This applies to the ARS and other ships.<br />
** This is defined in central xml so that we can tune it if need be.<br />
<br />
* ALL strike fleets are now considered to have 5x slots for strikecraft and frigates, and their "empty slots" are no longer a "physical thing" (people reporting oddness on how these custom fleets worked will know what this means).<br />
** This lets you take any fleet that you capture and swap stuff around so that it has a full 5 slots of stuff on it, which is really handy.<br />
** This also makes the interface for empty slots a lot more condensed and easy to read when you're swapping something else to them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an oversight that was causing players to be able to build more than a single copy of each of the empty flagships in the game.<br />
** This in turn caused various issues, such as trying to move empty slots between two Stealth Alpha fleets would not work, etc. That was never supposed to let you have more than one in the first place! Go figure.<br />
<br />
==== ARS Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* You are no longer allowed to hack an ARS for a ship line if that fleet already has the ship line<br />
** If there is any way to merge ship lines then people will want full ability to merge/split ship lines, which is not something Chris wants to allow. So for consistency's sake, this is being removed.<br />
** Fleet Capacity Extenders have been added as a replacement for this mechanic, and those are both clearer as well as being WAY more powerful.<br />
<br />
* When you find an ARS, it now works much differently. Rather than having just ONE ship type available at it, it has five. It will always have 4 strikecraft and 1 frigate type.<br />
** When you click the "Grant Ship Line" hack on the ARS, it no longer just does the hack -- instead, a new popout sidebar window appears, asking you which of the lines you wish to have granted to the fleet in question.<br />
** This shows you the fleet in question, what ships it has, and reds out any options that are invalid for that particular fleet because they happen to be invalid.<br />
** This gives you a TON more control over how you grow your fleets via ARS, without you having to do a bunch of expenditures of hacking points on re-rolls of the ARS.<br />
** This also gives us the framework for having hacks in general that let you make a sub-choice in them after choosing to do the hack itself, which is a powerful new ability for hacks. We'll be using this again super soon for upgrading specific ship line ship caps in a fleet via a new structure.<br />
** The fact that there are five options now is reflected in the text and will affect existing savegames.<br />
<br />
* If you DO choose to re-roll an ARS, it will give you five fresh ships. They may or may not have overlap with the prior batch or with your current fleet's contents.<br />
<br />
==== The Arrival Of Fleet Capacity Extenders ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new structure that you can find throughout the galaxy in new savegames: Fleet Capacity Extender<br />
** Hacking this structure doubles the ship cap for one of the fleetship types belonging to the Fleet that did the hacking (your choice as to which type).<br />
** This DOES show up in existing quick starts, but won't seed in savegames you're actively playing.<br />
** This new structure essentially is a far-more-powerful version of the secondary function that people used to like on ARSes (that we removed in this build).<br />
*** The fact that it was confusing to merge ship lines via the ARS was a good reason to remove that function, but this new structure is more powerful and doesn't have the strangeness of being a sometimes-thing. It always works like it works.<br />
** About the same number of these are seeded as ARSes, except not one on the adjacent planet to your start. The richness of what you can conquer is now a lot higher.<br />
<br />
* To prevent a lot of exploits that people would have started doing immediately, the upgrades from Fleet Capacity Extenders can no longer be applied to the same ship line in the same fleet more than once.<br />
<br />
==== Custom Fleet Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* The custom fleets, which previously had a max cap of 7, now only have a max cap of 5 like everything else.<br />
** It's possible that these fleets, or other fleets that got upgrades to 6 from an ARS, are over the new cap in old savegames. That won't harm anything.<br />
<br />
* Rather than having 9 explicit custom fleets (three regular, three cloaked, three speedy), the game now has a single type of custom fleet (regular) that you can build 9 of.<br />
** This makes the menu way less overwhelming down in the custom fleets section, and it doesn't give any special fleet leaders (speedy or cloaked) that are better than what you find out in the galaxy.<br />
<br />
=== EXP Revamp And Spending Science To Upgrade Specific Planets ===<br />
<br />
* The non-turret defenses, and command stations in general, no longer get mark levels based on EXP going up on their fleets.<br />
<br />
* Mobile player offensive fleets are still able to gain EXP like they always have been, and in the main it is still very useless for most of them (since only their flagships upgrade, for the most part; very useful for things with a powerful flagship but otherwise not much).<br />
** Note that this will get more useful in the future as we start adding in perks for these types of fleets that will affect other ships as you level up. That's just a TBD item.<br />
** The goal with these is still to have a bit of that flair of "hero stuff" that people have been asking for since the early days of AI War 1. We're proceeding somewhat cautiously with it, keeping it more on the useless end of the spectrum rather than something that takes over the game.<br />
<br />
* All the other kind of fleets are no longer able to gain EXP at all. This means battlestations and command stations, mainly, for you.<br />
** This was, by contrast, super duper useful to the point of being an absurd exploit. But it also wasn't a fun thing, requiring grinding rather than actual strategy of any sort.<br />
** This was one of the really big ways that people could force a victory far faster than they should have been able to, and really mess up the economy of things.<br />
** Existing savegames will lose all their unspent EXP, but WILL keep their existing added levels from this source, simply because a ton of games would have economies in the toilet without these levels remaining for now. But those savegames with leveled-up command stations are definitely overpowered in the player's favor, now.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting and inspiring this and many of the other related changes here.<br />
<br />
* When calculating how many fleets there are on a planet for EXP penalty purposes, it now ONLY counts mobile player fleets. It DOES include support fleets, but not battlestations/citadels, and not command stations.<br />
** So this is something that makes it so that you're penalized a lot less rapidly for having many fleets on a planet.<br />
** For the "max mark level" calculation that it does, it's now only based on the mark level of the mobile offensive fleets, too.<br />
<br />
* A new button has been added in place of the fleet EXP stuff for planetary (command station) type fleets. It's hovertext reads:<br />
** Planetary fleets can be upgraded (all ships within them) by directly spending science. This can be a very science-cost-effective way to get more metal income or energy production.<br />
** Changing the type of command station you're using, or losing the planet and recapturing it, won't cause you to lose your upgrades on this planet.<br />
<br />
* By clicking the above button, you can spend science in a whole new way an upgrade ALL the ships within the planetary fleet by one mark level (regardless of whether normally those would have been upgraded by EXP -- this isn't EXP, and you're paying science for it).<br />
** The cost is pretty cheap for the first added mark, at only 1000 science. The next is 3k, then 6k, then on to the absurd with 9k, 18k, and 36k. So you CAN upgrade one of your planets like crazy if you really want to, but it's prohibitively expensive to do so.<br />
** All of this gives you a lot more flexibility and allows you to do spot-upgrades for purposes of getting a better economy of having better defenses at a location.<br />
** This is pretty important for high level play with the removal of the EXP for command stations (and battlestations/citadels, although they aren't gaining the science unlock ability).<br />
** We may need to tweak the costs of these at some point to think about if we want the first upgrade to be even cheaper, to really tempt you. It's hard to say if this is tempting enough, as we want you to have strong defenses but be weighing that against the more generalized science expenditures that benefit offense AND defense. This of course also benefits your economy in a major way, so we may have to revisit how much more metal generators and the command stations generate as their mark levels go up if we reduce the science costs here. We shall see. For now, conservative steps. Anyone who isn't already a fairly advanced player may not even notice the difference here.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Teams ===<br />
<br />
* It is now possible for minor factions to have alliances amongst themselves to take down the Player and AI. In the game lobby, several factions can now join "Team Red", "Team Green" or "Team Blue". All factions on the same Team are allied against everyone else in the game.<br />
** Supported minor factions: Marauders, Nanocaust, Devourer, Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart to "Fun With Factions" demonstrating this mechanic<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Toggling objective importance is now done with a Right Click. Left click keeps the old behaviour (usually centering you on the planet in question)<br />
** This was suggested by a few people on discord I think? I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* Fix a surprising bug where the AI wasn't correctly generating threat when attacked by a player if the respective strength ratios were within certain ranges.<br />
** This might have some actual balance implications<br />
*** Thanks to zeus for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Death effect damage is no longer a strangely high number. Actually, this change allows for a lot more diversification in how effective units are at applying it. The start of this is done, with more tuning to follow.<br />
** This is most likely a somewhat large shift in the balance of it, which feels a tad necessary? Quite a few stories of mass hordes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference when calculating energy usage<br />
** Reported by Edmaniac<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the experimental pursuit mode implementation that could cause issues in "normal" mode where your units would not shoot at things properly.<br />
** Reported by a number of people<br />
<br />
* Structures that are under construction shouldn't generate AIP anymore if killed<br />
** reported by Chthon and zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Fix some confusion about killing reconquest command stations if you haven't paid the AIP price for that planet yet. It now correctly charges you AIP and lets you scout. The tooltip for such a reconquest command station tells you what's happening<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Destablilize Exogalactice Wormhole hack wasn't correctly killing the wormhole<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for the bug report<br />
<br />
* On particularly large maps (> 120 planets), increase the places that Officer Fleets are allowed to spawn<br />
<br />
* Fix an exciting bug where AOE shots with > 10 potential targets were doing 10% damage to each potential target. So if there were 20 targets each taking 10% damage, that's 200% of allowed damage done. 50 targets would be 500% damage.<br />
** This was particularly obvious for high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AOE shots were doing too much damage when killing lots of stacked units<br />
** Again obvious with high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Reported by Puffin<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with the tooltip on Alarm Posts; it had the ratios reversed<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow marauders to build outposts if the significantly outnumber the enemy; this prevents a single cloaked ship from stymying them.<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make the Cloaking hovertext a bit more obvious with colour<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the tooltip for uncaptured flagships where it was showing the Strength if all its units were at level 1, instead of reflecting your actual mark levels<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the bug report<br />
<br />
* In the science screen, the Ship Types You Could Capture now show the mark level for that ship line<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Your ships will now target down Eyes automatically in pursuit mode, once you've disabled their invulnerability<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The Objective tooltip for an ARS now shows the ship line in the colour of the mark level you have for it<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for reporting<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for a notification of a wave against one of your planets now tells you your defensive strength. <br />
** Suggested by NB_FlankStrike<br />
<br />
* Improve the tooltip for hacks that increase the cost for the next hack of that type to improve clarity<br />
** I think someone on steam got confused about this<br />
<br />
* Maybe improve the spacing for the X map. No promises.<br />
** Thanks to gigastar and cthonic_one for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Slight tweaks to the AIP hovertext to improve readability<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where several minor-faction specific hacks were not showing the hacking points used correctly in the hacking log<br />
** Thanks to Interloper for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of the distribution node hovertext<br />
** Suggested by Cyber-Kun<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for an upgrade in the Science Menu now tells you approximately how much Strength increase there would be to your fleets<br />
** Thanks to donblas and Phenomphear for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference related to the Spire Objective<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip to explain about automatically building engineers and factories and so on.<br />
** From a comment by donblas<br />
<br />
* Hovering over a save game in the Load menu will tell you how many times that save game has been loaded. So if you're stuck at a particularly hard spot then you'll get some feedback as to how hard it is<br />
<br />
* The intel tab entries for the hacks for the tech vault and the ARS and the FCE are now three different colors, so that you can tell them apart at a glance if you have a huge galaxy completely explored. This way you can see at a glance what is what, now that it's sorting (rightfully so) by how easy or hard it is to get to each one.<br />
<br />
* Any sidebar build items that would be uncategorized are now invisible instead. These are assumed to be things that exist for legacy purposes but that we don't want to build.<br />
** It sometimes also winds up including random stuff like gravitic battlestations or whatnot that could be constructed but should not have been.<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, it no longer shows the ship cap for command stations (that was spurious, anyway).<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, for flagships that you can construct it now shows the total of that kind that you have in the galaxy as well as what the galaxy count is for them.<br />
<br />
==== Instigator Polish ====<br />
<br />
* Instigators now have a permanent notification (like wave notifications)<br />
** Note this reuses the Wormhole Invasion icon for the notification for the moment<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Instigators no longer show a Cumulative Effect, just a description of what the effect does and how many times it has fired.<br />
** The units for Cumulative Effect weren't meaningful to anyone who wasn't a developer, and it just confused people<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the ship-spawning instigator base had a bunch of decimal points in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for bringing this to my attention<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Zombification no longer works on Dyson ships, Dire Guardians and such things. It was kindof OP.<br />
** The old behaviour can be enabled as a Galaxy Setting<br />
<br />
* Different AI Difficulties now increase the mark level at different AIP amounts. As a result of this, different AIs can be at different mark levels.<br />
** Suggested by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* The Hunter and Warden fleets now get decloaking ships, in the hopes of preventing permanent scouting by cloaked units<br />
** From a discussion on discord I think?<br />
<br />
* If your fleet outnumbers the AI "enough" on a planet then all the Guard Posts will release their ships so the ships can run away<br />
<br />
* Allow units spawned from Guard Posts to run away more quickly from an overwhelming attack<br />
<br />
* Buffed Astro Train durability and damage a bit, albedo 0.3 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Increased self construction rate of Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon reload time 4s -> 6s, damage 1,810 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Gave Forcefield Frigates the same priority as Forcefield Generators.<br />
** So the AI will ignore it in general if there are unprotected targets to go after.<br />
** Might cause a weird thing with Siphoners, but see how it goes?<br />
<br />
* Increased Hull Tech cost by 2,500.<br />
<br />
* Increased durability of things like Raid Engines, Alarm Posts, Data Centers, and Co Processors.<br />
<br />
* Major Data Center only reduces AIP by 60, and increases by 90 on death.<br />
<br />
* Increased chance of wormhole Tachyon Sentinels.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now has Pulsar Tanks in place of MLRS Corvettes, and Vanguards in place of Grenade Launcher Corvettes. Also removed 1 of the starting Siege Frigates.<br />
** This Fleet had an issue in that it had crazy synergy, with it being mostly Splash and Heavy Tech, plus not really fitting the Doorkicker name much. Both Pulsars and Vanguards have Doorkicker like abilities, and since these units can properly attack single targets, 1 Siege Frigate can be safely removed without impacting the Fleet too much, as these were apparently their own issue.<br />
<br />
* AIP Floor is now increased by 35% of AIP gain, up from 20%.<br />
<br />
* Metabolizing Gangsaw engine_gx 14 -> 13.<br />
<br />
* Reduced minimum and maximum unit type counts in the more thematic Fleets (i.e the ones with mass Fusion Bombers).<br />
** Incredibly synergistic inherently, with far more units in general too.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the count of some of the "flat upgrade" units, like Heavy and Parasitic Fusion Bombers.<br />
<br />
* Buffed the damage output of most of the normal Guard Posts as well as a few of the Dire.<br />
<br />
==== Economy And Engineering ====<br />
<br />
* Drastically reduced the assist construction and repair rate of Engineers.<br />
** It was possible for these to eventually end up assisting Factories to absurd amounts - actually a good bit more than the Factory.<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvesters income 80 -> 60, amount gained per mark 40 -> 30.<br />
** This might not be enough, come to think of it. Player unit costs never increase unlike Classic, which means late game costs to rebuild after a fleetwipe are pretty low compared to here, leading to the below "slapping" event.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station income gained per mark 400 -> 150.<br />
** While the player does have less income, the rate at which it can be spent is also much lower, so it's likely the player would start to noticeably lose a battle and retreat a good while before depleting their reserves.<br />
** Also, while we don't want people to be sitting around for ages waiting after a fleetwipe for it to replenish, it was also rather silly that you could do things like, to quote someone "Bleed out the praetorian guard by slapping it with wads of cash".<br />
<br />
* Reduced energy cost of Turrets a bit.<br />
<br />
==== Eyes ====<br />
<br />
* Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships<br />
** This makes Eyes pretty useless against minor factions. Unclear what (if anything) should be done about that.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid.<br />
<br />
* Eyes are now MK7.<br />
** Mostly important for the Ion Eye.<br />
<br />
* Tripled range of Plasma Eye.<br />
** Is now planet wide range, like the Ion Eye. No more sneaking about out of range.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Eye damage tripled, max targets hit before spreading damage reduced to a third.<br />
** Means it can focus a lot more on single targets than before.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now works on albedo of 0.4.<br />
** Yes, this means it can target most Frigates now. Eyes check Fleets, and not units, so this is possible. Also lets it target a few more Strikecraft.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now has splash damage on each shot. Radius of 1,000, hitting 5 targets.<br />
** Done this way instead of just increasing shot count, as that many shots could be a bit too bright and painful to look at. Simple enough to change.<br />
<br />
* Both Eyes now have tachyon systems.<br />
<br />
==== Flagships ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly reduced Transport Flagship priority.<br />
** AI should focus more on killing the actual combat units around rather than chasing an unarmed ship and getting shot to bits during it.<br />
** Combined with the far weaker Engineers reducing the fleet replenishment rate to more...reasonable speeds, hopefully this prevents a lot of attritioning?<br />
<br />
* Reduced durability of Transport Flagships.<br />
** Mostly applicable during deepstrikes.<br />
<br />
* Differentiated the Transport Flagship types:<br />
** Normal ones are the same (including the above).<br />
** Cloaked ones are now a good bit slower.<br />
** Fast ones now have less health.<br />
<br />
* Ships unloaded from a transport now have a delay before firing.<br />
** Hopefully should make the "Unload units, snipe target, load again, run away" strategy less OP. Further changes may be necessary.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Hacks now define if they work based on the closest hacker or not, using a new tag use_closest_hacker_for_check.<br />
** Before it was inferring if it should do that, which was potentially going to be confusing down the line.<br />
<br />
* A variety of bugfixes and improvements to the internal hacking logic.<br />
<br />
* Flagships now move much more slowly when hacking<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting that you could just run away from the nanocaust hack response<br />
<br />
* Increased Cost of Intra-Galactic-Coordinator Hack (120 if owe AIP, 60 without).<br />
<br />
* More hacks now have an escalating cost to them (1.2x what it was last time).<br />
<br />
* Shortened and cheapened the Ion Cannon and Mass Driver hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased cost of Grant Ship Line and Grant Tech hacks.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully increased the difficulty of the Super Terminal.<br />
** This seriously'll need more feedback. There are so many variables in it that whatever test games Puffin has is probably missing something else.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Convert ARS to Science.<br />
<br />
* Some minor duration changes to a few.<br />
<br />
* Added Exo-Waves on completion to a few hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased response strength of quite a few AI hacks.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.003 Sortable Objectives ==<br />
(Released October 28th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where ARS hacks were allowing you to get 7 ship lines instead of 6<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix an OBOB where we were reporting inconsistent stack numbers in the hover entity info text<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* New installations of the game now save 3 autosaves instead of 1<br />
** Suggested by yupyip<br />
<br />
* Flagships in Hold Fire Mode no longer deploy drones<br />
** SUggested by CWW256 on discord<br />
<br />
* Clicking on an Objective will now tag it with an Importance. Clicking once makes an Objective High importance, putting it at the top of the displayed list. Clicking again will make it Low importance, putting that objective at the bottom. Clicking a third time makes it Normal.<br />
** Suggested by Greeniguana<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to hoverEntity and fix a possible null reference<br />
** Thanks to kerzain for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tutorial 4 now mentions you can hover on the AIP amount on the top bar for some more information.<br />
** Thanks to Potkeny in Discord for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology hack now mentions not increasing the cost of unlocking it with Science.<br />
<br />
* Hack Intra-Galactic Coordinator and Hack Global Command Augmenter now note exactly what the reduced cost is if you have paid the AIP cost for that planet.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Science resource bit at the top now has the same blue colour for all the amounts, rather than being a light green, so it's consistent with every other mention.<br />
<br />
* Metal section of the top bar now has actual proper colouring.<br />
<br />
* Cost to fully extract all the science from a planet is now in green, like most hacks are.<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Sabotage Hack now mentions it doesn't cause an AIP increase for destroying structures which would normally do so.<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved the Experience tooltip information to have the correct logic and perhaps read a little bit better.<br />
<br />
* The "Ally to AI" setting description now explicitly says that all player-allied factions are also allied.<br />
** From a discussion with Astra on discord<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Hacking resource hovertext on the top bar now has the hacking point amounts in green rather than a red.<br />
<br />
* AIP hovertext on the top bar has some minor colour additions, as well as an explanation of what the AIP Floor actually is, as well as stating reduction is never wasted.<br />
** Thanks to Nuc_Temeron, Halfshell cat, right01, amblingalong and Pexpy in Steam Discussion for prompting this.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines now show on the galaxy map.<br />
** Suggested by gigastar in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Hunter Waves option is renamed to Threat Waves, and description updated to be clearer.<br />
** They never actually joined the Hunter Fleet immediately - they were threat, so it was rather in error.<br />
<br />
* Added some information about how threat is generated, and it eventually joining the Hunter Fleet to the info displayed by hovering over the top bar area.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Decoy Drone damage halved, tripled build time, health reduced 25%.<br />
** Puffin was finding these were a bit absurd in extended practice. More testing required.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology Hack cost increased to 20.<br />
<br />
* The Engineer and Factory changes from previous, as those were missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.002 ARSes, Instigators, and Tech Vaults, Oh My ==<br />
(Released October 25th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* ALL of these changes are thanks to Badger and Puffin. Chris was working on the world's longest AMA for some reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/dmhlu6/ama_i_am_chris_park_founder_of_arcen_games_and/<br />
<br />
* Add some new Quick Starts by community member zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Experimental Targeting Change<br />
** Under Galaxy Settings -> Units there's now a setting to enable/disable a new pursuit mode.<br />
** This mode makes ships prefer to kill all nearby units before moving on; hopefully it will make Drones less apt to go aggro guard posts everywhere.<br />
*** Looking for player feedback on this<br />
*** This also will affect the way AI ships will fight, so I'm loooking for feedback on that aspect as well<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagships now cost very little energy.<br />
** This was originally so they would be hurt more by Nucleophilic units, but you can usually just micro them around and that's...not really fun or interesting. So just greatly reduce it, since you were otherwise being penalised for using the custom ones.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and seemingly others for bringing up.<br />
<br />
* The Human Resistance Fighters now help less often in battles, so it feels more rare/special when they do. They also can't go back to a planet for at least 15 minutes after their last time there.<br />
** I forget who asked for this (sorry). They used to attack about 60% of the time, now it's more like 30%<br />
<br />
* Macrophages now need more metal to do things on Hostile To Players Only mode. Also decrease base telium income when that telium has harvesters on the map; harvesting should be the primary form of income<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Crippled flagships now have a 5 minute delay until they are eligible to be repaired. This is to make crippling a Bigger Deal in battles where you might have engineers<br />
** Note that taking the crippled flagship out of combat (ie to another planet where there are no enemies) will reset the repair delay<br />
*** From a discussion about flagships on discord<br />
<br />
* Engineers and Combat Engineers have less health, and are also much higher target priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories are much higher priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a few problems with quickstarts<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Dark Spire could give errors after it has killed all the players and AIs in the game.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for bringing about the triumph of the Dark Spire<br />
<br />
* Fix a strange null reference exception in some findHumanKing code in the game lobby<br />
** Spotted by Nuc_Temeron on stream<br />
<br />
* Fixed Mini Cluster Bombs being swappable. Woops.<br />
** Thanks to Mayheim on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Launching with OpenGL instead of DirectX11 can be problematic for some people, so on GOG the default launch is now DirectX11. On Steam it still shows you the option of which you want, but starts with DirectX11 as the default.<br />
** Thanks to Ronin Storm and Pheespud for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Replace a few mentions of FRD with Pursuit Mode in the Settings<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Auto-Kite setting<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx<br />
<br />
* The button in the lower left that just said "Coming Soon" now says "Chat Menu. Coming Soon" so it's clear what it is.<br />
* Include mention of the shortcut for toggling between the galaxy map/planet screen in the tooltip for the planet name in the top left.<br />
* Improve the tooltip for the clock to mention the buttons that control game speed<br />
* Add more colours to the incoming wave tooltip<br />
** From a remarkably uncivil and poorly written screed on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the explanation for the Praetorian Guard<br />
** Thanks to unicurse for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window available when you click on the Threat icon in the resource bar now shows threat in traditional Strength units (with the raw value divided by 1K).<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx and Puffin for pointing this out<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window now shows the total visible hunter/warden strength in the galaxy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Nanocaust ships were winding up being counted as Threat incorrectly<br />
<br />
* Improve the colouring in the science tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* Some tutorial improvements. Includes a bunch of colour.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for pointing it out.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the AIP history display when claiming structures<br />
<br />
* If a wave is against a minor faction that owns a planet, the game now tries harder to show the faction name in the tooltip. <br />
* If a wave is not against a player planet, the icon will turn grey more consistently.<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Pretty neat idea.<br />
** Thanks to Jaridan on Steam for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Add some colour to the counterattack notification hovertext to improve readability.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hacking description for local watch hacks<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Show better colours for zombies in tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip, Apthorpe and darkarchon<br />
<br />
=== ARS Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'cant hack due to too many ship lines' message for the ARS hack to explicitly call out which fleet you are using, and mention that the hack is done by the closest flagship<br />
** Some people on Steam were finding this confusing.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where custom fleets couldn't hack ARS for more ship lines<br />
** Thanks to zeus and Chromatism for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Lone Wolf Fleets could hack ARS<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where things like Hydra Heads were being counted as ship lines for the purposes of an ARS hack<br />
** This bug has popped up in so many places, fixing it is like, well, killing the heads on a hydra<br />
*** Thanks to yupyip for reporting this one<br />
<br />
* ARS Reroll hacks cost less Hacking Points but have a stronger response<br />
<br />
* ARS to Science conversion hack now grants more science<br />
<br />
* ARSs are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to ARS hacks, given that every other changes constitute a buff to the player<br />
<br />
=== Instigator Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to Instigators; decrease their power and make the bases spawn less frequently<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Instigator Bases weren't correctly tracking their cumulative effect<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting I look at this<br />
<br />
* Fix some punctuation issues with Instigator Base descriptions<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases now report how many times the effect has triggered<br />
<br />
=== Tech Vault Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The "Turn Tech Vault into Science" hack now grants a bit more science<br />
<br />
* Add a "Reroll Tech granted by Tech Vault" hack<br />
<br />
* Hacking a Tech Vault for science no longer increases the cost of the next upgrade<br />
** It seems like everyone wants this<br />
<br />
* Tech Vaults are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to Tech Vault hacks, given that every other changes constitute a strong buff to the player<br />
<br />
== Version 1.001 Official Game Launch! ==<br />
(Released October 21st, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some Tips with a brief explanation of what the AI sub-fleets (Warden, hunter etc) do.<br />
<br />
* The first time you click the Single Player menu (after this build), it gives you a modal prompt asking you if you'd like to do the tutorials first, or if you'd like to just play. This should help prevent people from missing that there are tutorials.<br />
** We did NOT add the tutorials to the Single Player menu, however, as that just gets very cluttered and makes the whole menu harder to read.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The Tutorials button on the right side of the main menu is now colorized and flashes very subtly every half second between two almost-identical colors. This should be much more noticeable without being obnoxious, and without cluttering up something like the single-player menu.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and Badger for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the hovertext for a command station in the sidebar reported the wrong number of turrets<br />
** Thanks to Wurfell on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The AIP history for games begun from Quick Starts will now show AIP change from you as from your username, not "Puffin"<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that can happen in EmitOnAOEParticles.<br />
** It will now log more info, and just do so silently, and not actually impede play like it previously did.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Super Terminal now mentions the Exo-Galactic Strikes.<br />
** Thanks to kocur4d for prompting.<br />
<br />
* Don't let the AI launch mini-waves after exploration/watching hacks<br />
** It was confusing. Thanks to Puffin for report.<br />
<br />
* The Metal launch option on OSX has been removed, as that was still launching under OpenGL anyway.<br />
<br />
* Non-Steam builds no longer try to log into Steam and complain in the log if they can't, and nor do they show "Not logged into Steam" on the main menu.<br />
** This gave the impression that the Steam client was required, when it definitely in no way is. These behaviors do still exist for Steam copies of the game, but just so that you can tell if you're not logged in right for whatever reason.<br />
<br />
* Improve the Instigator Base description to explicitly state that the base effect ends with the death of the base<br />
** Suggested by Apthorpe and Echthelon<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The Dark Spire Ward now instantly blows up any DS ships that enter the planet. The Ward's description has been updated to match<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the report.<br />
<br />
* Doubled range of Devourer Golem.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for bringing up the Devourer.<br />
<br />
* Doubled drone count of the basic Combat Factory.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Repair units now repair shields at the same rate as hull.<br />
** Outdated change from when personal shields cost metal to repair.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked cost of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
==== Golems and Arks ====<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem damage 1,000 -> 2,000, Sabot damage 2,000 -> 3,000, range 8000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem damage 700 -> 1,250, Sabot damage 1,500 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem speed 600 -> 1,000, damage 200 -> 350.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem damage 100,000 -> 200,000.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 450 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 50 -> 80, can only target mobile units, can't target high mass targets, costs 50 AIP to capture instead of 20, and is a Lone Wolf like the Hive Golem.<br />
** AI Botnet Golem has a lower chance to spawn on AI planets as well.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
** Note existing ones will still have their Fleet, and will kind of look a bit odd in the Intel Tab saying it's a Lone Wolf, even though it's still got a Fleet with it. New ones will be normal.<br />
<br />
* Standardised AI Golems to be 3x the durability and damage of a player Golem.<br />
** They were pretty close as is, apparently.<br />
** Also gave them proper costs now.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira damage 3,000 -> 7,000, now takes half damage for 5 seconds after using a wormhole, does bonus damage to shields and also has vampirism, similar to the Siphoner unit. <br />
<br />
* Thanatos single shot weapon damage 6,000 -> 12,000, Parasite Bolt damage 600 -> 900.<br />
<br />
* Ark One damage 350 -> 1050.<br />
<br />
* Orchid damage 7,000 -> 14,000, repair rate increased 50%, repair range doubled.<br />
<br />
* Gryn damage 6,000 -> 16,000, increased fleet unit construction rate 33%.<br />
<br />
* Ark AIP cost reduced from 20 to 15.<br />
<br />
* Reduced AI counterattack bonus for crippling some player Fleet centerpieces.<br />
<br />
==== Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Mass Combat Engineer starting Support Fleet design now uses the Rejuvenator Combat Factory instead.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting replacing this, as it was really unappealing.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.954 Hacking Log! ==<br />
(Released October 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* When you click on the Hacking icon in the resource bar you get a history of all the hacking points you've spent.<br />
** Nota Bene: This will only apply to hacks you do after you install this patch<br />
<br />
* Tweak the helping hands tooltip to mention leaving the marauders their own planets<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* For the hover planet info, explicitly call out if taking the planet would cause AIP, and show the AIP in Red to make it stand out. Also more explicitly call out minor faction owners<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the game was showing incorrect colours for enemy strength on galaxy screen if the planet was owned by a minor faction.<br />
** Thanks to Genrazian for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having partially claimed or hold-firing flagships could prevent building things<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bunch of typos all over the place<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for hunting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the tooltip for GCAs was lying to you about how many turrets they granted<br />
** Reported by RockyBst, Democracy and probably others<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Helping Hands quickstart to make sure the Nanocaust is your ally<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the fix and Genrazian for the impetus<br />
<br />
== Version 0.953 Hotfixes For Certain Linux + Hardware Combinations ==<br />
(Released October 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* On Vulkan on Linux in certain circumstances, there was some form of shader error in the Amplify Bloom rendering. That issue should now be fixed.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Just like windows has launch options allowing you to select between OpenGL and DirectX11, Linux now lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Vulkan - Experimental, and macOS lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Metal - Experimental.<br />
** This needs testing, and is a Steam client update only, not actually a change to the game.<br />
<br />
* Completely rebuilt the asset bundles and their projects to be based on Unity 2019.1.7, same as the main project has been for some time, and to make sure that they explicitly have Vulkan and Metal shader support built into themselves now that the game supports those new platforms.<br />
** This should hopefully solve the issues that we were still seeing with a few people using Vulkan on Linux, as well as potentially some "shader not compiled for this platform" issues with OpenGL on Linux for certain ships that were compiled against an older version of Unity.<br />
** This MAY also fix the Gyrn refractive glass not appearing in-game on any platform, although we haven't test this yet. It may be that we need to write our own shader for that, or update the one from Circonia Studios that we were using previously. Most likely it was an issue that was coming across because of different unity versions, though, we're not sure.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tutorial fix from Craig.<br />
<br />
* Enable strength icons with borders on the galaxy map. (I find it makes a big difference in readability when they overlap links of a similar color.)<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for implementing!<br />
<br />
* Updated a whole bunch of our shaders that were not going to properly work with Metal or Vulkan simply because they were being compiled with exclusive platforms set to directx11 and opengl.<br />
** These should now work, and include things like the icons for ships, and many of the ships themselves. But it hasn't been tested yet. It certainly won't hurt anything, anyhow.<br />
<br />
* The Ciconia Studio glass shaders that we were using for the Gyrn bubble have been updated to their latest version, which should provide better compatibility and hopefully have those actually show up again in-game.<br />
** Why those were showing up in the prep projects but not the actual game is something of a mystery. If this doesn't work, we'll just have to create our own refractive shader with rim lighting, but we'd rather not waste the time if this simple update works. Please do let us know!<br />
<br />
* Fixed one backer name in the credits (Kevin A Munoz), which did not translate over well into pure basic-ascii characters when we ran it through a handy processor (https://pteo.paranoiaworks.mobi/diacriticsremover/) to get rid of unicode characters not supported by our fonts.<br />
** If other folks find that their name got a bit mangled, please do let us know! There were SO many people's names that it was impossible to go through them all manually.<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the shaders for the Gyrn glass bits so that it uses a refractive shader based on Amplify Shader Editor and thus should actually render in these newer unity builds.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.952 A Little Help From Scary Friends ==<br />
(Released October 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Create a tip that points to the instructions in the wiki for how to create your own planet name list. I figure people will want to do this at some point.<br />
<br />
* Spelling/grammar and clarification improvements to some tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Craig and Badger for pointing things out.<br />
<br />
* We FINALLY have all of the kickstarter and backerkit backers thanked in the credits for the game. It's... um... a lot.<br />
<br />
* The credits screen has been split into three scrolling panels, rather than one giant one that scrolls everything. It's also now in two columns rather than three.<br />
** The left column is the same as it was before.<br />
** The center column now has just the top kickstarter backers, aka those at Mark III or higher levels of backing. That's the first 784 people, all backing at $44 or more.<br />
** The right column now has the Mark II and down backers, which is the remaining 2,264 people out of the 3,048 total backers.<br />
** These splits make it so that the scrollbars are actually sensitive enough that you can find what you're looking for. AND we alphabetized the backer names in each category, so that if you know your category you can find your name now.<br />
** Yeah this isn't really a top priority for the game in some ways, but it's a matter of showing respect for the people that made it possible in the first place. There are other kickstarter rewards for specific tiers, and some kickstarter stretch goals, that will happen post-1.0. But this is one of those basic "this needs to be in there for people on day 1 of launch" things.<br />
<br />
=== New "Helping Hands" Quick Start ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Quick Start to the Basics category, called Helping Hands. This really weighs the settings in the players favour, and is intended as an easy to win scenario that just lets you experience things with little stress.<br />
** Badger came up with this.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some changes to the out-of-date planet info representation<br />
** Thanks Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Some changes were made to make sure a player knows which Flagship is hacking (and doesn't try to make that flagship leave the planet)<br />
** Put in a line between the Hacker and the Target to really remind the player visually that the hacker is bound to the target (a great suggestion from Asteroid)<br />
** Add some text to the Hacking Notification reminding the player that the hacking flagship can't leave the system. <br />
*** Thanks to a bug report from kmunoz<br />
<br />
* Improve the hacking resource bar tooltip to show the number of hacking points spent per AI faction and the number of hacking points that will increase the hacking response level<br />
** This is something people have wanted for a while<br />
<br />
* Rather than confusingly opening a multiplayer submenu with little "coming soon" tooltips, the multiplayer button on the main menu now pops up a lengthy text note directly from Chris which explains the backstory and what is coming and a bit about the development process that led us here.<br />
** Big thanks to Craig for suggesting this.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting for showing an entity's world location.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug command to give all your fleets 1K Exp. Good for impatient people.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "level up" message for Planetary Fleets<br />
** Suggested by ArquebusX<br />
<br />
* Fix a nasty bug where the AI killing stacks could cause counterattack strength to increase enormously<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix an off by one error when showing the "What Level a Fleet will level up to next" message in the Fleet tab<br />
<br />
* Extra defensive entities seeded for the AI (like Golems for the Golemite) now patrol their planets in an imposing fashion, instead of just sitting in one spot.<br />
** Only affects new games<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when scrapping a command station<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debug handling in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations for a crash that could apparently happen during one of the tutorials for some people, and also put in extra debugging logic so that if it does happen again we'll know more precisely what the problem is. It should also no longer halt gameplay in general if such an error does happen.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer, related to GameCommands being null.<br />
** This is probably a problem with how GameCommands are being used somewhere, and might rear its head in the form of some desyncs in multiplayer when we get back to reimplementing that. Just one more reason why the desync auto-repair work we have planned is going to be so essential. It's hard to know if a bug like this comes from something a modder was doing, or a mistake on our own part, or what; but either way, the game needs to be resilient to that in both single player and multi player, and that's a good example of why our upcoming hybridized approach to lock-step versus sync-correcting the game (RTS versus action game styles, blended) is going to be well worth the wait.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game will prioritize Combat Fleets over Support Fleets when choosing the hacker. It will only use support fleets when there are no combat fleets on a planet<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Tutorial tweaks ====<br />
* Tutorials no longer display 'homeworld under attack' notifications, which aren't pertinent to any existing tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Autobuild settings no longer apply to tutorials; this is mostly so developers can test tutorials the way a new player would see them<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Threat Interactions ===<br />
* Some minor factions generate Threat that winds up just annoying players, in particular Anti-AI zombies.<br />
** Add an XML field that can be applied to any Faction that says 'any threat provoked by this faction will just go back to sleep once the enemies are gone'<br />
** Current factions with that field:<br />
*** Zombies<br />
*** Devourer<br />
*** Dyson Sphere<br />
*** Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Note that putting this field on the Human faction would make for an entertainingly confused AI, like fighting Guy Pearce from Memento.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The AI's planetary reinforcement cap can now increase as AIP increased (otherwise planets never really got stronger than they are at the beginning of the game except if Threat or subfleets wander through).<br />
** At difficulties <= 5, no change. At 6, the AI gets a 10% power increase per 100 AIP. At 7, 20%, difficulty 8-10 a 30% increase.<br />
<br />
* Cost of hacking Global Command Augmenter if you haven't paid the AIP for the planet reduced from 120 to 60.<br />
<br />
* Cost of Reroll ARS reduced from 80 to 20.<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to control AIP generation from allied factions<br />
** When you have allied factions like the Marauders or Nanocaust, when they kill command stations and so on it generates AIP. This is a balancing mechanism to keep these games from being too easy.<br />
** This can now be disabled mid-game. Disabling this makes the game much much easier, but should help in making some beginner-level quickstarts<br />
<br />
== Version 0.951 Hotfixes ==<br />
(Released October 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix typo in metal popup window<br />
<br />
* Don't let structures generate energy while you are still building them<br />
<br />
* Fix galaxy map possible/incoming wave animation being displayed for links between the AI and another faction than the player, even for unknown worlds and during map generation.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Fix null Reference when holding R on the C-view of a fleet you haven't captured yet. As a side-effect, the units highlighted in the R-view are now the ones on the currently selected planet, not necessarily the one the unit being viewed is on.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* When attacking an AI homeworld, killing all the guard posts is enough to cancel the counterattack, you don't also have to kill the AI King<br />
** Reported by zeusalmight and Nuc_Temeron on Steam<br />
<br />
* Further differentiate the lower AI difficulties by increasing their overconfidence ratio a good amount<br />
** This should make them much more willing to attack and fail.<br />
<br />
* Internally improved some of the documentation on why the sound effects play quite like they do when there's a voice effect and a sound effect playing at near the same time. This should solve some confusion that devs and modders could have.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== OS Compatibility ===<br />
<br />
* We've disabled "graphics jobs" in unity, as that may have been causing some problems on a very few machines (certain older intel cards, mainly not windows boxes).<br />
<br />
* We've updated linux to now default to using Vulkan rather than OpenGLCore.<br />
** Vulkan is only able to be triggered by directly having it be the default, and not by the command line, so this is how we had to do it.<br />
** On linux, you can use the command line -force-glcore to make it use OpenGL again if Vulkan is giving you trouble. But now you have a choice about it.<br />
<br />
* On OSX, we now support Metal, although it still uses OpenGLCore by default (and actually in this case we can't give any definite assurances that Metal will work completely correctly).<br />
** But if you want to give it a shot for whatever reason, you can enable that with force-gfx-metal in the command line to make it use metal instead of the default OpenGLCore. Previously that command line prompt would fail.<br />
<br />
* More info: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html<br />
<br />
=== Audio tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the 'ai wave arrives' taunt wasn't being played for some code paths<br />
* warden and hunter only taunt when they think they will win.<br />
* Correctly play the AI killed your command station taunt (the game will 80% of the time choose a taunt and 20% will choose the old 'planet lost' audio).<br />
* Don't spam the game with 'player command station under attack' notifications <br />
* Don't play more than one 'player ship constructor killed' message per planet per attack. This taunt currently only triggers on the death of a Factory. Previously you could get 3 taunts from the 3 factories on a military command station planet, which seemed a bit excessive especially since you also usually get the taunt for the command station too.<br />
** Possibly these messages should be changed to be for the crippling of a combat factory instead of killing a factory.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the AI taunts so that a specific taunt group can't play more frequently than every 30 seconds, as opposed to every 4.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.950 First Press Build ==<br />
(Released October 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* More work on adding support for numStacksKilled when handling death effects. Should get most everything now<br />
** Including Dark Spire, Metabolization, Zombification, etc...<br />
<br />
* Slightly tweak the Dyson Antagonizer warp in time<br />
<br />
* The Dyson Antagonizer now prefers to spawn on lower mark planets until the AIP is reasonably high<br />
** This behaviour now matches Instigator Bases<br />
<br />
* If you have a fleet in Load Mode but some elements of that fleet are on remote planets, those elements will try to find the Flagship and load themselves, instead of just sitting there<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures and don't want to click more than necessary<br />
<br />
* Non-Combatants like Engineers and Transports no longer cause Guard Posts to release their ships<br />
** So if you have a fleet in Transport mode with all ships transported, flying through AI planets should no longer cause the AI to generate Threat. I believe this was really confusing players, since the game encourages Deep Striking, but Deep Striking was releasing tons of Threat from planets you never attacked<br />
<br />
* Add a quickstart from community member Nuc_Temeron.<br />
** His description:<br />
*** In this scenario there are two level 7 AIs (Thief and Ensnarer) with Shark B enabled, which gives the Hunter fleets a quick surge of strength whenever you lose a base. Defend your territory well! You will have to depend on your allies, the Human Resistance Fighters (Intensity 8), to overcome these greedy swarms! The AIs are also supported by shipments from Astro Trains at Intensity 8 so you can't stay on defense for long.<br />
*** The Macrophage has also infested this zone at Intensity 6 and is hostile to all.<br />
*** The player starts with the Doorkicker Fleet, the Minelayer Battlestation and the Overloader Combat Factory in an 80-star Octopus zone.<br />
<br />
* Some Tutorial tweaks from Puffin<br />
<br />
* Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet<br />
<br />
=== Newly integrated AI taunts ===<br />
* 16 for AI Destroys player Command Station.<br />
* 13 for AI Destroys Player Golem.<br />
* 5 for AI Recaptures Planet.<br />
* 9 for AI Sends Wave.<br />
* 2 for Player Frees Dyson Sphere.<br />
* 10 for Hunter Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 8 for Overlord Transforms.<br />
* 12 for Player Claims Flagship.<br />
* 10 for Player Claims Golem.<br />
* 14 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (High Mark Planet).<br />
* 16 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (Low Mark Planet).<br />
* 5 for Player Destroys Warden Fleet Base.<br />
* 4 for Player Finds AI Overlord.<br />
* 5 for Player Fortress Destroyed.<br />
* 12 for Player Home Command Station Under Attack.<br />
* 7 for Player Stationary Constructor Destroyed.<br />
* 19 for AI Launches Counterattack.<br />
* 14 for Warden Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 1 for Warden Fleet Retreats (unused for now).<br />
** This is a total of 174 voice lines in 18 categories!<br />
** Thanks to Nathan Frisson for his awesome job voicing the AI in these clips; to a variety of players and staff for contributing fun lines for him to say; to Pablo Vega for processing this out so that he sounds wonderfully menacing, as well as splitting the files, removing mouth sounds and breaths and so on that would make it not sound like an AI; to Badger and Puffin for selecting the best takes and organizing them properly so that we could get them into our sound pipeline; and to Badger for actually wiring up the parts of the code that trigger these.<br />
<br />
* This obviously needs additional testing; if you think a line should be playing and it's not then a mantis report + save game would be appreciated!<br />
<br />
* There is now a dedicated audio bus to the AI taunting you, and it has its own gain settings and so on that are a bit louder than the "routine voices" that you hear elsewhere.<br />
** This also now will let us mix the AI voice in however we choose to do so.<br />
** We have a separate voice mixer for the AI voice lines now, and since those are much more complicated in terms of effects we have those coming in as a barely-compressed PCM stereo track. Downsampling, adaptive sampling, and/or mono makes it muddy fast.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* When unloading ships from a Transport, they inherit "time spent on planet" from the Transport so you can't cheese First Few Seconds On Planet bonus effects<br />
** Thanks to Smaug on Steam for reporting and Puffin for testing the fix<br />
<br />
* Remove some outdated text in the Scouting objective tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Telkir for reporting<br />
<br />
* Prevent Astro Train objectives from leaking the location of trains you shouldn't be able to see<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where for non-AI homeworld planets, the AI was spawning extra Guard Posts instead of Dire Guardians<br />
** This should make things much more interesting. Note that dires are still limited to high mark planets<br />
<br />
* Fix an Off by One Error when the game was telling you what level a fleet was<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference when ships would try to join the Praetorian Guard (ie the AI overlord is being attacked)<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the "metal income per planet" display was showing inaccurate information<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where it was much harder than necessary to maneouver flagships in tight spaces. If you wound up clicking on an allied unit the flagship's rebuild metal flow would make it try to assist, which is ... unhelpful.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fleets in Load Mode no longer deploy drones. This enables you to sneak combat factories past high-mark planets without the drones triggering lots of threat<br />
** Requested by overzot on steam<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the visual line for ships claiming other ships was not displaying. Turns out an image that was once white that we were using as part of its material got changed to black at some point, thus making it effectively invisible because of the math of how the shader was run.<br />
** We took this change to go ahead and make the claim lines more attractive in general, and they now have a cyan-greenish look to them, but double-beamed, so that they look kinda like the repair lines but still distinct.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and BadgerBadger for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Added in an OnLoad from savegame fix that should prevent stationary ships from being twitchy and thinking they should pursue you. This bit is untested.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game no longer gives a harmless "Could not do Shutdown for network, the engine network interface was null" message if the game is shutting down prematurely for whatever reason.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor issue where the game was reporting that your target framerate and vysnc count were being set right before they were, rather than right after. If it was failing, you'd have had no idea.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs the system info about itself far earlier in the load process, to help with cases where potentially we're unable to load things for some reason; we'll still get the system info in the debug files from now on.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The game's bootup log now is all-inclusive about all the steps that it takes, inside ArcenDebugLog.txt, so that in the event of a problem we now find out when that happens.<br />
** This makes for a much longer log every time you start up the game, but it's not something that is visible to players unless they go into their debug logs for whatever. And the information from it is definitely useful.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs what version it is on as soon as it can, but NOT before it can (heh), which it was temporarily doing on an internal build when we started logging system data really super early.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoNotShowAndAlsoDoNotSendToUnityLog verbosity level that lets us skip showing certain things in the unity log but still send it to the ArcenDebugLog.txt file. This is a big deal for us in terms of not having our unity editor logs flooded with stuff that we'd want to collect in a bug report but don't need to see every last time.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of selection issues on the galaxy map with fleets not always deselecting properly and instead sometimes being additive, etc.<br />
** It's actually a number of bugs all in one, because basically there was some older per-planet logic that was still being used here (and on planets) from back when cross-planet selection was only kinda-sorta a thing. Now it all works consistently galaxy-wide, or at least should. But if you see any remaining (or new) bugs, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif and Asteroid for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, hitting the escape key would just clear your selection on the current planet. Now it clears the selection on all the planets, as it should.<br />
** We didn't see the "when a fleet traverse a wormhole, it's selection is lost. This issue only occurs if the selection was made in the planet view. If you select the fleet on the galaxy map, it works correctly." issue, but probably what it really was was the above one. Or something fixed in the batch right before that. If it's still something anyone else sees, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with the planet links where their collision capsules were intersecting with the collision boxes of planets and ship icons on the galaxy map.<br />
** This was having the effect of making it so that quite often you couldn't select specific ships except at certain zoom levels, or couldn't click planets or ships reliably in general (zoom level and scale of icons did play a role here also).<br />
** Basically, the solution was to make it so that we first raycast to find ONLY the planets and ships/fleets, if there are any under the mouse cursor. These use one set of physx layers.<br />
** Only if we don't find anything with that first raycast do we then do a second raycast against the new physx layer that the links now use. Now it doesn't matter if the capsules for the links overlap with planets or ship icons (no way to stop that, really), because it will ALWAYS give preference to the other icons first, and only go for the links between planets if the icons fail.<br />
** Thanks to Smaug, I-KP, and Pat for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Energy Usage bar now gives detailed feedback for what is consuming your energy (broken down by fleet) and what planets are generating the most energy<br />
** Requested by darkarchon<br />
<br />
* The Tooltip for Tech Vault objectives now list which ship lines will benefit from hacking the tech vault<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* For the Flagship/GCA objectives, show the count of ship lines before listing the ship lines so I don't have to count them<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* Improvements to the R-Click "Strong Against" view:<br />
** Fixed damage bonuses listed in this view not always matching the mirror "weak against" view.<br />
** Show only units you discovered on the map, leading to a lot less clutter early-game.<br />
** Sort units that are in the same system as the friendly unit you're examining at the beginning of the list, and bold them.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the code and kmunoz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* CPAs always now give 10 minutes warning; given how impactful they are, a long warning period is justified. Previously they were getting less warning time than a regular Wave by default<br />
<br />
* When a Fleet levels up, only say "Some ship types may level up with the fleet" if the fleet actually contains ship lines that will level up<br />
** This was annoying Badger, since most ship lines don't level up anymore but the game made you think they did.<br />
<br />
* New icons for the Tech Menu!<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
* Better alignment for hotkey indicators on standing order buttons and for the icons in the build sidebar<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
=== Changes for lower AI difficulties (<= 5) ===<br />
<br />
* There were some complaints that there wasn't enough differentiation between high and low mark AIs, so we're making some changes to make lower mark games have an easier feel in a number of ways<br />
* Seed extra ARSs and Tech Vaults in the galaxy<br />
* Seed more low-mark planets near the player<br />
* Nerf AI income <br />
* Nerf AI defenses<br />
* Make the Hunter and Warden fleets dumber by allowing them to trickle into a battle piecemeal instead of waiting for reinforcements<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with hazxan on Steam<br />
<br />
== Version 0.900 Custom Fleets With Empty Slots ==<br />
(Released October 11th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Instead of spawning instantly, a Dyson Antagonizer now warps in over time, giving the player a chance to destroy it before the Sphere gets Antagonized.<br />
** Requested by zeus almighty. You'd think he could have just struck it with a lightning bolt or seduced it in the form of a goose...<br />
<br />
=== Tutorial and Tips Work ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Tutorial 99", which is even in its description just a note to be sure and check out the "How to Play" section of the game and other resources.<br />
** Since various people seem to miss those other resources but easily see the tutorials list, having this always be the last tutorial in the list no matter how many other tutorials we add seemed like a good idea.<br />
<br />
* Also got rid of the "Example Tutorial" that was junking up the tutorials screen, since now there are plenty of much more involved examples that are also actually fully-functional tutorials.<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip under the Modding section to explain how to make your own Quick Starts<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units sometimes were waiting out of range instead of closing to firing distance<br />
** Reported by kmunoz and Telcontar on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where flagships could just wander away from where you told them to go<br />
** Reported by kmunoz.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen in the wave notifications.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really rare nullref that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debugging to fix ships not rendering right in some rare circumstances and thus causing a cascade of all things not rendering. Now it should fail gracefully if it fails at all, and give us more information on where it failed, then let you keep playing without making everything disappear.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== "Custom Fleets", Aka The Remedy For Control Groups ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed things up so that fleet flagships can be constructed from the build sidebar, or other self-constructing means. This was never possible before in the engine, turns out.<br />
<br />
* There are 9 possible fleets that you can create at any of your command stations, now. Each one has 7 empty ship lines in it, and they are 3x cloaked, 3x velocity (fast flagship), and 3x workhorse (normal flagship).<br />
** These can be constructed at any point and you can start putting some of your specialized ships into them via ship swapping. The interface makes this clear and suggests it, as well. Basically for people who wanted to pull aside just their melee ships or cloaked raiders or whatever, now you can do that; this lets you control "sub fleets" in effect, by splitting your existing ship lines among more fleets, exchanging empty slots for ship lines you find elsewhere.<br />
** This was something that Chris went back and forth on a lot of times in terms of how to handle control groups that were more specific than 1+ fleets at a time. Ultimately the display and automation benefits of having control groups always stay linked to just 1+ fleets outweighed the benefits of changing that; but in order to allow for players to have smaller custom fleets as they may desire, activated by control group as they may desire, here's this new feature.<br />
** This is, of course, in addition to the hotkeys for quickly selecting units of specific criteria a while ago (cloaked units, melee units, whatever). This is for when you want to make a permanent or semi-permanent sub-grouping of ships for whatever reason (of which there are many valid ones to have).<br />
** Thanks to a lot of people, including Nameless Terror, ulu, Asteroid, and others for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== UI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Standing order buttons now display their key shortcut on the button itself, provided it can be expressed in a single letter (so X and V are displayed, Delete isn't).<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Science bar now has icons for the various techs.<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Wave progress indicator on galaxy map links now animates smoothly instead of once every second. (No associated visual at the moment, Chris didn't find the proposed particle effect good enough.)<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* For all mobile flagships and citadels (not lone flagships, though), there is a new "Flagship Movement Mode" in their fleet status window.<br />
** Your flagships are usually precious enough that you don't want them to roam around in pursuit mode or attack-move mode. HOWEVER, you will often want to set them into those modes in order to make any ships they construct pop out in those modes.<br />
** When this is set to"Stay Put Unless Direct Order", it acts as you might expect and causes the flagship to ignore things like Pursuit mode, but for ships it creates to be put in that mode (and obey it).<br />
** When this is set to "Roam If Instructed" mode, the flagship will pursue when in pursuit mode, attack when in attack-move mode, and so on. This can be useful for Arks and Golems in some cases, or even for things like Combat Factories (on peaceful worlds).<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Refinement of Fleets]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Pre-And-Post_Launch_Polish&diff=37338AI War 2:Pre-And-Post Launch Polish2019-12-11T07:39:48Z<p>Ovalcircle1: It seems spawnt is indeed a real word, but it sounds weird and I’ve never seen it used before.</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
The game is solid at this point and something we're really proud of and that players are having fun with. But inevitably, the more people we have playing it, the more things get brought to our attention to refine and make as smooth and fun as possible. This is basically a period we've set aside for doing that sort of thing, rather than focusing on any major new content drops or other major new features.<br />
<br />
There may still be the odd major new thing, who knows -- sometimes the volunteers or modders wind up creating something and we're certainly not going to turn that down! But by the start of this phase the game was mature and really huge already, so focusing on polish seems like the way to best serve the largest group of people.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.015 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* Make Anti-AI Zombies less likely to get stuck by small groups of cloaked enemy units<br />
** Thanks to Dunno for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Outguard Rework ===<br />
<br />
* Outguard Rework - Reworked to be cooldown based, more customization options in xml, and added in 3 more groups.<br />
** Huge thanks to StarKelp for designing and implementing this whole piece!<br />
<br />
* Gameplay Changes<br />
** Each Outguard now comes with a number of summons.<br />
** These summons scale with the total amount of earnt AIP.<br />
** After use, you must wait a period of time before summoning the same one again.<br />
** In addition, as long as it is under capacity, it will slowly rebuild its used fleets, giving you further uses in the future.<br />
** Base values are as follows;<br />
*** Offensive/Utility: 5 minute cooldown, 15 minute recharge, 10 minute duration<br />
*** Defense/Stationary: 5 minute cooldown, 20 minute recharge, 10 minute duration<br />
*** Donated To Player: 5 minute cooldown, 30 minute recharge, infinite duration<br />
** Outguard units now inherit techs properly.<br />
** Turret spawning mercs are now spawned between your command station and a hostile wormhole on a friendly planet.<br />
** Turret spawning mercs are now spawned near the center of the planet on a hostile planet.<br />
** Turrets will now spawn around each other instead of on each other.<br />
<br />
* Code Changes<br />
** Unit tags will now attempt to search by tag first, and internal name second as a backup.<br />
** A multitude of new xml tags to configure nearly all of the changes.<br />
** (Many older Outguard units retain some older, no longer used values, for compatibility's sake.)<br />
<br />
==== New Outguard ==== <br />
<br />
* Spire Archivist, potent forcefields and beams<br />
<br />
* Democratic Demolitionists, grenade launcher turrets and ships<br />
<br />
* Hydran Hobbyist, an extremely redundant hydra starship with low damage and high disabling capabilities<br />
<br />
== Version 1.014 High AIP Playstyle Viability ==<br />
(Released December 10th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Continued work on voice lines:<br />
** Human Resistance Fighters warping in and out has voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Marauders attacking have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Risk Analyzers firing have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Astro Train depot spawn/train spawn have voice lines, and the Log Message now includes faction colour<br />
** Low on Metal, Metal Exhausted, Low on Power, Brownout (no power) are in<br />
<br />
* Improve readability of unit hovertext by suppressing the Exp section unless the player wants detailed tooltips<br />
** I for one almost never care about this information. Suggested by Dekar on discord<br />
<br />
* Tweak the prompt when exiting the game to make it harder to confuse the Exit to Desktop button with the Quit to Main Screen.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "Delete or Keep Campaign" prompt so it doesn't run off the edge of the button<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Hopefully fix a bug where waves were still spawning after being disabled<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI Reserves would never spawn on difficulty 10<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for reporting<br />
<br />
* Hovering a planet in verbose mode will tell you whether the AI Reserves can respond to a deepstrike there<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference in fleets code<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the having multiple AIs meant that the game wasn't properly sending anti-MDC exo waves<br />
**Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the report<br />
<br />
* Waves sent against minor factions now make an effort to become threat against that minor faction, instead of just going for you after spawning<br />
** I think this has been reported by several people but I don't know who (if you'd like credit for bug reports, putting them on Mantis is the best way to make sure you are attributed)<br />
<br />
* Add the ability to hold down a button to suppress the 'Are you sure?' tech upgrade prompt. Having the prompt on in case of mistakes, but an easily done override is a nice little QoL improvement.<br />
** Suggested by ParadoxSong on mantis.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Beam Cannons could fail to hit fast moving ships.<br />
<br />
* Improve the beginner science/engineering objectives.<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for contributing the text<br />
<br />
* Allow the player and minor factions to target AI defensive structures build from the Zenith Trader<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the bug report<br />
<br />
* If the AI has planned to send a wave against a target, but between the wave planning and the time you are alerted something happens to the target, the AI will silently reroute the wave to a new target<br />
** The practical upshot of this is that when a wave notification appears, it will always be for a reasonable target<br />
** Thanks to zoutzakje<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Altered the AI Mark Level AIP Requirements.<br />
** For Difficulty 7, it was: 100, 220, 340, 470, 580, 700.<br />
** For Difficulty 7, is now: 100, 275, 450, 650, 880, 1,100.<br />
** For Difficulty 8, remove 10 from each level, Difficulty 9 remove 20, and Difficulty 10 remove 30.<br />
** For each Difficulty below 7, add an extra 10 as you go down.<br />
*** Response to some conversations with Peter Ebbesen about high AIP styles in this game in general.<br />
*** Still keeps some values low for lower AIP play, while freeing up the middle and higher ones, for people who prefer and can manage that type of gameplay.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate beam range 15,000 -> 12,000. Triple Beam variant damage 7,500 -> 4,000. Other variant beam damage 7,500 -> 6,000. Reduced shields of all slightly.<br />
<br />
==== Player Defenses ====<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Turret reload time 12s -> 8s.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Focused Gravity Generator durability, and increased the range of the effect from 6,000 to 7,100.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Tractor Array durability.<br />
<br />
* Minefields are no longer one use, and are back to firing 5 times before being destroyed.<br />
** However, this is a cleaner version, where there are no weird effects from how many targets are being hit, how much damage it did, is there a Military Command, Mark level, etc.<br />
** Instead they take 20% of their maximum health in damage with every attack, regardless of anything else.<br />
** Mine effects and damage have been reduced to 25% of old values, but as they detonate 5 times, it's in the end a boost to their maximum potential, and of course no more Mines being wasted on a single unit.<br />
** As a last note, normal Minefields are probably actually viable now!<br />
<br />
* Increased minimum count of normal Turrets in Global Command Augmenters by 1 (so from min 2 to min 3).<br />
** This puts the spread of min and max to the same as most Strikecraft in Fleets (i.e the max is 1.6x the min).<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 4,000, 5,500, 7,000, 8,500<br />
** Now: 2,000, 3,750, 3,750, 4,250<br />
*** The scaling here uses only the Stations damage, and ignores everything else for now, as the cap doesn't increase for these.<br />
*** The damage bonus is pretty much considered "free", as you have already paid some costs for even having a Military Station (no nearby vision, no economy, so on).<br />
*** In-case someone wonders why two costs are the same, that's due to the damage gained for each of those Marks being identical. This doesn't appear in things that take cap into account.<br />
*** That's actually the same reason the Hull Techs cost the same - they're priced for a unit going from MK5 to MK6, then to MK7. Just so happens the benefit is identical for each step.<br />
<br />
* Citadel Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 2,000, 3,000, 4,000<br />
** Now: 1,500, 2,625, 2,625, 3,000<br />
*** Same thing for above, just uses the damage.<br />
<br />
* Deprecated the Tractor Beams Tech. Tractor Arrays are now included in Sentries.<br />
** These are both a bit...too niche. Sentries was just detection and Gravity Generators, Tractors was...well, Tractors. It makes some sense to just combine the two, as they both fill defensive utility roles, and neither were really bought.<br />
<br />
* Sentries Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 500 ,750, 1000, 1250<br />
** Now: 750, 1500, 3250, 3500<br />
*** Note that since Tractor Beams are included in this now, the cost is up from the previous one, but is cheaper than the Tractor Beam Tech was originally anyhow, which just followed the same scaling that Weapon Techs do, so now you get both for cheaper than the old price of Tractors.<br />
*** Changed the scaling to be one based on health and cap, rather than damage and cap, because naturally nothing here actually attacks.<br />
<br />
* Minefield Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 1,500, 2,750, 5,000, 6,750<br />
** Now: 1,000, 1,850, 3,250, 4,500<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Tech Cost changed.<br />
** Was: 3,000, 5,500, 10,000, 13,500<br />
** Now: 2,500, 4,750, 10,500, 11,500<br />
*** Mostly bringing it in line with the same scaling used for Sentries. Was surprisingly close.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station shots per salvo 8 -> 12, now gains 4 extra shots per Mark. Damage increased 50%.<br />
** The extra shots is an experimental thing, and newly added with this Station primarily in mind.<br />
** Like the damage bonus, the Tech Cost for these completely ignores it - the cost is paid already in choosing to use a Military.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon damage and reload time halved.<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen.<br />
** It appears the changes from StarKelp to beams have greatly improved their performance, but there's still some consistency issues. Doing this should, like the Spire Frigates, help to counteract some of the bad shots.<br />
** When it's decided they're in a more reliable place, can then investigate their power.<br />
<br />
* Doubled durability of Battlestations. They now also have guns.<br />
<br />
* Citadels damage consoldiated into fewer shots per salvo, now gain 25% more shots per salvo per Mark.<br />
<br />
==== Economy ====<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvester Techs cost the same amount (4,000) for each Mark.<br />
** The benefit of these is purely linear, so the cost should probably be linear too, else an odd case results in which there just becomes a point it's not worth ever getting, so why have that level?<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations now increase energy by 100k per Mark, instead of 50k.<br />
** 50k is kind of pitiful if you only have a few. 100k should hopefully make it worth the investment, combined with below.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station Techs cost the same amount (4,000) for each Mark.<br />
** Same reasoning as the Metal Harvesters. They gain some durability, but it's so little it's not included.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Stations now increase energy by 50k per Mark, instead of 25k.<br />
** Yep, a buff to Logisticals! Mainly to provide some benefit to upgrading these. Economicals are still the top producer, and are more efficient to upgrade for Energy, out of the two.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Station Techs cost the same amount (3,000) for each Mark.<br />
** Same as above.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.013 Menacing Messages From The Machine ==<br />
(Released December 6th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Make Major Data Center exos a bit less frequent<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* When you have marked intel entries as high priority or low priority, it now shows H1, H2, etc, on the left for however many high priority objectives are at a planet on the galaxy map. For all the low-priority ones, it shows L1, L2, etc.<br />
** Potentially the formatting could use some work in the future, but for now this really seems to get the job done in terms of making the importance of the intel items translate onto the galaxy map and not just on the intel sidebar.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* A new "skip_adding_to_seed_lists" tag has been added to fleet designs, which lets us keep them around for existing savegames but prevent them from showing up in the lobby or in seeding in new galaxies.<br />
** This has now been applied to the "Bomber Fleet" starting fleet for players, as that was supremely overpowered and let some players cheese things on the highest difficulty levels.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong for inspiring this change, and Badger and Puffin for figuring out the actual conundrum here.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The planet Murdoch will still appear in all games as an Easter Egg, but it is no longer your default starting planet<br />
** Badger prefers some variety, and a number of people have been making muttered complaints about this for a while<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we were showing the wrong colour for tech level upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting<br />
<br />
* Exiting and reopening the load game menu will now abort any selecting game to delete state, to prevent accidental deletes.<br />
** Thanks to StarKeep for reporting and donblas for fixing.<br />
<br />
* On battlestation fleet leaders, it had a duplicated-feeling "battlestation" bit of text in the tooltip, which just felt off. That's been removed.<br />
<br />
* Setting the border colors for sub-factions of the AI (warden, hunter, and praetorian guard) now actually works properly.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for figuring out what the problem was. Thanks to Zoreiss, Ryulong, and NB_FlankStrike for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a super-longstanding bug where if you were hovering over an item in a dropdown list and getting a tooltip for it, then closing the dropdown would sometimes leave that item "stuck" on. Now it detects this case and auto-fixes itself before you can really notice it.<br />
** Thanks to lots of people reporting the stuck tooltips that could happen in the factions tab in particular. Including but not limited to Ovalcircle (most recent repro), AnnoyingOrange, ParadoxSong, vinco, and donblas.<br />
<br />
* Showing the debug info for ship types now shows the fleet category on them of what fleet they're in.<br />
<br />
* On load of a savegame, the game now detects player ships that are in the "loose" fleet (which is bad), and tries to correct them.<br />
** At the moment it can only correct ships that should be part of the planetary fleet.<br />
<br />
* Fixed metal harvesters to properly have a fleet membership of planetary so that they can take advantage of this auto-correction.<br />
<br />
* Added a new is_scrapping_by_player_to_turn_unclaimed xml tag that, when turned to true, lets you override something that is non-scrappable and have it be killed.<br />
** At the moment this lets us scrap metal harvesters but keeps them from just disappearing completely, and thus lets us test for them going into the unconnected fleet improperly.<br />
<br />
* When ships are claimed, if they are not a flagship they are now properly added to the planetary command fleet at the local planet.<br />
** This lets things like metal harvesters properly be added back into the planet's fleet (and thus get related upgrades, if any) after being destroyed.<br />
** There's a mild chance that this might have some strange secondary consequences on some ship that SHOULD have been in the "loose player fleet," but I can't think of any specific examples. All those sorts of things are typically flagships with their own fleet and use a different code path. Worst case is that they'll appear as a member of that planet's fleet and get bonuses from it if there are science upgrades at that planet.<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the onload process can't fix whatever ships that are in PlayerLoose for some reason, it now also gives a list of which ships those are.<br />
<br />
* Any ships that did not have fleet_membership="Planetary", but ARE immobile now automatically get set to be a membership of planetary unless they are also a fleet leader (aka things like the AI Overlord Phase 1).<br />
** This makes it so that capturing such buildings puts them into the fleet of the planet and not the "player loose fleet," and also allows for them to be properly re-linked if need be from the onload fixing process.<br />
** This is affecting things like IGCs, MDCs, and so on. It remains to be seen if things of this sort will still properly come back to the planet fleet without a savegame load if they die to remains and then get recaptured (for anything of this sort where that's even a possibility), but fingers crossed.<br />
** Thanks to deo for the report that let us find this one.<br />
<br />
* Also with some of these changes, it's possible that things that were turrets for a specific battlestation or citadel might incorrectly go to the planet fleet after they get shot up and rebuild. Please let us know with a savegame repro if you find that happening.<br />
<br />
=== Audio And Journal Work ===<br />
<br />
* The audio setting "Music: Play Tracks from AI War Classic" now defaults to on instead of off.<br />
** While it's nice to hear the new music from the sequel, there's four and a half hours of music that was gated-off in here that made things repetitive at times without it on.<br />
** A lot of people weren't even aware this setting existed, so thought there was far less music than there was (1 hour rather than 5.5 hours, roughly).<br />
<br />
* Added a new audio setting: "Allow Funny Voice Clips" (defaults to off)<br />
** Humor is subjective, and for some folks can even be a mood-killer in a game like this about galactic stakes. Some of the AI voice taunts err on the possibly-mood-breaking side, and those are disabled by default. If you're in a lighter mood and would like to have those included, feel free to turn this on.<br />
<br />
* When AI taunts play, they now also drop a chat-style message for you to see them.<br />
** If you have voices turned off, then these won't show up at all. If you have just turned the volume way down on the voice channel or AI taunts channel, then you WILL still see these.<br />
** It is colorized and identifies itself as either being from the overlord, hunter, or warden as the case requires.<br />
** We had been planning on this, but thanks to a lot of people for requesting it, including Apthorpe, Asteroid, Thotimx, and Orelius.<br />
<br />
* Added a new JournalMessages object on the world, which lets us store a history of messages from chat, AI taunts, and other sources. It can also be used to store story-specific things in campaigns.<br />
** To save space, it will only save the 50 most recent entries in the journal when you save your game. BUT it first discards normal-priority stuff, then keep-longer stuff if it has to, and then there's always-keep stuff that it will never remove no matter what and so can make it store more than 50. That last category is good for campaign-specific instructions, hopefully of which we won't be having too many things.<br />
** These are temporarily just shown at the bottom of the escape menu, but later will be in their own interface that you can get to via the bottom left corner of the screen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where a variety of AI taunts were imported as ambisonic, and thus threw a harmless warning when we tried to play them back in a standard fashion.<br />
<br />
* 171 new Chief of Staff voice lines (51 categories) have been integrated into the game files, although they're not being triggered yet. <br />
** This is in addition to the 89 lines (14 categories) that were previously in the game from this actress, Alicia Harris.<br />
** A lot of these have to do with alerts for situations relating to the various factions, or other specialized situations that had no voice prompt previously.<br />
<br />
* New voice lines that are actually wired up to trigger:<br />
** Brownouts.<br />
<br />
=== Fleet Naming ===<br />
<br />
* You now select name lists for fleets just like planets (Added by donblas)<br />
* You can add custom name lists of your own as well!<br />
* Create a new folder in GameData\Configuration\FleetNames in the AI War directory<br />
* Add a file with preferrably at least 50 entries, one on each line.<br />
* Edit AIWar2\GameData\Configuration\FleetNameType\CMP_FleetNameTypes.xml and add an entry for your new pack<br />
* Consider opening a bug (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/) with your list if you want to share<br />
<br />
== Version 1.012 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released December 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* If the game fails to load the InstancedRenderer for some reason, it will now tell you which ship it's failing on and what the error was.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units trying to split stacks was causing lots of nasty errors and game slowdown<br />
** Reported by Everyone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where some flagships could have no units in them<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AIs in civil war mode were sending waves against undefended planets<br />
** Thanks to ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed up some of the resource icon alignment and sizing in the top bar of the game.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.011 SuperCat Swats Back ==<br />
(Released December 3rd, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Polish and Gameplay Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of the "List of remote ships you might destroy" list in the Fleets popup<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Allow citadels with engineers to autobuild those engineers<br />
** Requested by deo<br />
<br />
* All new code for group-move thanks to new volunteer Eagleheart. His notes:<br />
** Reworked the speed group / group move system.<br />
** Rather than all units in the group just moving at the speed of the slowest unit in the group, each unit now has its own individual speed limit based on its starting location and the target location of a move command.<br />
** The speed limit will be set to make that unit arrive as close as it can to the arrival time of the unit that will arrive at the destination last. This means that if a unit is far away from the other units in the group while those units are near the destination, the far-away unit will now move at its max speed to catch up.<br />
** Speed groups are now recreated on move orders in addition to when the button is clicked in order to adjust these distance calculations / speeds. This has the added benefit of behavior more closely matching what you would expect. If issuing individual unit or subgroup orders to units of a larger group, they will now be broken out into their own speed group and won't move slowly just because of the previous group limit.<br />
** Similarly, original groups will now move faster if all the slower units of the group have been given a new move command. As an additional side-effect, you can now no longer issue move commands to an overall selection of units that contains units not in a group and have them not have any speed limit enforced. That behavior was a bit confusing.<br />
** For now, units will still not move any slower than the speed of the slowest unit so that they never move imperceptibly slow. This is also necessary at the moment to not make group/pursuit combo mode any worse since ships can only move faster.<br />
** Units will also be removed from their speed group if tractored or stunned so they don't slow the rest of the group down.<br />
** This resolves part of this bug: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=20658<br />
** I hope to implement the second part of group target calculations, so that units move and fight as a group when both group and pursuit mode is enabled. But that will be a bit more tricky.<br />
** Thanks to Eagleheart for coming up with the idea as well as implementing it!<br />
<br />
* Re-order the Intel Menu a bit (including putting Beginner objectives near the top). Note that you can hide/unhide the beginner objectives through the UI. <br />
** Add new Beginner objectives to remind the player to capture their first Flagship, GCA and ARS<br />
*** From some comments on one of the podcasts Chris appeared on (I think the SGJ podcast)<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to disable repairing allied units<br />
** Note that this will need to be revisited for multiplayer for a proper implementation<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty (and others) for requesting<br />
<br />
* Attempt to make crippled flagships more desirable repair targets. I'm not sure if it's enough, so if people continue to see problems then a save game to help me reproduce the issue is needed.<br />
** Thanks to deo for suggesting<br />
<br />
* When choosing an Instigator Base planet, make a good faith effort to choose an explored planet. Instigators will only use an unexplored planet if they can't find a good explored planet.<br />
** Thanks to a discussion on Steam started by KDR_11k<br />
<br />
* When a bunch of drones have been produced for combat, they are reabsorbed into their flagship when all the enemies are dead.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for requesting this originally, and thanks to ArnaudB for pointing out the performance issues that were happening without a feature like this<br />
<br />
* Things such as Coordinators and Augmenters are now considered critical infrastructure for the purposes of the "planet under attack" notifications.<br />
** Thanks to Sigma7 for pointing out.<br />
<br />
* Eyes now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Puffin was reluctant to add things like this in, because it could kind of be a bit crowded already and it was purely a local thing to him, while galaxy icons should be for things with strategic impact.<br />
** Then the realisation occurred that they impact deepstriking choices, and so they now fit strategic impact.<br />
** Things like Mass Drivers will remain as is however, because of how many of these things can be on a single planet potentially (Peacemaker AI), even though they do kind of affect deepstriking.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Zenith Power Generators and Matter Converters now properly die if Perma-Death is enabled for them.<br />
** Thanks to Ryulong and Venger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Stored Hive Golem Wasps now persist across save/reload<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* The player can no longer murder the antagonized dyson sphere<br />
** Reported by Ovalcircle <br />
<br />
* Fix several bugs with potentially capturable units not being shown in the tech menu<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference in debug-mode entity display code <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where killing a reconquest command station might incorrectly charge you AIP<br />
** Thanks to deo for reporting<br />
<br />
* Non-Allied Marauders no longer announce they have conquered planets that you can't see. Allied Marauders are more chatty.<br />
<br />
* You will no longer rebuild remains if they would put you into brownout<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now correctly alert nearby AI ships. They also print a message saying "Alarm Post has been triggered"<br />
** Thanks to GreatYng for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Planet text boxes weren't being appropriately suppressed even when the "suppress text" button was held<br />
** Thanks to Astilious for finding the bug and also for coding the fix!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the Linked Rings generator that was causing the math to essentially infinite-loop until the game ran out of planet names (or similar) and generate *thousands* of planets instead of the desired number.<br />
** Also fixed the "moon" rings from disappearing on larger map sizes.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for finding a repro case.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked Swirl and Bubbles maps to have a bit more spacing between planets.<br />
** Primarily done by placing fewer planets on each orbit/loop/ring (<code>radius * Pi * 2 / desired_space_between_planets</code>). Swirl is always going to be tight, though. More space just makes the map larger, which then gets scaled down due to zooming, resulting in no appreciable difference.<br />
** Swirl's generator rewritten to operate outside-in instead of inside-out. So the central area is less likely to be cramped and the total number of planets ends up being more accurate (the number is always going to be more of a suggestion, than exact, simply due to how each ellipse is generated and how much room is left).<br />
*** Before if you asked for 150 planets and it got up to 149, it would add another ellipse around the outside, adding 20, 30, or 60 more planets. Now it will be adding a ring of only 5 or 7. If there isn't room, but is currently under the desired amount, it will generate a single planet in the exact center.<br />
** Boosted Swirl's connectivity slightly<br />
** Added a random call that changes the Swirl direction<br />
** Added a random call to slightly adjust the number of planets in each ellipse to prevent same-y-ness (and it also helps prevent near-collisions between planets in separate ellipses).<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fix battlestation/planet confirmation dialog showing the wrong science cost (was correctly charged however).<br />
** Thanks to donblas for his first fix.<br />
* Fix multiple locations showing wrong turret counts (showing 5x too many).<br />
** Thanks Volatar for the report<br />
* Fix multi-beam description typo<br />
** Thanks donblas for the report and fix.<br />
<br />
* Fix to the bug where hitting the escape key while in certain windows (like the fleet management window, hack choices, fleet ship line swapping, etc) was not just closing the window, but was also opening the escape menu.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting, for finding the fix, and for fixing it.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Give the higher-difficulty AIs some stronger defenses and a bit more income<br />
<br />
* Increase the strength of the AI anti-marauder and anti-nanocaust waves<br />
** Suggested by zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Tripper now has an engine_gx bonus similar to the Agravic Pod. This replaces the secondary speed related bonus it had.<br />
** Said bonus was meant to replace the original, but apparently isn't now, leading to stupidly high damage values as they multiplied each other.<br />
<br />
* Raid Frigates (and their variants) are now found in higher numbers whenever they appear. Also increased cloaking points (starting and amount gained) by 50%.<br />
** The basic one also shows up in ARS' now, and there are 3 in the Raid Starting Fleet instead of 2.<br />
*** Prompted by an unfavourable mention on Steam, and some discussion with zeusalmighty.<br />
<br />
* Added "Greater Metabolism" and applied it to Bounty Hunters.<br />
** This lets them be the specialist in getting large amounts of metal (max 50% or 50,000) off single targets, while things like Gangsaws and Yellow Jackets are good at swarms.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tanks "Bunker Buster" bonus is applicable for 12 seconds, rather than 5.<br />
** This hopefully lets you shuttle them in a Transport to something, unload, wait for the firing delay to elapse then still get the bonus.<br />
** Preferable to having them ignore the unload firing delay, as that would somewhat bring back the problem the delay was meant to solve (unload, fire, and load at every single Guard Post, avoiding all damage).<br />
** The cost of these for the AI is increased slightly, to offset the fact they're much more likely to get the bonus against you in a wave, though thankfully you can stop these being sent.<br />
** Prompted by a few unfavourable mentions on Steam.<br />
<br />
* Added a Turret Hull Tech.<br />
** Using the old cost of the other Hull Techs (7,500) for now. This lets you get Turrets to MK6 and 7 without needing the local Command Station upgrades, and is a way to just upgrade most of your defenses everywhere, rather than doing it purely through Weapon Techs (some of which don't have Turrets in them).<br />
<br />
* Battlestations/citadels can now be upgraded by spending science, like planetary fleets can.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin and a variety of other players for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Replaced Eyebots damage bonus. They now gain more damage based on how much energy the target uses. The higher the energy consumption, the more damage.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira Ark range 5,600 -> 8,000.<br />
** Apparently the bubble on this thing would get so large it couldn't attack something without pushing it away.<br />
** Thanks to Hyde on Discord for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Halved Marauder Drone Frigate drone count and build rate.<br />
<br />
* AI Grenade Launcher Turret and Fortified Tesla Turret range is now 75% and 100% of normal player Turrets respectively.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for bugging Puffin repeatedly.<br />
<br />
* Stalker durability increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Assault Frigate shield bypass no longer increases with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Added the "Suppressor" Frigate to help shore up Disruptive Tech.<br />
<br />
* Medic Gunboats repair rate now increases with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Increased Ion Disruptor durability by 30%.<br />
<br />
* Strikecraft, Frigates and normal Guardians have had their hull/shield ratios standardised, to a 2/1 ratio. There are occasional exceptions where it's desirable for a unit to be very shield heavy, such as the Vanguards, which are 1/2.<br />
** This is part of a change to fixing the problem with Fusion Bombers basically being really good against everything by skipping most of their durability, rather than mostly structures and things specified to be weak to them.<br />
** There aren't any changes to Bombers yet - anything will be done slow and this is a notable change in some areas. However, as noted above, Assault Frigates (and Muggers by extension) no longer gain improved bypass per Mark, as they would result in having the same problem inspiring this change.<br />
** This'll likely be extended to other areas, such as Dire Guardians and faction units, but for now the majority of the player/AI units are done.<br />
<br />
* Combed through all the Fleet Design stuff, and made some fairly wide changes.<br />
** Added several new Designs, such as the SniperMix and DisruptiveMix.<br />
** Everything *should* be in ARS' now, rather than a few being totally missed for whatever reason.<br />
** The rare/odd units, such as Daggers or Medic Gunboats, are now set to a lower chance in ARS than normal units, because over time a lot of the rare finds were creeping up to be too common in ARS'. A good number of them show up in the new designs, and of course the ones that weren't in ARS at all now show up, so this shouldn't be too bad.<br />
** Altered the general distribution and chances of all the unit types to make each Tech far more equal (Fusion was notably far above the others). This was something Puffin hadn't thought about until recently, and oof, there was a problem. They're still not perfect, but at this point the options available of what to tune are really running low without making some very strange changes.<br />
** Fixed some random values being out of place as well, particularly with the FrigatesWithSupport Strikecraft options.<br />
** Lastly, fixed some units being in strange Designs, such as the new Eyebots being in AntiSmaller, despite their new bonus not being relevant at all versus that type of target.<br />
*** Prompted by some grumbling in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Implemented some code changes from StarKelp that improve performance of the lance weapons be 12-15% in heavy usage based on his tests, and they now hit all targets in a line. This may have some balance implications based on a code review, so please let us know what folks think about this change. It's a small enough change that it's easy to revert or alter if need be, and the performance boost is certainly welcome when it's a big battle of these sorts of ships.<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for investigating and implementing this.<br />
<br />
==== Major Data Center Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Since AIP reduction is now so strong with the Major Data Centers, the AI will now generate Exogalactic Strikeforces against players who own Major Data Centers<br />
** Only happens if there are AIs at difficulty >= 7<br />
** This can be disabled via an in-game Setting, so players who are mid-game can disable it if it's too much of a balance swing.<br />
** Thanks to everyone who is still beating the game at difficulty 10, in particular Astilious<br />
<br />
==== Wormhole Invasion Nerfs ====<br />
* Wormhole invasions get less budget<br />
* You will have more warning before they start sending troops through<br />
* Exogalactic Wormholes can no longer be used to send regular waves<br />
** From a discussion on discord led by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* If the AI would send a wormhole invasion but it has no valid targets, it will continue to retry every few minutes, instead of only checking again in another couple hours.<br />
** This should reduce the number of times when players have giant wormhole invasions "Out of nowhere"<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report and save game to test the fix<br />
<br />
== Version 1.010 Extracting Those Archives ==<br />
(Released November 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Modding Support ===<br />
<br />
* If someone were to mod nanocausting guns onto the Devourer, the nanocausted ships will now wander the galaxy if their current planet has no real threats, instead of always staying on the same planet<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Add a Notification for brownouts<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The Metal Flow Planning popup window now consolidates essentially identical flows. So if there are 3 engineers doing something it will now show as a single line saying '3 engineers are doing ....' instead of 3 separate lines. <br />
** The list is now sorted by planet from "Most metal spent on a planet" to "Least", and gives a nice header line with the total spent per planet before the details<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the excellent suggestion and ongoing critique<br />
<br />
* Allow for the energy consumed screen to show data sorted by 'overall usage' or by Planetary Fleets and Mobile fleets sorted separately<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for a hacking notification now reminds the player that the hack can be cancelled by clicking<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* Hacking information from the top bar when hovered over now explains only hacking structures owned by that AI count.<br />
** Suggested by VengefulWight.<br />
<br />
* Fix a whitespace problem with the planet hovertext<br />
** Reported by alocritani<br />
<br />
* Fixed typo in the Devourer beacon, and one with some Astro Train text.<br />
** Reported by Ryulong and VengefulWight respectively. <br />
<br />
* Improve some tooltips<br />
** Reported by Histidine<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Hopefully this actually fixes the "AI Reserves spawning outside of gravwell" problem<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the base-oriented Warden Fleet wasn't properly constrained to camping at bases<br />
<br />
* Fix a couple hacks that weren't correctly setting the Hacking History<br />
** Thanks to alocritani for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive Extraction hack now only takes 5 minutes at base, rather than 15.<br />
** With higher difficulties getting longer durations, this could lead to...well, on Diff 10, an hour long hack. Yeah.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty and donblas for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Units under construction take bonus damage from being shot. This should alleviate the frustrating case where the AI is distracted trying to kill Under Construction Frigates/Turrets instead of things that are actually shooting back<br />
** Note that this makes long-build-time things from the zenith trader very fragile before they are finished.<br />
** Mentioned by ussdefiant60 on discord<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian damage 1,500 -> 500, reload time 6s -> 4s, swapped outdated damage bonus to match the Fusion Bombers.<br />
** The 6s reload time was allowing these to recloak while still firing. The outdated bonus had weird Mark interactions and was missed.<br />
** Damage in general was a bit high for a unit that bypassed 90% of shields, so a large drop, both for that and to account for the new bonus.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Black Widow Golem Ark hull into shields.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some Guardian costs.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.009 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the last patch where sometimes threat wasn't being correctly counted.<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists and others for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.008 Golems And Arks Come Marching In ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart from Nuc Temeron<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Science icon in the resource bar now shows the history of the Techs you have unlocked. Note that this only applies to techs unlocked after this patch is applied.<br />
** This is mostly to have behariour that matches with the AIP and Hacking histories, but also allows for a new player to look at a save from an experienced player and learn from what they did with science.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug option to increase or decrease the difficulty of all the AIs in the game<br />
** It occurs to me that people sometimes start games and think "Man, this isn't challenging enough" or "I'm getting crushed". Well, now you can adjust the AI difficulty on the fly! Yet another feature for improved sandboxing.<br />
** This code includes a framework to allow other settings on other factions to be changed.<br />
<br />
* Add a tip explaining that unit stats have no inherent mechanical impact, they only matter insofar as their numbers relate to weapons systems<br />
** This caused some confusion<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
* Fix a typo in the metal popup<br />
** Thanks to alocritani for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI Reserves to spawn a bit further from the gravwell edge; they were getting stuck sometimes<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where sometimes minor factions would incorrectly cause AIP increases when killing warp gates. <br />
** Thanks to MasterGeese for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with Global Command Augmenters where they used the Turret type count for how many OtherDefense types they had.<br />
** Normally, a GCA has 1 Turret type, with 25% chance for a second. It then has a 33% chance for a single "OtherDefense" type (things like Minefields). If it has only 1 unit type after this, it gets a second Turret type, so in general they're pretty likely to get 2 Turret types.<br />
** Because of the OtherDefense logic actually using the Turret count, it meant since it always has at least 1 Turret, it would also always have 1 OtherDefense, regardless of the 33% chance.<br />
** This meant the "add a second Turret type so we have at least 2 types total" logic never occurred, making it so most GCAs had just 1 Turret type, when in fact the majority were meant to have 2.<br />
** It seems like this has changed it from around 25% of GCAs having 2 Turret types, to 75% (!) of GCAs having 2 Turret types.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Dark Spire Ward description<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste on discord for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Strikecraft and Turret Coordinators were both increasing Strikecraft and Turret caps once you had both effects.<br />
** If you had only one, it would work completely fine. Once you had two, it would combine the effects, leading to a 1.7x cap multiplier for both, instead of 1.3x.<br />
** This probably leads to some late game nerfs as a consequence.<br />
*** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting an oddity with some MLRS Turrets, leading to this discovery.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer was causing all the ships to rush out of the AI Guard Posts and get eaten<br />
** I hope this also alleviates a bug where some minor factions could still stir up AI units to attack you<br />
<br />
* The Tech Menu now shows ships in ARSs under the set of things that you can upgrade, not just the things in Fleets on the map that you haven't captured yet<br />
** I think a number of people have wanted this but I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* The Tech menu now shows entries for techs that you could unlock from ARSs but don't have in a fleet (either owned or capturable)<br />
** I think this confused some people on Steam who could see something in an ARS but couldn't see the Tech for it<br />
<br />
* Fixed several possible but rare index out of range exceptions that could happen in the vis layer simulation due to cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif, KazeSasso, and Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the ReevaluateUnitOrders code that would sometimes have background-coarse planets not run the logic for their ships at all. Now those ships only use the secondary "SimCycleGroup_Slow" logic if this is on a "tier 1" planet that gets processed every frame.<br />
** The intent of the sim frame processing was to split it out across multiple frames, which works great on those tier 1 planets, but for planets that are already being split across multiple frames it could mean that their ships might not get new orders ever until the player visited the planet. This could greatly nerf engineers, for example.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this!<br />
<br />
* The forcefield protection planning was being run only intermittently on tier 2 planets, which include player forces that are not being monitored right now. Now it ONLY runs those intermittently on tier 3 planets (no players), and runs them continuously otherwise, so as to never run into cases where enemies could get off a few shots at something of a player that was being protected by a forcefield.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this, and Chthon and folks on discord for reporting it.<br />
<br />
* Silenced some harmless errors about trying to render a ship when its RelatedEntity became null during the process, via cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare nullref exception that could happen in the target list planning because of cross-threading stuff.<br />
** Thanks to vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tentatively prevent the Devourer from shooting force field generators (the ones you can build at your planets)<br />
** A number of people have complained about it. I'm not sure if I caught all the cases, so please let me know if there are any issues.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Hacking Difficulty Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* The goal of this is to make hacking easier early and harder late.<br />
<br />
* Increase up the Hacking Points Spent required to trigger new hacking difficulty levels.<br />
** Some larger hacks could move you up 2 levels of difficulty under the wrong circumstances, which was quite excessive <br />
<br />
* Add some new tiers of hacking difficulty to allow us to make late game hacking scarier. The hacking difficulty now goes<br />
** Very Easy<br />
** Easy<br />
** Indifferent (old Moderate)<br />
** Slothful (old Hard)<br />
** Moderate (old Extreme)<br />
** Hard (old Terrifying)<br />
** Extreme (new, and harder)<br />
** Terrifying (new, and harder)<br />
***From a conversation on discord where people wanted higher difficulty tiers<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hacking difficulty levels used were one tier harder than they should have been<br />
** A number of people noted this<br />
<br />
=== Other Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Tractor Arrays in Global Command Augmenters a bit.<br />
<br />
* Added Raiders and Daggers to ARS'.<br />
<br />
* AI Sentry Frigate now decloaks much slower (from 2s for MK1 vs MK1 cloaked units, to 8s), damage 600 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Added an AI Ship Group consisting of the Classic Trio Strikecraft (V-Wing, Fusion Bomber, Concussion Corvette).<br />
<br />
* Added the V-Wing into a few groups.<br />
<br />
* Weaken Turret and Weaken Guard Post hacks are slightly cheaper. Can also be done remotely (i.e without a Flagship present).<br />
** The remote hack is an experiment.<br />
<br />
* The logic for officer fleets (those with Arks and Golems) used to be that they couldn't be more than a certain number of hops away from an AI homeworld. Now it doesn't care how far away they are, except that they must ideally be at least 3 from the AI homeworld and (same as before) 6 from player homeworlds. This makes it a lot more likely for you to actually see officer fleets in the mid-game (or at all, depending on how far you're getting).<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for inspiring this change while doing a podcast with Chris (https://explorminate.co/chris-park-of-arcen-games-podcast-interview/), and Badger for suggesting the specifics.<br />
** Note that Lone Wolf flagships have also had their seeding locations updated in an analagous but not identical fashion<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette damage 340 -> 280, stack damage multiplier 3x - > 2x.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tank augmented weapon range 8,000 -> 10,100, base damage multiplier 2x -> 3x, visual changed to a red laser pulse.<br />
<br />
* Removed Fusion Bombers damage bonus improving with Mark.<br />
** The bonus was only meant for them to automatically target anything with enough shields to be worth bypassing.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette damage 96 -> 130.<br />
<br />
* Kite now uses the same damage as the Concussion Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod damage 100 -> 125.<br />
<br />
==== Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Ripper reload time 3s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate damage 20,000 -> 24,000.<br />
<br />
==== Outguard ====<br />
<br />
* Removed Hacking cost of hiring Outguard.<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased base values of Outguard strength.<br />
<br />
* Those Outguard groups that did not have a Flagship now do.<br />
<br />
* Some Outguard groups can be hired twice rather than once.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate beams max targets 30 -> 10, damage 5,000 -> 7,500, reload time 2s -> 1s.<br />
** Same DPS as before, but more likely to hit enough targets to get all of it. Fire rate offsets the occasional beam that mostly misses.<br />
** This appears to be a somewhat decent improvement.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed 600 -> 1,000, AIP cost 20 -> 15, hull 750,000 -> 1,250,000.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse weapon damage 2,500 -> 4,500.<br />
<br />
* Railcannon weapon damage 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Golems ====<br />
<br />
* Note: AI Golems are currently untouched. There is very little data on them currently - most feedback is about the player ones, which the below concern.<br />
<br />
* AIP cost (for non Lone Wolves) 20 -> 15.<br />
<br />
* Golem Speed 600 -> 1,000, Black Widow Golem speed 1,000 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem main weapon damage 2,000 -> 5,000, Sabot damage 3,000 -> 8,000, total durability 2,500,000 -> 4,000,000.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem reload time 9s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Regenerator Golem shots per salvo 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem shots per salvo 20 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 2,000 -> 3,000, hull 1,000,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem hull 1,800,000 -> 2,800,000, damage 350 -> 800, range of both weapon and tractor beams 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Hive Golem has 300 Yellow Jackets, up from 250.<br />
<br />
==== Arks ====<br />
<br />
* AIP cost 15 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos range 5,600 -> 9,000, Parasite Bolt damage 900 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira forcefield size increased 25%, damage 7,000 -> 15,000, shields 1,250,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Ark One shots per salvo 20 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Gryn now launches Saboteur, Decoy and Scrap drones. Also produces some energy.<br />
<br />
=== Expansion and Mod Loading Work ===<br />
<br />
* XMLLoadingOrder.txt, which lets you specify the loading order of mods that you choose to install, has been updated with some notes on exactly how that's intended to work.<br />
** They read: <br />
*** //note that this is for determining the order that mods are loaded.<br />
*** //any mods not specified in here will be loaded in alphabetical order according to the OS.<br />
*** //the base game content, and then the expansions in numerical order, are ALWAYS loaded first.<br />
*** //to add an mod to your mod order list, just place them each on a single line here.<br />
*** //unless a mod depends on another mod, you don't even need to do that, though. Usually mods don't touch each other.<br />
<br />
* The game now handles mod loading slightly differently, in that it makes a central table of all the mods that it finds in the XmlMods folder and allows for other parts of the game to reference them as-needed later.<br />
** Overall we're not doing TOO much with this yet, but it does make things faster.<br />
** As part of this, the actual xml mod loading order is now handled far better, and doesn't require loading the same file over and over again dozens of times.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoPostInitializationAndSortingLogic method onto ArcenDynamicTable, which allows us to do things like export the list of installed mods.<br />
<br />
* As part of the boot sequence for the game, it now logs which mods are installed, and in what order. This is pretty useful for any debugging that anyone might need to do.<br />
** It also lists all of the expansions that it's aware of, and if they are installed or not.<br />
<br />
* Under the hood since the start of the project, we've had the ability to have expansions that are enabled or disabled in worlds. This has now been fleshed out with our modern requirements for it, though.<br />
<br />
* Some various old parts of the code under the hood were still assuming that we could sometimes reload some of the xml after initial game load (that's never been true in this game, what a mess that always was when we tried it).<br />
** Some also assumed that we would use the old-style Language localization files, which gave false hope for localization to anyone poring through the code and also had a mild waste of time in there.<br />
** All of this has been cleaned out.<br />
<br />
* When there are exceptions in processing in the xml from the base game, an expansion, or a mod, it's now a lot clearer what the file is and some other bits of data about it.<br />
<br />
* In the folder for any expansion, there is an "ExpansionInstallation.txt" file. Removing that will cause the game to act as if the expansion isn't there, which is useful for testing.<br />
** In past games, we called that Version.txt, but this is a less confusing name. <br />
<br />
* Mods are now automatically loaded -- in whatever order -- simply by existing in the XmlMods folder. You can override their order by using the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file as noted above, but they'll automatically load in alpha order without that requirement.<br />
** However, there is also now a new file called "ModIsDisabled.txt" that can be placed in the folder of each mod. If it is there, then the mod will not load EVEN IF it is in the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file. This is basically a way to make really super sure that the example mods don't load without someone wanting them to.<br />
** The fact that mods are auto-loaded makes them a lot easier to install just by dragging and dropping them.<br />
<br />
* Several example mods had really outdated bits that made them unable to load. Those have now been cleaned up a bit.<br />
<br />
* A lot of subtle changes have been made in the code to how expansions and mods are loaded, which gives them more capabilities than before in things like overwriting core constants or adding to them, etc.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.007 The Player/AI Arms Race Intensifies ==<br />
(Released November 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* You can now see the number of empty slots in your fleet in the fleet management screen, and you can swap other things IN to the empty slot of a fleet, rather than having to go to the other location and swap them OUT only.<br />
** This is the more natural workflow in a lot of cases, and now both workflows are possible at any rate.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== AI Reserves: Anti-Deepstriking ====<br />
<br />
* Add new AI Reserves, basically an HRF for the AI against deepstriking players. The response strength is greater at higher difficulties and the further away from one of your planets you are. Will not trigger unless you are more than 3 hops from your planets.<br />
** Once arrived, AI Reserves are limited to that planet and will hang out for a few minutes, then vanish again.<br />
** It shouldn't trigger easily on Flagships in transport mode, only once you deploy the units.<br />
*** As with all new code, there will probably be a need for some QoL improvements once people have figured out what's fun/frustrating about them<br />
<br />
* Added a new "auto_add_one_of_faction_if_missing_on_save_load" xml tag on factions that allows us to automatically add the AI Reserve into existing quick starts if they weren't already there.<br />
** We definitely don't want to be in a position for constantly recreating the quick starts every time we add a new under-the-hood-always-there faction.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Tweak the logic that calculates the hacking cost increase for a number of hacking types to make the increase less aggressive<br />
** This had already been done for the science extraction hacking, but I hadn't also updated the generic cost increase function because we weren't using it until very recently<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The following hacks no longer get more expensive (in hacking points) based on repeated attempts:<br />
** Neutral Planet Science Extraction<br />
** Grant Technology<br />
** Convert Tech Vault to Science<br />
** Grant Ship Line<br />
** Convert ARS to Science<br />
** Double Ship Line Cap<br />
** At this point, most of the things that increase with repeat usages are things that are hackinng something that you can also get the benefit of via capturing, or covert science extraction, etc.<br />
** It's useful to have some things increase with repeat usages, but for a lot of the main goodies that are on the map that you can ONLY get via hacking, having them increase that way felt punitive.<br />
<br />
* Most of the very common hacks have had their durations reduced from 120-300 seconds to more like 30-120 seconds instead.<br />
** Given things happen once-per-second as hacking progresses, this was a bit on the punishing side for sure.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of players on Steam for pointing out how much harder this had made things, not in a fun way.<br />
<br />
* There is now an increase in hacking times required based on the highest difficulty of any AI faction in the game you're playing (living or dead).<br />
** This only applies to hacks that take more than 5 seconds to begin with.<br />
** On difficulty 5 and down, it's the same as it always has been (with the new nerfs in placing making it far less than it used to be, actually).<br />
** On diff 6, it's now multiplied by 1.25x.<br />
** Diff 7 is 1.5x (so an ARS hack is 45 seconds here instead of the new 30, still better than the older 120 of the last two builds).<br />
** Diff 8 is 2x, diff 9 is 3x, diff 10 is 4x.<br />
** This should help put in some nice gradation for people who feel like hacking should be on the harder side with people on other difficulties not getting absolutely stomped by them.<br />
** Thanks to various discussions on the steam forums making it clear that different people expected/wanted a different amount of hassle out of these, and this led to us feeling like it needed to vary by AI difficulty. A harder-to-hack higher-difficulty AI is super thematically appropriate, anyway.<br />
<br />
==== Economy ====<br />
<br />
* Cheapened the metal cost of Transport Flagships to around 27% of previous.<br />
** An unwelcome penalty for constructing empty Flagships for unit groups, as well as repairing them.<br />
<br />
* 25% increase in Engineer repair rate.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of rare exceptions that could happen based on copying orders from one entity to another after it had already been returned to the pool or otherwise been made invalid. Was something that could happen during stack splits, evidently.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting; it seems he has ridiculously bad luck in getting more exceptions than anyone.<br />
<br />
* The save and load menus now have better sized and spaced text, so long names no longer overlap the stats about them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of cross-threading exceptions that could be hit if the waves composition changed while you were iterating over them.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The "Danger! CurrentFrameNumber changed" error message has been removed from the game and won't bother people anymore.<br />
** This was exceedingly rare for most people, but common for a few specific people. The best theory on this is that these people had exceedingly fast CPU cores, because on inspection of this code it was actually able to detect an "improper" state change that was really just "unlikely but fine." All of the improper cases would have been a lot more common to see, and seen across many clients. In this case it seems to have been a race condition between "work's done" and "make sure the frame didn't change," which were happening on a nanosecond scale.<br />
** The worst case with someone having this change in an actual problematic way would be a multiplayer desync of some varying severity, but given that we already have network desync repair planned as a core key feature this isn't exactly a big deal. Originally this was also code that was defensively checking to see about single-player cross-threading issues, but those are all long-since fixed (2+ years ago).<br />
** Basically this was a case of some false positive popping up in interrupting you for no good reason if your processor was fast enough.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exceptionally rare error that could happen with multiple ships pulling the same order out of the pool if your machine is just really too excellent at multithreading for some reason. Now instead of complaining at you, it just fixes itself. Originally the complain-at-you code was in case we made some code mistakes that would cause this, but the rarity of this error pretty much shows we don't have any such errors. But man, cross-threading stuff on a few particular machines really is popping out some interesting cases.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where astro train depots weren't tracking the number of trains that arrived between save/reload. Whoops.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* When you load a quick start, it now sets the first player name to be whatever your local profile's name is, and then the ones after that (if any) become "Player 2," "Player 3," etc.<br />
** This solves a lot of the underlying names still being "Puffin" or various people who contributed quick starts.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.006 Freedom Of Fleet Line Combination ==<br />
(Released November 7th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== The Ability To Have Duplicate Ship Lines In One Fleet ===<br />
<br />
* The game now allows for duplicate ship lines in a single fleet. This was something that people REALLY wanted, and we get why, but it was a tricky technical thing. Our first idea for this today wasn't valid for multiplayer it turned out, but thankfully we came up with something that is.<br />
** This also includes the ability for initial fleet designs to add more than one copy of a fleet line to itself, whereas before it would just combine them. So you could have two bomber lines in a single fleet design now, for example.<br />
** Note that this will NOT work for drones in fleets at the moment. Those can't be swapped around by players anyway, and there didn't seem to be any reason to make this part work. It could be extended later if we really need to, but it seemed pointless.<br />
** Only the player mobile fleets have this new ability. Command stations, NPC fleets, battlestations/citadels, and so forth all still combine their fleet lines if the type matches. Those can't be swapped around, and it makes much more sense for them to work like they always have.<br />
** It's possible there may be some bugs with this (mainly of the sort of something not building when it's a secondary ship line in a fleet, or things not being able to swap properly when there are duplicate lines), but if so please do report those to us and bear with us.<br />
** Thanks to nas1m, Asteroid, and many others for requesting this -- rather forcefully at times in the case of some steam reviewers or folks on discord, but we got the message. This was tricky as heck to implement, and may cause a few bugs for a bit, but it's clear how important this is to people.<br />
<br />
* When hacking for dark spire ships, it now always puts each new ship you get in its own ship line rather than ever adding to an existing line.<br />
** Additionally, it checks to make sure you have enough empty slots before it will work.<br />
<br />
* Dyson hacks seem to have been assuming that you'll increase the ship cap on existing lines, so for now we've left that working as it always has.<br />
<br />
* ARSes now CAN grant duplicate ship lines to a fleet, and instead of merging they now stay as separate ship lines.<br />
<br />
* Doing a hack to double the cap of a ship line SHOULD work properly in cases where you have multiple ship lines inside a single fleet, only doubling one of them and then allowing the other one to be doubled later if you want.<br />
** This needs testing, though, as it was kind of complicated.<br />
<br />
==== New Bomber Starting Fleet ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Bomber Fleet as a starting option, which includes two different identical lines of Fusion Bombers, plus also Parasitic Bombers. This helps to highlight the fact that you can have very-thematic fleets for anyone just perusing these things from the lobby, so that hopefully this is a teaching moment.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the tooltip showing the number of ships an ARS granted didn't factor in Mark Level increases. Note it still doesn't factor in any additional multipliers like ICGs<br />
<br />
* Fixed some more Frigates being seeded as Strike options in ARS.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an ArgumentOutOfRangeException that could happen in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations P2 because of a race condition. It's harmless and no longer puts up an error message in your face.<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a pretty nasty memory leak that could happen around planned metal flows, particularly given that they were being used from a single pool but for two different threading areas.<br />
** This was something that would affect things even when the metal flows UI wasn't open, because of race conditions between two threads. It was also causing some errors and other race conditions in general, all of which are now fixed.<br />
** It was a very unusual sort of situation with a very special-case data structure (the time-based pool), and that was just... really an edge case thing. It also was not really causing errors or a memory leak in all cases, even though it was in some. Why it would be particularly severe for the one player who reported it, while nobody else had crashes related to this, is mildly baffling. But that's the nature of race conditions for you, honestly.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of memory leaks and other things that caused excessive memory churn while actively viewing the metal flows interface. These were things that would be given back to the player and thus not truly a memory leak in general; it was leaking on the heap and then coming back later.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The last of the memory-leaky-type things related to metal flows is now fixed. This one was introduced possibly as far back as September 2018 by Chris, or possibly more recently when changing another bit of code to make a copy per list instead of having a reference in another list. At any rate, we were creating a metric ton of extra metal flow data that was then getting churned out of the memory pool by the garbage collector, and generally wasting some CPU time and efficiency. Now things properly get returned to the pool.<br />
** On the metal flows screen, there is still some climbing RAM that you see for a while, but then it stabilizes and eventually drops. That seems to be mostly related to temporarily cached sprite quads being used by TextMeshPro, and with such large amounts of text that changes frequently that's probably unavoidable. It's not a true memory leak anymore, and doesn't spike more than something like 60mb at peak in our current tests, where it was hundreds of mb in the same tests previously.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the Threat tooltip to say that the Visible Threat reported is only from Watched planets<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx of reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a couple of changes that may fix custom flagships being placed at a higher mark level than their base should be if the planet they are on is a higher mark.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an invisible nullref exception that could happen on quitting the game program in some rare circumstances.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Show Fleet Ship Line Numbers" settings option to the Debug section that is for helping us root out problems with multiple ship lines of the same type within a fleet.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen inside LazyLoadSquadWrapper when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare indexing exception that could happen inside GetEntityByID when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Phenomphear for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Reduced firepower and health of Instigator and Warden Fleet Bases.<br />
** People liked it when shown the values before the release, but it seems to have caused issues elsewhere. For deepstriking defense, probably need to be another method.<br />
** Also lowered the range a tad of both and removed the forcefield from the Warden Fleet Base.<br />
<br />
* Upped Parasite damage slightly, doubled the zombification damage amount.<br />
** So now they zombify in 5 shots, and 1 at MK7.<br />
<br />
* Bumped up starting metal storage to the maximum value.<br />
<br />
* Home Human Settlements gain 260 metal per mark, up from 120.<br />
<br />
* Reduced metal cost of Plasma Turrets and Beam Cannons by half.<br />
<br />
* Human Home Command metal income 900 - > 2,200, increase by 400 per mark.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations now benefit from the Citadel Technology.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Citadel Tech from 3,000/4,500/6,000 to 2,000/3,000/4,000.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Sentries Tech from 1000/1500/2000/2500 to 500/750/1000/1250.<br />
<br />
* Watchman Frigate energy usage 7,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.005 Answering Your Top Requests ==<br />
(Released November 5th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some code to dump the current state of the Hunter Fleets in threat popup display window. Only enabled with the Debug_Tooltip setting. <br />
** Intended for debugging/internal testing.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Line And Count Revisions ===<br />
<br />
* There are now a maximum of 5 ship lines (other than drones, things like hydra heads, and the fleet leaders) that any fleet can have. Previously it was 6 for some fleets, 7 for others.<br />
** This applies to the ARS and other ships.<br />
** This is defined in central xml so that we can tune it if need be.<br />
<br />
* ALL strike fleets are now considered to have 5x slots for strikecraft and frigates, and their "empty slots" are no longer a "physical thing" (people reporting oddness on how these custom fleets worked will know what this means).<br />
** This lets you take any fleet that you capture and swap stuff around so that it has a full 5 slots of stuff on it, which is really handy.<br />
** This also makes the interface for empty slots a lot more condensed and easy to read when you're swapping something else to them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an oversight that was causing players to be able to build more than a single copy of each of the empty flagships in the game.<br />
** This in turn caused various issues, such as trying to move empty slots between two Stealth Alpha fleets would not work, etc. That was never supposed to let you have more than one in the first place! Go figure.<br />
<br />
==== ARS Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* You are no longer allowed to hack an ARS for a ship line if that fleet already has the ship line<br />
** If there is any way to merge ship lines then people will want full ability to merge/split ship lines, which is not something Chris wants to allow. So for consistency's sake, this is being removed.<br />
** Fleet Capacity Extenders have been added as a replacement for this mechanic, and those are both clearer as well as being WAY more powerful.<br />
<br />
* When you find an ARS, it now works much differently. Rather than having just ONE ship type available at it, it has five. It will always have 4 strikecraft and 1 frigate type.<br />
** When you click the "Grant Ship Line" hack on the ARS, it no longer just does the hack -- instead, a new popout sidebar window appears, asking you which of the lines you wish to have granted to the fleet in question.<br />
** This shows you the fleet in question, what ships it has, and reds out any options that are invalid for that particular fleet because they happen to be invalid.<br />
** This gives you a TON more control over how you grow your fleets via ARS, without you having to do a bunch of expenditures of hacking points on re-rolls of the ARS.<br />
** This also gives us the framework for having hacks in general that let you make a sub-choice in them after choosing to do the hack itself, which is a powerful new ability for hacks. We'll be using this again super soon for upgrading specific ship line ship caps in a fleet via a new structure.<br />
** The fact that there are five options now is reflected in the text and will affect existing savegames.<br />
<br />
* If you DO choose to re-roll an ARS, it will give you five fresh ships. They may or may not have overlap with the prior batch or with your current fleet's contents.<br />
<br />
==== The Arrival Of Fleet Capacity Extenders ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new structure that you can find throughout the galaxy in new savegames: Fleet Capacity Extender<br />
** Hacking this structure doubles the ship cap for one of the fleetship types belonging to the Fleet that did the hacking (your choice as to which type).<br />
** This DOES show up in existing quick starts, but won't seed in savegames you're actively playing.<br />
** This new structure essentially is a far-more-powerful version of the secondary function that people used to like on ARSes (that we removed in this build).<br />
*** The fact that it was confusing to merge ship lines via the ARS was a good reason to remove that function, but this new structure is more powerful and doesn't have the strangeness of being a sometimes-thing. It always works like it works.<br />
** About the same number of these are seeded as ARSes, except not one on the adjacent planet to your start. The richness of what you can conquer is now a lot higher.<br />
<br />
* To prevent a lot of exploits that people would have started doing immediately, the upgrades from Fleet Capacity Extenders can no longer be applied to the same ship line in the same fleet more than once.<br />
<br />
==== Custom Fleet Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* The custom fleets, which previously had a max cap of 7, now only have a max cap of 5 like everything else.<br />
** It's possible that these fleets, or other fleets that got upgrades to 6 from an ARS, are over the new cap in old savegames. That won't harm anything.<br />
<br />
* Rather than having 9 explicit custom fleets (three regular, three cloaked, three speedy), the game now has a single type of custom fleet (regular) that you can build 9 of.<br />
** This makes the menu way less overwhelming down in the custom fleets section, and it doesn't give any special fleet leaders (speedy or cloaked) that are better than what you find out in the galaxy.<br />
<br />
=== EXP Revamp And Spending Science To Upgrade Specific Planets ===<br />
<br />
* The non-turret defenses, and command stations in general, no longer get mark levels based on EXP going up on their fleets.<br />
<br />
* Mobile player offensive fleets are still able to gain EXP like they always have been, and in the main it is still very useless for most of them (since only their flagships upgrade, for the most part; very useful for things with a powerful flagship but otherwise not much).<br />
** Note that this will get more useful in the future as we start adding in perks for these types of fleets that will affect other ships as you level up. That's just a TBD item.<br />
** The goal with these is still to have a bit of that flair of "hero stuff" that people have been asking for since the early days of AI War 1. We're proceeding somewhat cautiously with it, keeping it more on the useless end of the spectrum rather than something that takes over the game.<br />
<br />
* All the other kind of fleets are no longer able to gain EXP at all. This means battlestations and command stations, mainly, for you.<br />
** This was, by contrast, super duper useful to the point of being an absurd exploit. But it also wasn't a fun thing, requiring grinding rather than actual strategy of any sort.<br />
** This was one of the really big ways that people could force a victory far faster than they should have been able to, and really mess up the economy of things.<br />
** Existing savegames will lose all their unspent EXP, but WILL keep their existing added levels from this source, simply because a ton of games would have economies in the toilet without these levels remaining for now. But those savegames with leveled-up command stations are definitely overpowered in the player's favor, now.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting and inspiring this and many of the other related changes here.<br />
<br />
* When calculating how many fleets there are on a planet for EXP penalty purposes, it now ONLY counts mobile player fleets. It DOES include support fleets, but not battlestations/citadels, and not command stations.<br />
** So this is something that makes it so that you're penalized a lot less rapidly for having many fleets on a planet.<br />
** For the "max mark level" calculation that it does, it's now only based on the mark level of the mobile offensive fleets, too.<br />
<br />
* A new button has been added in place of the fleet EXP stuff for planetary (command station) type fleets. It's hovertext reads:<br />
** Planetary fleets can be upgraded (all ships within them) by directly spending science. This can be a very science-cost-effective way to get more metal income or energy production.<br />
** Changing the type of command station you're using, or losing the planet and recapturing it, won't cause you to lose your upgrades on this planet.<br />
<br />
* By clicking the above button, you can spend science in a whole new way an upgrade ALL the ships within the planetary fleet by one mark level (regardless of whether normally those would have been upgraded by EXP -- this isn't EXP, and you're paying science for it).<br />
** The cost is pretty cheap for the first added mark, at only 1000 science. The next is 3k, then 6k, then on to the absurd with 9k, 18k, and 36k. So you CAN upgrade one of your planets like crazy if you really want to, but it's prohibitively expensive to do so.<br />
** All of this gives you a lot more flexibility and allows you to do spot-upgrades for purposes of getting a better economy of having better defenses at a location.<br />
** This is pretty important for high level play with the removal of the EXP for command stations (and battlestations/citadels, although they aren't gaining the science unlock ability).<br />
** We may need to tweak the costs of these at some point to think about if we want the first upgrade to be even cheaper, to really tempt you. It's hard to say if this is tempting enough, as we want you to have strong defenses but be weighing that against the more generalized science expenditures that benefit offense AND defense. This of course also benefits your economy in a major way, so we may have to revisit how much more metal generators and the command stations generate as their mark levels go up if we reduce the science costs here. We shall see. For now, conservative steps. Anyone who isn't already a fairly advanced player may not even notice the difference here.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Teams ===<br />
<br />
* It is now possible for minor factions to have alliances amongst themselves to take down the Player and AI. In the game lobby, several factions can now join "Team Red", "Team Green" or "Team Blue". All factions on the same Team are allied against everyone else in the game.<br />
** Supported minor factions: Marauders, Nanocaust, Devourer, Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart to "Fun With Factions" demonstrating this mechanic<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Toggling objective importance is now done with a Right Click. Left click keeps the old behaviour (usually centering you on the planet in question)<br />
** This was suggested by a few people on discord I think? I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* Fix a surprising bug where the AI wasn't correctly generating threat when attacked by a player if the respective strength ratios were within certain ranges.<br />
** This might have some actual balance implications<br />
*** Thanks to zeus for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Death effect damage is no longer a strangely high number. Actually, this change allows for a lot more diversification in how effective units are at applying it. The start of this is done, with more tuning to follow.<br />
** This is most likely a somewhat large shift in the balance of it, which feels a tad necessary? Quite a few stories of mass hordes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference when calculating energy usage<br />
** Reported by Edmaniac<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the experimental pursuit mode implementation that could cause issues in "normal" mode where your units would not shoot at things properly.<br />
** Reported by a number of people<br />
<br />
* Structures that are under construction shouldn't generate AIP anymore if killed<br />
** reported by Chthon and zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Fix some confusion about killing reconquest command stations if you haven't paid the AIP price for that planet yet. It now correctly charges you AIP and lets you scout. The tooltip for such a reconquest command station tells you what's happening<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Destablilize Exogalactice Wormhole hack wasn't correctly killing the wormhole<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for the bug report<br />
<br />
* On particularly large maps (> 120 planets), increase the places that Officer Fleets are allowed to spawn<br />
<br />
* Fix an exciting bug where AOE shots with > 10 potential targets were doing 10% damage to each potential target. So if there were 20 targets each taking 10% damage, that's 200% of allowed damage done. 50 targets would be 500% damage.<br />
** This was particularly obvious for high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AOE shots were doing too much damage when killing lots of stacked units<br />
** Again obvious with high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Reported by Puffin<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with the tooltip on Alarm Posts; it had the ratios reversed<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow marauders to build outposts if the significantly outnumber the enemy; this prevents a single cloaked ship from stymying them.<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make the Cloaking hovertext a bit more obvious with colour<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the tooltip for uncaptured flagships where it was showing the Strength if all its units were at level 1, instead of reflecting your actual mark levels<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the bug report<br />
<br />
* In the science screen, the Ship Types You Could Capture now show the mark level for that ship line<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Your ships will now target down Eyes automatically in pursuit mode, once you've disabled their invulnerability<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The Objective tooltip for an ARS now shows the ship line in the colour of the mark level you have for it<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for reporting<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for a notification of a wave against one of your planets now tells you your defensive strength. <br />
** Suggested by NB_FlankStrike<br />
<br />
* Improve the tooltip for hacks that increase the cost for the next hack of that type to improve clarity<br />
** I think someone on steam got confused about this<br />
<br />
* Maybe improve the spacing for the X map. No promises.<br />
** Thanks to gigastar and cthonic_one for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Slight tweaks to the AIP hovertext to improve readability<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where several minor-faction specific hacks were not showing the hacking points used correctly in the hacking log<br />
** Thanks to Interloper for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of the distribution node hovertext<br />
** Suggested by Cyber-Kun<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for an upgrade in the Science Menu now tells you approximately how much Strength increase there would be to your fleets<br />
** Thanks to donblas and Phenomphear for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference related to the Spire Objective<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip to explain about automatically building engineers and factories and so on.<br />
** From a comment by donblas<br />
<br />
* Hovering over a save game in the Load menu will tell you how many times that save game has been loaded. So if you're stuck at a particularly hard spot then you'll get some feedback as to how hard it is<br />
<br />
* The intel tab entries for the hacks for the tech vault and the ARS and the FCE are now three different colors, so that you can tell them apart at a glance if you have a huge galaxy completely explored. This way you can see at a glance what is what, now that it's sorting (rightfully so) by how easy or hard it is to get to each one.<br />
<br />
* Any sidebar build items that would be uncategorized are now invisible instead. These are assumed to be things that exist for legacy purposes but that we don't want to build.<br />
** It sometimes also winds up including random stuff like gravitic battlestations or whatnot that could be constructed but should not have been.<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, it no longer shows the ship cap for command stations (that was spurious, anyway).<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, for flagships that you can construct it now shows the total of that kind that you have in the galaxy as well as what the galaxy count is for them.<br />
<br />
==== Instigator Polish ====<br />
<br />
* Instigators now have a permanent notification (like wave notifications)<br />
** Note this reuses the Wormhole Invasion icon for the notification for the moment<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Instigators no longer show a Cumulative Effect, just a description of what the effect does and how many times it has fired.<br />
** The units for Cumulative Effect weren't meaningful to anyone who wasn't a developer, and it just confused people<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the ship-spawning instigator base had a bunch of decimal points in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for bringing this to my attention<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Zombification no longer works on Dyson ships, Dire Guardians and such things. It was kindof OP.<br />
** The old behaviour can be enabled as a Galaxy Setting<br />
<br />
* Different AI Difficulties now increase the mark level at different AIP amounts. As a result of this, different AIs can be at different mark levels.<br />
** Suggested by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* The Hunter and Warden fleets now get decloaking ships, in the hopes of preventing permanent scouting by cloaked units<br />
** From a discussion on discord I think?<br />
<br />
* If your fleet outnumbers the AI "enough" on a planet then all the Guard Posts will release their ships so the ships can run away<br />
<br />
* Allow units spawned from Guard Posts to run away more quickly from an overwhelming attack<br />
<br />
* Buffed Astro Train durability and damage a bit, albedo 0.3 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Increased self construction rate of Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon reload time 4s -> 6s, damage 1,810 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Gave Forcefield Frigates the same priority as Forcefield Generators.<br />
** So the AI will ignore it in general if there are unprotected targets to go after.<br />
** Might cause a weird thing with Siphoners, but see how it goes?<br />
<br />
* Increased Hull Tech cost by 2,500.<br />
<br />
* Increased durability of things like Raid Engines, Alarm Posts, Data Centers, and Co Processors.<br />
<br />
* Major Data Center only reduces AIP by 60, and increases by 90 on death.<br />
<br />
* Increased chance of wormhole Tachyon Sentinels.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now has Pulsar Tanks in place of MLRS Corvettes, and Vanguards in place of Grenade Launcher Corvettes. Also removed 1 of the starting Siege Frigates.<br />
** This Fleet had an issue in that it had crazy synergy, with it being mostly Splash and Heavy Tech, plus not really fitting the Doorkicker name much. Both Pulsars and Vanguards have Doorkicker like abilities, and since these units can properly attack single targets, 1 Siege Frigate can be safely removed without impacting the Fleet too much, as these were apparently their own issue.<br />
<br />
* AIP Floor is now increased by 35% of AIP gain, up from 20%.<br />
<br />
* Metabolizing Gangsaw engine_gx 14 -> 13.<br />
<br />
* Reduced minimum and maximum unit type counts in the more thematic Fleets (i.e the ones with mass Fusion Bombers).<br />
** Incredibly synergistic inherently, with far more units in general too.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the count of some of the "flat upgrade" units, like Heavy and Parasitic Fusion Bombers.<br />
<br />
* Buffed the damage output of most of the normal Guard Posts as well as a few of the Dire.<br />
<br />
==== Economy And Engineering ====<br />
<br />
* Drastically reduced the assist construction and repair rate of Engineers.<br />
** It was possible for these to eventually end up assisting Factories to absurd amounts - actually a good bit more than the Factory.<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvesters income 80 -> 60, amount gained per mark 40 -> 30.<br />
** This might not be enough, come to think of it. Player unit costs never increase unlike Classic, which means late game costs to rebuild after a fleetwipe are pretty low compared to here, leading to the below "slapping" event.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station income gained per mark 400 -> 150.<br />
** While the player does have less income, the rate at which it can be spent is also much lower, so it's likely the player would start to noticeably lose a battle and retreat a good while before depleting their reserves.<br />
** Also, while we don't want people to be sitting around for ages waiting after a fleetwipe for it to replenish, it was also rather silly that you could do things like, to quote someone "Bleed out the praetorian guard by slapping it with wads of cash".<br />
<br />
* Reduced energy cost of Turrets a bit.<br />
<br />
==== Eyes ====<br />
<br />
* Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships<br />
** This makes Eyes pretty useless against minor factions. Unclear what (if anything) should be done about that.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid.<br />
<br />
* Eyes are now MK7.<br />
** Mostly important for the Ion Eye.<br />
<br />
* Tripled range of Plasma Eye.<br />
** Is now planet wide range, like the Ion Eye. No more sneaking about out of range.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Eye damage tripled, max targets hit before spreading damage reduced to a third.<br />
** Means it can focus a lot more on single targets than before.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now works on albedo of 0.4.<br />
** Yes, this means it can target most Frigates now. Eyes check Fleets, and not units, so this is possible. Also lets it target a few more Strikecraft.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now has splash damage on each shot. Radius of 1,000, hitting 5 targets.<br />
** Done this way instead of just increasing shot count, as that many shots could be a bit too bright and painful to look at. Simple enough to change.<br />
<br />
* Both Eyes now have tachyon systems.<br />
<br />
==== Flagships ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly reduced Transport Flagship priority.<br />
** AI should focus more on killing the actual combat units around rather than chasing an unarmed ship and getting shot to bits during it.<br />
** Combined with the far weaker Engineers reducing the fleet replenishment rate to more...reasonable speeds, hopefully this prevents a lot of attritioning?<br />
<br />
* Reduced durability of Transport Flagships.<br />
** Mostly applicable during deepstrikes.<br />
<br />
* Differentiated the Transport Flagship types:<br />
** Normal ones are the same (including the above).<br />
** Cloaked ones are now a good bit slower.<br />
** Fast ones now have less health.<br />
<br />
* Ships unloaded from a transport now have a delay before firing.<br />
** Hopefully should make the "Unload units, snipe target, load again, run away" strategy less OP. Further changes may be necessary.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Hacks now define if they work based on the closest hacker or not, using a new tag use_closest_hacker_for_check.<br />
** Before it was inferring if it should do that, which was potentially going to be confusing down the line.<br />
<br />
* A variety of bugfixes and improvements to the internal hacking logic.<br />
<br />
* Flagships now move much more slowly when hacking<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting that you could just run away from the nanocaust hack response<br />
<br />
* Increased Cost of Intra-Galactic-Coordinator Hack (120 if owe AIP, 60 without).<br />
<br />
* More hacks now have an escalating cost to them (1.2x what it was last time).<br />
<br />
* Shortened and cheapened the Ion Cannon and Mass Driver hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased cost of Grant Ship Line and Grant Tech hacks.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully increased the difficulty of the Super Terminal.<br />
** This seriously'll need more feedback. There are so many variables in it that whatever test games Puffin has is probably missing something else.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Convert ARS to Science.<br />
<br />
* Some minor duration changes to a few.<br />
<br />
* Added Exo-Waves on completion to a few hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased response strength of quite a few AI hacks.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.003 Sortable Objectives ==<br />
(Released October 28th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where ARS hacks were allowing you to get 7 ship lines instead of 6<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix an OBOB where we were reporting inconsistent stack numbers in the hover entity info text<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* New installations of the game now save 3 autosaves instead of 1<br />
** Suggested by yupyip<br />
<br />
* Flagships in Hold Fire Mode no longer deploy drones<br />
** SUggested by CWW256 on discord<br />
<br />
* Clicking on an Objective will now tag it with an Importance. Clicking once makes an Objective High importance, putting it at the top of the displayed list. Clicking again will make it Low importance, putting that objective at the bottom. Clicking a third time makes it Normal.<br />
** Suggested by Greeniguana<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to hoverEntity and fix a possible null reference<br />
** Thanks to kerzain for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tutorial 4 now mentions you can hover on the AIP amount on the top bar for some more information.<br />
** Thanks to Potkeny in Discord for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology hack now mentions not increasing the cost of unlocking it with Science.<br />
<br />
* Hack Intra-Galactic Coordinator and Hack Global Command Augmenter now note exactly what the reduced cost is if you have paid the AIP cost for that planet.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Science resource bit at the top now has the same blue colour for all the amounts, rather than being a light green, so it's consistent with every other mention.<br />
<br />
* Metal section of the top bar now has actual proper colouring.<br />
<br />
* Cost to fully extract all the science from a planet is now in green, like most hacks are.<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Sabotage Hack now mentions it doesn't cause an AIP increase for destroying structures which would normally do so.<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved the Experience tooltip information to have the correct logic and perhaps read a little bit better.<br />
<br />
* The "Ally to AI" setting description now explicitly says that all player-allied factions are also allied.<br />
** From a discussion with Astra on discord<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Hacking resource hovertext on the top bar now has the hacking point amounts in green rather than a red.<br />
<br />
* AIP hovertext on the top bar has some minor colour additions, as well as an explanation of what the AIP Floor actually is, as well as stating reduction is never wasted.<br />
** Thanks to Nuc_Temeron, Halfshell cat, right01, amblingalong and Pexpy in Steam Discussion for prompting this.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines now show on the galaxy map.<br />
** Suggested by gigastar in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Hunter Waves option is renamed to Threat Waves, and description updated to be clearer.<br />
** They never actually joined the Hunter Fleet immediately - they were threat, so it was rather in error.<br />
<br />
* Added some information about how threat is generated, and it eventually joining the Hunter Fleet to the info displayed by hovering over the top bar area.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Decoy Drone damage halved, tripled build time, health reduced 25%.<br />
** Puffin was finding these were a bit absurd in extended practice. More testing required.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology Hack cost increased to 20.<br />
<br />
* The Engineer and Factory changes from previous, as those were missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.002 ARSes, Instigators, and Tech Vaults, Oh My ==<br />
(Released October 25th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* ALL of these changes are thanks to Badger and Puffin. Chris was working on the world's longest AMA for some reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/dmhlu6/ama_i_am_chris_park_founder_of_arcen_games_and/<br />
<br />
* Add some new Quick Starts by community member zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Experimental Targeting Change<br />
** Under Galaxy Settings -> Units there's now a setting to enable/disable a new pursuit mode.<br />
** This mode makes ships prefer to kill all nearby units before moving on; hopefully it will make Drones less apt to go aggro guard posts everywhere.<br />
*** Looking for player feedback on this<br />
*** This also will affect the way AI ships will fight, so I'm loooking for feedback on that aspect as well<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagships now cost very little energy.<br />
** This was originally so they would be hurt more by Nucleophilic units, but you can usually just micro them around and that's...not really fun or interesting. So just greatly reduce it, since you were otherwise being penalised for using the custom ones.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and seemingly others for bringing up.<br />
<br />
* The Human Resistance Fighters now help less often in battles, so it feels more rare/special when they do. They also can't go back to a planet for at least 15 minutes after their last time there.<br />
** I forget who asked for this (sorry). They used to attack about 60% of the time, now it's more like 30%<br />
<br />
* Macrophages now need more metal to do things on Hostile To Players Only mode. Also decrease base telium income when that telium has harvesters on the map; harvesting should be the primary form of income<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Crippled flagships now have a 5 minute delay until they are eligible to be repaired. This is to make crippling a Bigger Deal in battles where you might have engineers<br />
** Note that taking the crippled flagship out of combat (ie to another planet where there are no enemies) will reset the repair delay<br />
*** From a discussion about flagships on discord<br />
<br />
* Engineers and Combat Engineers have less health, and are also much higher target priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories are much higher priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a few problems with quickstarts<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Dark Spire could give errors after it has killed all the players and AIs in the game.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for bringing about the triumph of the Dark Spire<br />
<br />
* Fix a strange null reference exception in some findHumanKing code in the game lobby<br />
** Spotted by Nuc_Temeron on stream<br />
<br />
* Fixed Mini Cluster Bombs being swappable. Woops.<br />
** Thanks to Mayheim on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Launching with OpenGL instead of DirectX11 can be problematic for some people, so on GOG the default launch is now DirectX11. On Steam it still shows you the option of which you want, but starts with DirectX11 as the default.<br />
** Thanks to Ronin Storm and Pheespud for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Replace a few mentions of FRD with Pursuit Mode in the Settings<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Auto-Kite setting<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx<br />
<br />
* The button in the lower left that just said "Coming Soon" now says "Chat Menu. Coming Soon" so it's clear what it is.<br />
* Include mention of the shortcut for toggling between the galaxy map/planet screen in the tooltip for the planet name in the top left.<br />
* Improve the tooltip for the clock to mention the buttons that control game speed<br />
* Add more colours to the incoming wave tooltip<br />
** From a remarkably uncivil and poorly written screed on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the explanation for the Praetorian Guard<br />
** Thanks to unicurse for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window available when you click on the Threat icon in the resource bar now shows threat in traditional Strength units (with the raw value divided by 1K).<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx and Puffin for pointing this out<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window now shows the total visible hunter/warden strength in the galaxy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Nanocaust ships were winding up being counted as Threat incorrectly<br />
<br />
* Improve the colouring in the science tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* Some tutorial improvements. Includes a bunch of colour.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for pointing it out.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the AIP history display when claiming structures<br />
<br />
* If a wave is against a minor faction that owns a planet, the game now tries harder to show the faction name in the tooltip. <br />
* If a wave is not against a player planet, the icon will turn grey more consistently.<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Pretty neat idea.<br />
** Thanks to Jaridan on Steam for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Add some colour to the counterattack notification hovertext to improve readability.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hacking description for local watch hacks<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Show better colours for zombies in tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip, Apthorpe and darkarchon<br />
<br />
=== ARS Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'cant hack due to too many ship lines' message for the ARS hack to explicitly call out which fleet you are using, and mention that the hack is done by the closest flagship<br />
** Some people on Steam were finding this confusing.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where custom fleets couldn't hack ARS for more ship lines<br />
** Thanks to zeus and Chromatism for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Lone Wolf Fleets could hack ARS<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where things like Hydra Heads were being counted as ship lines for the purposes of an ARS hack<br />
** This bug has popped up in so many places, fixing it is like, well, killing the heads on a hydra<br />
*** Thanks to yupyip for reporting this one<br />
<br />
* ARS Reroll hacks cost less Hacking Points but have a stronger response<br />
<br />
* ARS to Science conversion hack now grants more science<br />
<br />
* ARSs are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to ARS hacks, given that every other changes constitute a buff to the player<br />
<br />
=== Instigator Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to Instigators; decrease their power and make the bases spawn less frequently<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Instigator Bases weren't correctly tracking their cumulative effect<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting I look at this<br />
<br />
* Fix some punctuation issues with Instigator Base descriptions<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases now report how many times the effect has triggered<br />
<br />
=== Tech Vault Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The "Turn Tech Vault into Science" hack now grants a bit more science<br />
<br />
* Add a "Reroll Tech granted by Tech Vault" hack<br />
<br />
* Hacking a Tech Vault for science no longer increases the cost of the next upgrade<br />
** It seems like everyone wants this<br />
<br />
* Tech Vaults are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to Tech Vault hacks, given that every other changes constitute a strong buff to the player<br />
<br />
== Version 1.001 Official Game Launch! ==<br />
(Released October 21st, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some Tips with a brief explanation of what the AI sub-fleets (Warden, hunter etc) do.<br />
<br />
* The first time you click the Single Player menu (after this build), it gives you a modal prompt asking you if you'd like to do the tutorials first, or if you'd like to just play. This should help prevent people from missing that there are tutorials.<br />
** We did NOT add the tutorials to the Single Player menu, however, as that just gets very cluttered and makes the whole menu harder to read.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The Tutorials button on the right side of the main menu is now colorized and flashes very subtly every half second between two almost-identical colors. This should be much more noticeable without being obnoxious, and without cluttering up something like the single-player menu.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and Badger for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the hovertext for a command station in the sidebar reported the wrong number of turrets<br />
** Thanks to Wurfell on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The AIP history for games begun from Quick Starts will now show AIP change from you as from your username, not "Puffin"<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that can happen in EmitOnAOEParticles.<br />
** It will now log more info, and just do so silently, and not actually impede play like it previously did.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Super Terminal now mentions the Exo-Galactic Strikes.<br />
** Thanks to kocur4d for prompting.<br />
<br />
* Don't let the AI launch mini-waves after exploration/watching hacks<br />
** It was confusing. Thanks to Puffin for report.<br />
<br />
* The Metal launch option on OSX has been removed, as that was still launching under OpenGL anyway.<br />
<br />
* Non-Steam builds no longer try to log into Steam and complain in the log if they can't, and nor do they show "Not logged into Steam" on the main menu.<br />
** This gave the impression that the Steam client was required, when it definitely in no way is. These behaviors do still exist for Steam copies of the game, but just so that you can tell if you're not logged in right for whatever reason.<br />
<br />
* Improve the Instigator Base description to explicitly state that the base effect ends with the death of the base<br />
** Suggested by Apthorpe and Echthelon<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The Dark Spire Ward now instantly blows up any DS ships that enter the planet. The Ward's description has been updated to match<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the report.<br />
<br />
* Doubled range of Devourer Golem.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for bringing up the Devourer.<br />
<br />
* Doubled drone count of the basic Combat Factory.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Repair units now repair shields at the same rate as hull.<br />
** Outdated change from when personal shields cost metal to repair.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked cost of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
==== Golems and Arks ====<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem damage 1,000 -> 2,000, Sabot damage 2,000 -> 3,000, range 8000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem damage 700 -> 1,250, Sabot damage 1,500 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem speed 600 -> 1,000, damage 200 -> 350.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem damage 100,000 -> 200,000.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 450 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 50 -> 80, can only target mobile units, can't target high mass targets, costs 50 AIP to capture instead of 20, and is a Lone Wolf like the Hive Golem.<br />
** AI Botnet Golem has a lower chance to spawn on AI planets as well.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
** Note existing ones will still have their Fleet, and will kind of look a bit odd in the Intel Tab saying it's a Lone Wolf, even though it's still got a Fleet with it. New ones will be normal.<br />
<br />
* Standardised AI Golems to be 3x the durability and damage of a player Golem.<br />
** They were pretty close as is, apparently.<br />
** Also gave them proper costs now.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira damage 3,000 -> 7,000, now takes half damage for 5 seconds after using a wormhole, does bonus damage to shields and also has vampirism, similar to the Siphoner unit. <br />
<br />
* Thanatos single shot weapon damage 6,000 -> 12,000, Parasite Bolt damage 600 -> 900.<br />
<br />
* Ark One damage 350 -> 1050.<br />
<br />
* Orchid damage 7,000 -> 14,000, repair rate increased 50%, repair range doubled.<br />
<br />
* Gryn damage 6,000 -> 16,000, increased fleet unit construction rate 33%.<br />
<br />
* Ark AIP cost reduced from 20 to 15.<br />
<br />
* Reduced AI counterattack bonus for crippling some player Fleet centerpieces.<br />
<br />
==== Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Mass Combat Engineer starting Support Fleet design now uses the Rejuvenator Combat Factory instead.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting replacing this, as it was really unappealing.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.954 Hacking Log! ==<br />
(Released October 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* When you click on the Hacking icon in the resource bar you get a history of all the hacking points you've spent.<br />
** Nota Bene: This will only apply to hacks you do after you install this patch<br />
<br />
* Tweak the helping hands tooltip to mention leaving the marauders their own planets<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* For the hover planet info, explicitly call out if taking the planet would cause AIP, and show the AIP in Red to make it stand out. Also more explicitly call out minor faction owners<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the game was showing incorrect colours for enemy strength on galaxy screen if the planet was owned by a minor faction.<br />
** Thanks to Genrazian for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having partially claimed or hold-firing flagships could prevent building things<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bunch of typos all over the place<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for hunting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the tooltip for GCAs was lying to you about how many turrets they granted<br />
** Reported by RockyBst, Democracy and probably others<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Helping Hands quickstart to make sure the Nanocaust is your ally<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the fix and Genrazian for the impetus<br />
<br />
== Version 0.953 Hotfixes For Certain Linux + Hardware Combinations ==<br />
(Released October 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* On Vulkan on Linux in certain circumstances, there was some form of shader error in the Amplify Bloom rendering. That issue should now be fixed.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Just like windows has launch options allowing you to select between OpenGL and DirectX11, Linux now lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Vulkan - Experimental, and macOS lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Metal - Experimental.<br />
** This needs testing, and is a Steam client update only, not actually a change to the game.<br />
<br />
* Completely rebuilt the asset bundles and their projects to be based on Unity 2019.1.7, same as the main project has been for some time, and to make sure that they explicitly have Vulkan and Metal shader support built into themselves now that the game supports those new platforms.<br />
** This should hopefully solve the issues that we were still seeing with a few people using Vulkan on Linux, as well as potentially some "shader not compiled for this platform" issues with OpenGL on Linux for certain ships that were compiled against an older version of Unity.<br />
** This MAY also fix the Gyrn refractive glass not appearing in-game on any platform, although we haven't test this yet. It may be that we need to write our own shader for that, or update the one from Circonia Studios that we were using previously. Most likely it was an issue that was coming across because of different unity versions, though, we're not sure.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tutorial fix from Craig.<br />
<br />
* Enable strength icons with borders on the galaxy map. (I find it makes a big difference in readability when they overlap links of a similar color.)<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for implementing!<br />
<br />
* Updated a whole bunch of our shaders that were not going to properly work with Metal or Vulkan simply because they were being compiled with exclusive platforms set to directx11 and opengl.<br />
** These should now work, and include things like the icons for ships, and many of the ships themselves. But it hasn't been tested yet. It certainly won't hurt anything, anyhow.<br />
<br />
* The Ciconia Studio glass shaders that we were using for the Gyrn bubble have been updated to their latest version, which should provide better compatibility and hopefully have those actually show up again in-game.<br />
** Why those were showing up in the prep projects but not the actual game is something of a mystery. If this doesn't work, we'll just have to create our own refractive shader with rim lighting, but we'd rather not waste the time if this simple update works. Please do let us know!<br />
<br />
* Fixed one backer name in the credits (Kevin A Munoz), which did not translate over well into pure basic-ascii characters when we ran it through a handy processor (https://pteo.paranoiaworks.mobi/diacriticsremover/) to get rid of unicode characters not supported by our fonts.<br />
** If other folks find that their name got a bit mangled, please do let us know! There were SO many people's names that it was impossible to go through them all manually.<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the shaders for the Gyrn glass bits so that it uses a refractive shader based on Amplify Shader Editor and thus should actually render in these newer unity builds.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.952 A Little Help From Scary Friends ==<br />
(Released October 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Create a tip that points to the instructions in the wiki for how to create your own planet name list. I figure people will want to do this at some point.<br />
<br />
* Spelling/grammar and clarification improvements to some tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Craig and Badger for pointing things out.<br />
<br />
* We FINALLY have all of the kickstarter and backerkit backers thanked in the credits for the game. It's... um... a lot.<br />
<br />
* The credits screen has been split into three scrolling panels, rather than one giant one that scrolls everything. It's also now in two columns rather than three.<br />
** The left column is the same as it was before.<br />
** The center column now has just the top kickstarter backers, aka those at Mark III or higher levels of backing. That's the first 784 people, all backing at $44 or more.<br />
** The right column now has the Mark II and down backers, which is the remaining 2,264 people out of the 3,048 total backers.<br />
** These splits make it so that the scrollbars are actually sensitive enough that you can find what you're looking for. AND we alphabetized the backer names in each category, so that if you know your category you can find your name now.<br />
** Yeah this isn't really a top priority for the game in some ways, but it's a matter of showing respect for the people that made it possible in the first place. There are other kickstarter rewards for specific tiers, and some kickstarter stretch goals, that will happen post-1.0. But this is one of those basic "this needs to be in there for people on day 1 of launch" things.<br />
<br />
=== New "Helping Hands" Quick Start ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Quick Start to the Basics category, called Helping Hands. This really weighs the settings in the players favour, and is intended as an easy to win scenario that just lets you experience things with little stress.<br />
** Badger came up with this.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some changes to the out-of-date planet info representation<br />
** Thanks Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Some changes were made to make sure a player knows which Flagship is hacking (and doesn't try to make that flagship leave the planet)<br />
** Put in a line between the Hacker and the Target to really remind the player visually that the hacker is bound to the target (a great suggestion from Asteroid)<br />
** Add some text to the Hacking Notification reminding the player that the hacking flagship can't leave the system. <br />
*** Thanks to a bug report from kmunoz<br />
<br />
* Improve the hacking resource bar tooltip to show the number of hacking points spent per AI faction and the number of hacking points that will increase the hacking response level<br />
** This is something people have wanted for a while<br />
<br />
* Rather than confusingly opening a multiplayer submenu with little "coming soon" tooltips, the multiplayer button on the main menu now pops up a lengthy text note directly from Chris which explains the backstory and what is coming and a bit about the development process that led us here.<br />
** Big thanks to Craig for suggesting this.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting for showing an entity's world location.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug command to give all your fleets 1K Exp. Good for impatient people.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "level up" message for Planetary Fleets<br />
** Suggested by ArquebusX<br />
<br />
* Fix a nasty bug where the AI killing stacks could cause counterattack strength to increase enormously<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix an off by one error when showing the "What Level a Fleet will level up to next" message in the Fleet tab<br />
<br />
* Extra defensive entities seeded for the AI (like Golems for the Golemite) now patrol their planets in an imposing fashion, instead of just sitting in one spot.<br />
** Only affects new games<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when scrapping a command station<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debug handling in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations for a crash that could apparently happen during one of the tutorials for some people, and also put in extra debugging logic so that if it does happen again we'll know more precisely what the problem is. It should also no longer halt gameplay in general if such an error does happen.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer, related to GameCommands being null.<br />
** This is probably a problem with how GameCommands are being used somewhere, and might rear its head in the form of some desyncs in multiplayer when we get back to reimplementing that. Just one more reason why the desync auto-repair work we have planned is going to be so essential. It's hard to know if a bug like this comes from something a modder was doing, or a mistake on our own part, or what; but either way, the game needs to be resilient to that in both single player and multi player, and that's a good example of why our upcoming hybridized approach to lock-step versus sync-correcting the game (RTS versus action game styles, blended) is going to be well worth the wait.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game will prioritize Combat Fleets over Support Fleets when choosing the hacker. It will only use support fleets when there are no combat fleets on a planet<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Tutorial tweaks ====<br />
* Tutorials no longer display 'homeworld under attack' notifications, which aren't pertinent to any existing tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Autobuild settings no longer apply to tutorials; this is mostly so developers can test tutorials the way a new player would see them<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Threat Interactions ===<br />
* Some minor factions generate Threat that winds up just annoying players, in particular Anti-AI zombies.<br />
** Add an XML field that can be applied to any Faction that says 'any threat provoked by this faction will just go back to sleep once the enemies are gone'<br />
** Current factions with that field:<br />
*** Zombies<br />
*** Devourer<br />
*** Dyson Sphere<br />
*** Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Note that putting this field on the Human faction would make for an entertainingly confused AI, like fighting Guy Pearce from Memento.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The AI's planetary reinforcement cap can now increase as AIP increased (otherwise planets never really got stronger than they are at the beginning of the game except if Threat or subfleets wander through).<br />
** At difficulties <= 5, no change. At 6, the AI gets a 10% power increase per 100 AIP. At 7, 20%, difficulty 8-10 a 30% increase.<br />
<br />
* Cost of hacking Global Command Augmenter if you haven't paid the AIP for the planet reduced from 120 to 60.<br />
<br />
* Cost of Reroll ARS reduced from 80 to 20.<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to control AIP generation from allied factions<br />
** When you have allied factions like the Marauders or Nanocaust, when they kill command stations and so on it generates AIP. This is a balancing mechanism to keep these games from being too easy.<br />
** This can now be disabled mid-game. Disabling this makes the game much much easier, but should help in making some beginner-level quickstarts<br />
<br />
== Version 0.951 Hotfixes ==<br />
(Released October 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix typo in metal popup window<br />
<br />
* Don't let structures generate energy while you are still building them<br />
<br />
* Fix galaxy map possible/incoming wave animation being displayed for links between the AI and another faction than the player, even for unknown worlds and during map generation.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Fix null Reference when holding R on the C-view of a fleet you haven't captured yet. As a side-effect, the units highlighted in the R-view are now the ones on the currently selected planet, not necessarily the one the unit being viewed is on.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* When attacking an AI homeworld, killing all the guard posts is enough to cancel the counterattack, you don't also have to kill the AI King<br />
** Reported by zeusalmight and Nuc_Temeron on Steam<br />
<br />
* Further differentiate the lower AI difficulties by increasing their overconfidence ratio a good amount<br />
** This should make them much more willing to attack and fail.<br />
<br />
* Internally improved some of the documentation on why the sound effects play quite like they do when there's a voice effect and a sound effect playing at near the same time. This should solve some confusion that devs and modders could have.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== OS Compatibility ===<br />
<br />
* We've disabled "graphics jobs" in unity, as that may have been causing some problems on a very few machines (certain older intel cards, mainly not windows boxes).<br />
<br />
* We've updated linux to now default to using Vulkan rather than OpenGLCore.<br />
** Vulkan is only able to be triggered by directly having it be the default, and not by the command line, so this is how we had to do it.<br />
** On linux, you can use the command line -force-glcore to make it use OpenGL again if Vulkan is giving you trouble. But now you have a choice about it.<br />
<br />
* On OSX, we now support Metal, although it still uses OpenGLCore by default (and actually in this case we can't give any definite assurances that Metal will work completely correctly).<br />
** But if you want to give it a shot for whatever reason, you can enable that with force-gfx-metal in the command line to make it use metal instead of the default OpenGLCore. Previously that command line prompt would fail.<br />
<br />
* More info: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html<br />
<br />
=== Audio tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the 'ai wave arrives' taunt wasn't being played for some code paths<br />
* warden and hunter only taunt when they think they will win.<br />
* Correctly play the AI killed your command station taunt (the game will 80% of the time choose a taunt and 20% will choose the old 'planet lost' audio).<br />
* Don't spam the game with 'player command station under attack' notifications <br />
* Don't play more than one 'player ship constructor killed' message per planet per attack. This taunt currently only triggers on the death of a Factory. Previously you could get 3 taunts from the 3 factories on a military command station planet, which seemed a bit excessive especially since you also usually get the taunt for the command station too.<br />
** Possibly these messages should be changed to be for the crippling of a combat factory instead of killing a factory.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the AI taunts so that a specific taunt group can't play more frequently than every 30 seconds, as opposed to every 4.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.950 First Press Build ==<br />
(Released October 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* More work on adding support for numStacksKilled when handling death effects. Should get most everything now<br />
** Including Dark Spire, Metabolization, Zombification, etc...<br />
<br />
* Slightly tweak the Dyson Antagonizer warp in time<br />
<br />
* The Dyson Antagonizer now prefers to spawn on lower mark planets until the AIP is reasonably high<br />
** This behaviour now matches Instigator Bases<br />
<br />
* If you have a fleet in Load Mode but some elements of that fleet are on remote planets, those elements will try to find the Flagship and load themselves, instead of just sitting there<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures and don't want to click more than necessary<br />
<br />
* Non-Combatants like Engineers and Transports no longer cause Guard Posts to release their ships<br />
** So if you have a fleet in Transport mode with all ships transported, flying through AI planets should no longer cause the AI to generate Threat. I believe this was really confusing players, since the game encourages Deep Striking, but Deep Striking was releasing tons of Threat from planets you never attacked<br />
<br />
* Add a quickstart from community member Nuc_Temeron.<br />
** His description:<br />
*** In this scenario there are two level 7 AIs (Thief and Ensnarer) with Shark B enabled, which gives the Hunter fleets a quick surge of strength whenever you lose a base. Defend your territory well! You will have to depend on your allies, the Human Resistance Fighters (Intensity 8), to overcome these greedy swarms! The AIs are also supported by shipments from Astro Trains at Intensity 8 so you can't stay on defense for long.<br />
*** The Macrophage has also infested this zone at Intensity 6 and is hostile to all.<br />
*** The player starts with the Doorkicker Fleet, the Minelayer Battlestation and the Overloader Combat Factory in an 80-star Octopus zone.<br />
<br />
* Some Tutorial tweaks from Puffin<br />
<br />
* Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet<br />
<br />
=== Newly integrated AI taunts ===<br />
* 16 for AI Destroys player Command Station.<br />
* 13 for AI Destroys Player Golem.<br />
* 5 for AI Recaptures Planet.<br />
* 9 for AI Sends Wave.<br />
* 2 for Player Frees Dyson Sphere.<br />
* 10 for Hunter Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 8 for Overlord Transforms.<br />
* 12 for Player Claims Flagship.<br />
* 10 for Player Claims Golem.<br />
* 14 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (High Mark Planet).<br />
* 16 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (Low Mark Planet).<br />
* 5 for Player Destroys Warden Fleet Base.<br />
* 4 for Player Finds AI Overlord.<br />
* 5 for Player Fortress Destroyed.<br />
* 12 for Player Home Command Station Under Attack.<br />
* 7 for Player Stationary Constructor Destroyed.<br />
* 19 for AI Launches Counterattack.<br />
* 14 for Warden Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 1 for Warden Fleet Retreats (unused for now).<br />
** This is a total of 174 voice lines in 18 categories!<br />
** Thanks to Nathan Frisson for his awesome job voicing the AI in these clips; to a variety of players and staff for contributing fun lines for him to say; to Pablo Vega for processing this out so that he sounds wonderfully menacing, as well as splitting the files, removing mouth sounds and breaths and so on that would make it not sound like an AI; to Badger and Puffin for selecting the best takes and organizing them properly so that we could get them into our sound pipeline; and to Badger for actually wiring up the parts of the code that trigger these.<br />
<br />
* This obviously needs additional testing; if you think a line should be playing and it's not then a mantis report + save game would be appreciated!<br />
<br />
* There is now a dedicated audio bus to the AI taunting you, and it has its own gain settings and so on that are a bit louder than the "routine voices" that you hear elsewhere.<br />
** This also now will let us mix the AI voice in however we choose to do so.<br />
** We have a separate voice mixer for the AI voice lines now, and since those are much more complicated in terms of effects we have those coming in as a barely-compressed PCM stereo track. Downsampling, adaptive sampling, and/or mono makes it muddy fast.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* When unloading ships from a Transport, they inherit "time spent on planet" from the Transport so you can't cheese First Few Seconds On Planet bonus effects<br />
** Thanks to Smaug on Steam for reporting and Puffin for testing the fix<br />
<br />
* Remove some outdated text in the Scouting objective tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Telkir for reporting<br />
<br />
* Prevent Astro Train objectives from leaking the location of trains you shouldn't be able to see<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where for non-AI homeworld planets, the AI was spawning extra Guard Posts instead of Dire Guardians<br />
** This should make things much more interesting. Note that dires are still limited to high mark planets<br />
<br />
* Fix an Off by One Error when the game was telling you what level a fleet was<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference when ships would try to join the Praetorian Guard (ie the AI overlord is being attacked)<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the "metal income per planet" display was showing inaccurate information<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where it was much harder than necessary to maneouver flagships in tight spaces. If you wound up clicking on an allied unit the flagship's rebuild metal flow would make it try to assist, which is ... unhelpful.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fleets in Load Mode no longer deploy drones. This enables you to sneak combat factories past high-mark planets without the drones triggering lots of threat<br />
** Requested by overzot on steam<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the visual line for ships claiming other ships was not displaying. Turns out an image that was once white that we were using as part of its material got changed to black at some point, thus making it effectively invisible because of the math of how the shader was run.<br />
** We took this change to go ahead and make the claim lines more attractive in general, and they now have a cyan-greenish look to them, but double-beamed, so that they look kinda like the repair lines but still distinct.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and BadgerBadger for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Added in an OnLoad from savegame fix that should prevent stationary ships from being twitchy and thinking they should pursue you. This bit is untested.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game no longer gives a harmless "Could not do Shutdown for network, the engine network interface was null" message if the game is shutting down prematurely for whatever reason.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor issue where the game was reporting that your target framerate and vysnc count were being set right before they were, rather than right after. If it was failing, you'd have had no idea.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs the system info about itself far earlier in the load process, to help with cases where potentially we're unable to load things for some reason; we'll still get the system info in the debug files from now on.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The game's bootup log now is all-inclusive about all the steps that it takes, inside ArcenDebugLog.txt, so that in the event of a problem we now find out when that happens.<br />
** This makes for a much longer log every time you start up the game, but it's not something that is visible to players unless they go into their debug logs for whatever. And the information from it is definitely useful.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs what version it is on as soon as it can, but NOT before it can (heh), which it was temporarily doing on an internal build when we started logging system data really super early.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoNotShowAndAlsoDoNotSendToUnityLog verbosity level that lets us skip showing certain things in the unity log but still send it to the ArcenDebugLog.txt file. This is a big deal for us in terms of not having our unity editor logs flooded with stuff that we'd want to collect in a bug report but don't need to see every last time.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of selection issues on the galaxy map with fleets not always deselecting properly and instead sometimes being additive, etc.<br />
** It's actually a number of bugs all in one, because basically there was some older per-planet logic that was still being used here (and on planets) from back when cross-planet selection was only kinda-sorta a thing. Now it all works consistently galaxy-wide, or at least should. But if you see any remaining (or new) bugs, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif and Asteroid for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, hitting the escape key would just clear your selection on the current planet. Now it clears the selection on all the planets, as it should.<br />
** We didn't see the "when a fleet traverse a wormhole, it's selection is lost. This issue only occurs if the selection was made in the planet view. If you select the fleet on the galaxy map, it works correctly." issue, but probably what it really was was the above one. Or something fixed in the batch right before that. If it's still something anyone else sees, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with the planet links where their collision capsules were intersecting with the collision boxes of planets and ship icons on the galaxy map.<br />
** This was having the effect of making it so that quite often you couldn't select specific ships except at certain zoom levels, or couldn't click planets or ships reliably in general (zoom level and scale of icons did play a role here also).<br />
** Basically, the solution was to make it so that we first raycast to find ONLY the planets and ships/fleets, if there are any under the mouse cursor. These use one set of physx layers.<br />
** Only if we don't find anything with that first raycast do we then do a second raycast against the new physx layer that the links now use. Now it doesn't matter if the capsules for the links overlap with planets or ship icons (no way to stop that, really), because it will ALWAYS give preference to the other icons first, and only go for the links between planets if the icons fail.<br />
** Thanks to Smaug, I-KP, and Pat for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Energy Usage bar now gives detailed feedback for what is consuming your energy (broken down by fleet) and what planets are generating the most energy<br />
** Requested by darkarchon<br />
<br />
* The Tooltip for Tech Vault objectives now list which ship lines will benefit from hacking the tech vault<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* For the Flagship/GCA objectives, show the count of ship lines before listing the ship lines so I don't have to count them<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* Improvements to the R-Click "Strong Against" view:<br />
** Fixed damage bonuses listed in this view not always matching the mirror "weak against" view.<br />
** Show only units you discovered on the map, leading to a lot less clutter early-game.<br />
** Sort units that are in the same system as the friendly unit you're examining at the beginning of the list, and bold them.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the code and kmunoz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* CPAs always now give 10 minutes warning; given how impactful they are, a long warning period is justified. Previously they were getting less warning time than a regular Wave by default<br />
<br />
* When a Fleet levels up, only say "Some ship types may level up with the fleet" if the fleet actually contains ship lines that will level up<br />
** This was annoying Badger, since most ship lines don't level up anymore but the game made you think they did.<br />
<br />
* New icons for the Tech Menu!<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
* Better alignment for hotkey indicators on standing order buttons and for the icons in the build sidebar<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
=== Changes for lower AI difficulties (<= 5) ===<br />
<br />
* There were some complaints that there wasn't enough differentiation between high and low mark AIs, so we're making some changes to make lower mark games have an easier feel in a number of ways<br />
* Seed extra ARSs and Tech Vaults in the galaxy<br />
* Seed more low-mark planets near the player<br />
* Nerf AI income <br />
* Nerf AI defenses<br />
* Make the Hunter and Warden fleets dumber by allowing them to trickle into a battle piecemeal instead of waiting for reinforcements<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with hazxan on Steam<br />
<br />
== Version 0.900 Custom Fleets With Empty Slots ==<br />
(Released October 11th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Instead of spawning instantly, a Dyson Antagonizer now warps in over time, giving the player a chance to destroy it before the Sphere gets Antagonized.<br />
** Requested by zeus almighty. You'd think he could have just struck it with a lightning bolt or seduced it in the form of a goose...<br />
<br />
=== Tutorial and Tips Work ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Tutorial 99", which is even in its description just a note to be sure and check out the "How to Play" section of the game and other resources.<br />
** Since various people seem to miss those other resources but easily see the tutorials list, having this always be the last tutorial in the list no matter how many other tutorials we add seemed like a good idea.<br />
<br />
* Also got rid of the "Example Tutorial" that was junking up the tutorials screen, since now there are plenty of much more involved examples that are also actually fully-functional tutorials.<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip under the Modding section to explain how to make your own Quick Starts<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units sometimes were waiting out of range instead of closing to firing distance<br />
** Reported by kmunoz and Telcontar on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where flagships could just wander away from where you told them to go<br />
** Reported by kmunoz.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen in the wave notifications.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really rare nullref that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debugging to fix ships not rendering right in some rare circumstances and thus causing a cascade of all things not rendering. Now it should fail gracefully if it fails at all, and give us more information on where it failed, then let you keep playing without making everything disappear.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== "Custom Fleets", Aka The Remedy For Control Groups ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed things up so that fleet flagships can be constructed from the build sidebar, or other self-constructing means. This was never possible before in the engine, turns out.<br />
<br />
* There are 9 possible fleets that you can create at any of your command stations, now. Each one has 7 empty ship lines in it, and they are 3x cloaked, 3x velocity (fast flagship), and 3x workhorse (normal flagship).<br />
** These can be constructed at any point and you can start putting some of your specialized ships into them via ship swapping. The interface makes this clear and suggests it, as well. Basically for people who wanted to pull aside just their melee ships or cloaked raiders or whatever, now you can do that; this lets you control "sub fleets" in effect, by splitting your existing ship lines among more fleets, exchanging empty slots for ship lines you find elsewhere.<br />
** This was something that Chris went back and forth on a lot of times in terms of how to handle control groups that were more specific than 1+ fleets at a time. Ultimately the display and automation benefits of having control groups always stay linked to just 1+ fleets outweighed the benefits of changing that; but in order to allow for players to have smaller custom fleets as they may desire, activated by control group as they may desire, here's this new feature.<br />
** This is, of course, in addition to the hotkeys for quickly selecting units of specific criteria a while ago (cloaked units, melee units, whatever). This is for when you want to make a permanent or semi-permanent sub-grouping of ships for whatever reason (of which there are many valid ones to have).<br />
** Thanks to a lot of people, including Nameless Terror, ulu, Asteroid, and others for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== UI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Standing order buttons now display their key shortcut on the button itself, provided it can be expressed in a single letter (so X and V are displayed, Delete isn't).<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Science bar now has icons for the various techs.<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Wave progress indicator on galaxy map links now animates smoothly instead of once every second. (No associated visual at the moment, Chris didn't find the proposed particle effect good enough.)<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* For all mobile flagships and citadels (not lone flagships, though), there is a new "Flagship Movement Mode" in their fleet status window.<br />
** Your flagships are usually precious enough that you don't want them to roam around in pursuit mode or attack-move mode. HOWEVER, you will often want to set them into those modes in order to make any ships they construct pop out in those modes.<br />
** When this is set to"Stay Put Unless Direct Order", it acts as you might expect and causes the flagship to ignore things like Pursuit mode, but for ships it creates to be put in that mode (and obey it).<br />
** When this is set to "Roam If Instructed" mode, the flagship will pursue when in pursuit mode, attack when in attack-move mode, and so on. This can be useful for Arks and Golems in some cases, or even for things like Combat Factories (on peaceful worlds).<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Refinement of Fleets]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Pre-And-Post_Launch_Polish&diff=37210AI War 2:Pre-And-Post Launch Polish2019-11-17T22:44:46Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Modding Support */</p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
The game is solid at this point and something we're really proud of and that players are having fun with. But inevitably, the more people we have playing it, the more things get brought to our attention to refine and make as smooth and fun as possible. This is basically a period we've set aside for doing that sort of thing, rather than focusing on any major new content drops or other major new features.<br />
<br />
There may still be the odd major new thing, who knows -- sometimes the volunteers or modders wind up creating something and we're certainly not going to turn that down! But by the start of this phase the game was mature and really huge already, so focusing on polish seems like the way to best serve the largest group of people.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.010 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
=== Modding Support ===<br />
<br />
* If someone were to put nanocausting guns on the Devourer, the nanocausted ships will now fight units on their current planet. If they kill most of the mobile ships, they will wander off to an adjacent planet.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Allow for the energy consumed screen to show data sorted by 'overall usage' or by Planetary Fleets and Mobile fleets sorted separately<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for a hacking notification now reminds the player that the hack can be cancelled by clicking<br />
** Suggested by Peter Ebbesen<br />
<br />
* The Metal Flow Planning popup window now consolidates essentially identical flows. So if there are 3 engineers doing something it will now show as a single line saying '3 engineers are doing ....' instead of 3 separate lines<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for the excellent suggestion and ongoing critique<br />
<br />
* Hacking information from the top bar when hovered over now explains only hacking structures owned by that AI count.<br />
** Suggested by VengefulWight.<br />
<br />
* Fix a whitespace problem with the planet hovertext<br />
** Reported by alocritani<br />
<br />
* Fixed typo in the Devourer beacon, and one with some Astro Train text.<br />
** Reported by Ryulong and VengefulWight respectively. <br />
<br />
* Improve some tooltips<br />
** Reported by Histidine<br />
<br />
* Add a Notification for brownouts<br />
** Thanks to Peter Ebbesen for suggesting<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Hopefully this actually fixes the "AI Reserves spawning outside of gravwell" problem<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive Extraction hack now only takes 5 minutes at base, rather than 15.<br />
** With higher difficulties getting longer durations, this could lead to...well, on Diff 10, an hour long hack. Yeah.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty and donblas for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Units under construction take bonus damage from being shot. This should alleviate the frustrating case where the AI is distracted trying to kill Under Construction Frigates/Turrets instead of things that are actually shooting back<br />
** Note that this makes long-build-time things from the zenith trader very fragile before they are finished.<br />
** Mentioned by ussdefiant60 on discord<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian damage 1,500 -> 500, reload time 6s -> 4s, swapped outdated damage bonus to match the Fusion Bombers.<br />
** The 6s reload time was allowing these to recloak while still firing. The outdated bonus had weird Mark interactions and was missed.<br />
** Damage in general was a bit high for a unit that bypassed 90% of shields, so a large drop, both for that and to account for the new bonus.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Black Widow Golem Ark hull into shields.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some Guardian costs.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.009 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the last patch where sometimes threat wasn't being correctly counted.<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists and others for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.008 Golems And Arks Come Marching In ==<br />
(Released November 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart from Nuc Temeron<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Science icon in the resource bar now shows the history of the Techs you have unlocked. Note that this only applies to techs unlocked after this patch is applied.<br />
** This is mostly to have behariour that matches with the AIP and Hacking histories, but also allows for a new player to look at a save from an experienced player and learn from what they did with science.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug option to increase or decrease the difficulty of all the AIs in the game<br />
** It occurs to me that people sometimes start games and think "Man, this isn't challenging enough" or "I'm getting crushed". Well, now you can adjust the AI difficulty on the fly! Yet another feature for improved sandboxing.<br />
** This code includes a framework to allow other settings on other factions to be changed.<br />
<br />
* Add a tip explaining that unit stats have no inherent mechanical impact, they only matter insofar as their numbers relate to weapons systems<br />
** This caused some confusion<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
* Fix a typo in the metal popup<br />
** Thanks to alocritani for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI Reserves to spawn a bit further from the gravwell edge; they were getting stuck sometimes<br />
** Thanks to Chthon for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where sometimes minor factions would incorrectly cause AIP increases when killing warp gates. <br />
** Thanks to MasterGeese for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with Global Command Augmenters where they used the Turret type count for how many OtherDefense types they had.<br />
** Normally, a GCA has 1 Turret type, with 25% chance for a second. It then has a 33% chance for a single "OtherDefense" type (things like Minefields). If it has only 1 unit type after this, it gets a second Turret type, so in general they're pretty likely to get 2 Turret types.<br />
** Because of the OtherDefense logic actually using the Turret count, it meant since it always has at least 1 Turret, it would also always have 1 OtherDefense, regardless of the 33% chance.<br />
** This meant the "add a second Turret type so we have at least 2 types total" logic never occurred, making it so most GCAs had just 1 Turret type, when in fact the majority were meant to have 2.<br />
** It seems like this has changed it from around 25% of GCAs having 2 Turret types, to 75% (!) of GCAs having 2 Turret types.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Dark Spire Ward description<br />
** Thanks to Flypaste on discord for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Strikecraft and Turret Coordinators were both increasing Strikecraft and Turret caps once you had both effects.<br />
** If you had only one, it would work completely fine. Once you had two, it would combine the effects, leading to a 1.7x cap multiplier for both, instead of 1.3x.<br />
** This probably leads to some late game nerfs as a consequence.<br />
*** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting an oddity with some MLRS Turrets, leading to this discovery.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Devourer was causing all the ships to rush out of the AI Guard Posts and get eaten<br />
** I hope this also alleviates a bug where some minor factions could still stir up AI units to attack you<br />
<br />
* The Tech Menu now shows ships in ARSs under the set of things that you can upgrade, not just the things in Fleets on the map that you haven't captured yet<br />
** I think a number of people have wanted this but I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* The Tech menu now shows entries for techs that you could unlock from ARSs but don't have in a fleet (either owned or capturable)<br />
** I think this confused some people on Steam who could see something in an ARS but couldn't see the Tech for it<br />
<br />
* Fixed several possible but rare index out of range exceptions that could happen in the vis layer simulation due to cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif, KazeSasso, and Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue in the ReevaluateUnitOrders code that would sometimes have background-coarse planets not run the logic for their ships at all. Now those ships only use the secondary "SimCycleGroup_Slow" logic if this is on a "tier 1" planet that gets processed every frame.<br />
** The intent of the sim frame processing was to split it out across multiple frames, which works great on those tier 1 planets, but for planets that are already being split across multiple frames it could mean that their ships might not get new orders ever until the player visited the planet. This could greatly nerf engineers, for example.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this!<br />
<br />
* The forcefield protection planning was being run only intermittently on tier 2 planets, which include player forces that are not being monitored right now. Now it ONLY runs those intermittently on tier 3 planets (no players), and runs them continuously otherwise, so as to never run into cases where enemies could get off a few shots at something of a player that was being protected by a forcefield.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this, and Chthon and folks on discord for reporting it.<br />
<br />
* Silenced some harmless errors about trying to render a ship when its RelatedEntity became null during the process, via cross-threading.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare nullref exception that could happen in the target list planning because of cross-threading stuff.<br />
** Thanks to vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tentatively prevent the Devourer from shooting force field generators (the ones you can build at your planets)<br />
** A number of people have complained about it. I'm not sure if I caught all the cases, so please let me know if there are any issues.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Hacking Difficulty Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* The goal of this is to make hacking easier early and harder late.<br />
<br />
* Increase up the Hacking Points Spent required to trigger new hacking difficulty levels.<br />
** Some larger hacks could move you up 2 levels of difficulty under the wrong circumstances, which was quite excessive <br />
<br />
* Add some new tiers of hacking difficulty to allow us to make late game hacking scarier. The hacking difficulty now goes<br />
** Very Easy<br />
** Easy<br />
** Indifferent (old Moderate)<br />
** Slothful (old Hard)<br />
** Moderate (old Extreme)<br />
** Hard (old Terrifying)<br />
** Extreme (new, and harder)<br />
** Terrifying (new, and harder)<br />
***From a conversation on discord where people wanted higher difficulty tiers<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hacking difficulty levels used were one tier harder than they should have been<br />
** A number of people noted this<br />
<br />
=== Other Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Tractor Arrays in Global Command Augmenters a bit.<br />
<br />
* Added Raiders and Daggers to ARS'.<br />
<br />
* AI Sentry Frigate now decloaks much slower (from 2s for MK1 vs MK1 cloaked units, to 8s), damage 600 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Added an AI Ship Group consisting of the Classic Trio Strikecraft (V-Wing, Fusion Bomber, Concussion Corvette).<br />
<br />
* Added the V-Wing into a few groups.<br />
<br />
* Weaken Turret and Weaken Guard Post hacks are slightly cheaper. Can also be done remotely (i.e without a Flagship present).<br />
** The remote hack is an experiment.<br />
<br />
* The logic for officer fleets (those with Arks and Golems) used to be that they couldn't be more than a certain number of hops away from an AI homeworld. Now it doesn't care how far away they are, except that they must ideally be at least 3 from the AI homeworld and (same as before) 6 from player homeworlds. This makes it a lot more likely for you to actually see officer fleets in the mid-game (or at all, depending on how far you're getting).<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for inspiring this change while doing a podcast with Chris (https://explorminate.co/chris-park-of-arcen-games-podcast-interview/), and Badger for suggesting the specifics.<br />
** Note that Lone Wolf flagships have also had their seeding locations updated in an analagous but not identical fashion<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette damage 340 -> 280, stack damage multiplier 3x - > 2x.<br />
<br />
* Pulsar Tank augmented weapon range 8,000 -> 10,100, base damage multiplier 2x -> 3x, visual changed to a red laser pulse.<br />
<br />
* Removed Fusion Bombers damage bonus improving with Mark.<br />
** The bonus was only meant for them to automatically target anything with enough shields to be worth bypassing.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette damage 96 -> 130.<br />
<br />
* Kite now uses the same damage as the Concussion Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod damage 100 -> 125.<br />
<br />
==== Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Ripper reload time 3s -> 2s.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate damage 20,000 -> 24,000.<br />
<br />
==== Outguard ====<br />
<br />
* Removed Hacking cost of hiring Outguard.<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased base values of Outguard strength.<br />
<br />
* Those Outguard groups that did not have a Flagship now do.<br />
<br />
* Some Outguard groups can be hired twice rather than once.<br />
<br />
==== Spire Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate beams max targets 30 -> 10, damage 5,000 -> 7,500, reload time 2s -> 1s.<br />
** Same DPS as before, but more likely to hit enough targets to get all of it. Fire rate offsets the occasional beam that mostly misses.<br />
** This appears to be a somewhat decent improvement.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed 600 -> 1,000, AIP cost 20 -> 15, hull 750,000 -> 1,250,000.<br />
<br />
* Laser Pulse weapon damage 2,500 -> 4,500.<br />
<br />
* Railcannon weapon damage 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Golems ====<br />
<br />
* Note: AI Golems are currently untouched. There is very little data on them currently - most feedback is about the player ones, which the below concern.<br />
<br />
* AIP cost (for non Lone Wolves) 20 -> 15.<br />
<br />
* Golem Speed 600 -> 1,000, Black Widow Golem speed 1,000 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem main weapon damage 2,000 -> 5,000, Sabot damage 3,000 -> 8,000, total durability 2,500,000 -> 4,000,000.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem reload time 9s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Regenerator Golem shots per salvo 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem shots per salvo 20 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 2,000 -> 3,000, hull 1,000,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem hull 1,800,000 -> 2,800,000, damage 350 -> 800, range of both weapon and tractor beams 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Hive Golem has 300 Yellow Jackets, up from 250.<br />
<br />
==== Arks ====<br />
<br />
* AIP cost 15 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos range 5,600 -> 9,000, Parasite Bolt damage 900 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira forcefield size increased 25%, damage 7,000 -> 15,000, shields 1,250,000 -> 1,500,000.<br />
<br />
* Ark One shots per salvo 20 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Gryn now launches Saboteur, Decoy and Scrap drones. Also produces some energy.<br />
<br />
=== Expansion and Mod Loading Work ===<br />
<br />
* XMLLoadingOrder.txt, which lets you specify the loading order of mods that you choose to install, has been updated with some notes on exactly how that's intended to work.<br />
** They read: <br />
*** //note that this is for determining the order that mods are loaded.<br />
*** //any mods not specified in here will be loaded in alphabetical order according to the OS.<br />
*** //the base game content, and then the expansions in numerical order, are ALWAYS loaded first.<br />
*** //to add an mod to your mod order list, just place them each on a single line here.<br />
*** //unless a mod depends on another mod, you don't even need to do that, though. Usually mods don't touch each other.<br />
<br />
* The game now handles mod loading slightly differently, in that it makes a central table of all the mods that it finds in the XmlMods folder and allows for other parts of the game to reference them as-needed later.<br />
** Overall we're not doing TOO much with this yet, but it does make things faster.<br />
** As part of this, the actual xml mod loading order is now handled far better, and doesn't require loading the same file over and over again dozens of times.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoPostInitializationAndSortingLogic method onto ArcenDynamicTable, which allows us to do things like export the list of installed mods.<br />
<br />
* As part of the boot sequence for the game, it now logs which mods are installed, and in what order. This is pretty useful for any debugging that anyone might need to do.<br />
** It also lists all of the expansions that it's aware of, and if they are installed or not.<br />
<br />
* Under the hood since the start of the project, we've had the ability to have expansions that are enabled or disabled in worlds. This has now been fleshed out with our modern requirements for it, though.<br />
<br />
* Some various old parts of the code under the hood were still assuming that we could sometimes reload some of the xml after initial game load (that's never been true in this game, what a mess that always was when we tried it).<br />
** Some also assumed that we would use the old-style Language localization files, which gave false hope for localization to anyone poring through the code and also had a mild waste of time in there.<br />
** All of this has been cleaned out.<br />
<br />
* When there are exceptions in processing in the xml from the base game, an expansion, or a mod, it's now a lot clearer what the file is and some other bits of data about it.<br />
<br />
* In the folder for any expansion, there is an "ExpansionInstallation.txt" file. Removing that will cause the game to act as if the expansion isn't there, which is useful for testing.<br />
** In past games, we called that Version.txt, but this is a less confusing name. <br />
<br />
* Mods are now automatically loaded -- in whatever order -- simply by existing in the XmlMods folder. You can override their order by using the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file as noted above, but they'll automatically load in alpha order without that requirement.<br />
** However, there is also now a new file called "ModIsDisabled.txt" that can be placed in the folder of each mod. If it is there, then the mod will not load EVEN IF it is in the XmlLoadingOrder.txt file. This is basically a way to make really super sure that the example mods don't load without someone wanting them to.<br />
** The fact that mods are auto-loaded makes them a lot easier to install just by dragging and dropping them.<br />
<br />
* Several example mods had really outdated bits that made them unable to load. Those have now been cleaned up a bit.<br />
<br />
* A lot of subtle changes have been made in the code to how expansions and mods are loaded, which gives them more capabilities than before in things like overwriting core constants or adding to them, etc.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.007 The Player/AI Arms Race Intensifies ==<br />
(Released November 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* You can now see the number of empty slots in your fleet in the fleet management screen, and you can swap other things IN to the empty slot of a fleet, rather than having to go to the other location and swap them OUT only.<br />
** This is the more natural workflow in a lot of cases, and now both workflows are possible at any rate.<br />
** Thanks to donblas for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== AI Reserves: Anti-Deepstriking ====<br />
<br />
* Add new AI Reserves, basically an HRF for the AI against deepstriking players. The response strength is greater at higher difficulties and the further away from one of your planets you are. Will not trigger unless you are more than 3 hops from your planets.<br />
** Once arrived, AI Reserves are limited to that planet and will hang out for a few minutes, then vanish again.<br />
** It shouldn't trigger easily on Flagships in transport mode, only once you deploy the units.<br />
*** As with all new code, there will probably be a need for some QoL improvements once people have figured out what's fun/frustrating about them<br />
<br />
* Added a new "auto_add_one_of_faction_if_missing_on_save_load" xml tag on factions that allows us to automatically add the AI Reserve into existing quick starts if they weren't already there.<br />
** We definitely don't want to be in a position for constantly recreating the quick starts every time we add a new under-the-hood-always-there faction.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking Balance ====<br />
<br />
* Tweak the logic that calculates the hacking cost increase for a number of hacking types to make the increase less aggressive<br />
** This had already been done for the science extraction hacking, but I hadn't also updated the generic cost increase function because we weren't using it until very recently<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The following hacks no longer get more expensive (in hacking points) based on repeated attempts:<br />
** Neutral Planet Science Extraction<br />
** Grant Technology<br />
** Convert Tech Vault to Science<br />
** Grant Ship Line<br />
** Convert ARS to Science<br />
** Double Ship Line Cap<br />
** At this point, most of the things that increase with repeat usages are things that are hackinng something that you can also get the benefit of via capturing, or covert science extraction, etc.<br />
** It's useful to have some things increase with repeat usages, but for a lot of the main goodies that are on the map that you can ONLY get via hacking, having them increase that way felt punitive.<br />
<br />
* Most of the very common hacks have had their durations reduced from 120-300 seconds to more like 30-120 seconds instead.<br />
** Given things happen once-per-second as hacking progresses, this was a bit on the punishing side for sure.<br />
** Thanks to a variety of players on Steam for pointing out how much harder this had made things, not in a fun way.<br />
<br />
* There is now an increase in hacking times required based on the highest difficulty of any AI faction in the game you're playing (living or dead).<br />
** This only applies to hacks that take more than 5 seconds to begin with.<br />
** On difficulty 5 and down, it's the same as it always has been (with the new nerfs in placing making it far less than it used to be, actually).<br />
** On diff 6, it's now multiplied by 1.25x.<br />
** Diff 7 is 1.5x (so an ARS hack is 45 seconds here instead of the new 30, still better than the older 120 of the last two builds).<br />
** Diff 8 is 2x, diff 9 is 3x, diff 10 is 4x.<br />
** This should help put in some nice gradation for people who feel like hacking should be on the harder side with people on other difficulties not getting absolutely stomped by them.<br />
** Thanks to various discussions on the steam forums making it clear that different people expected/wanted a different amount of hassle out of these, and this led to us feeling like it needed to vary by AI difficulty. A harder-to-hack higher-difficulty AI is super thematically appropriate, anyway.<br />
<br />
==== Economy ====<br />
<br />
* Cheapened the metal cost of Transport Flagships to around 27% of previous.<br />
** An unwelcome penalty for constructing empty Flagships for unit groups, as well as repairing them.<br />
<br />
* 25% increase in Engineer repair rate.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of rare exceptions that could happen based on copying orders from one entity to another after it had already been returned to the pool or otherwise been made invalid. Was something that could happen during stack splits, evidently.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting; it seems he has ridiculously bad luck in getting more exceptions than anyone.<br />
<br />
* The save and load menus now have better sized and spaced text, so long names no longer overlap the stats about them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of cross-threading exceptions that could be hit if the waves composition changed while you were iterating over them.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The "Danger! CurrentFrameNumber changed" error message has been removed from the game and won't bother people anymore.<br />
** This was exceedingly rare for most people, but common for a few specific people. The best theory on this is that these people had exceedingly fast CPU cores, because on inspection of this code it was actually able to detect an "improper" state change that was really just "unlikely but fine." All of the improper cases would have been a lot more common to see, and seen across many clients. In this case it seems to have been a race condition between "work's done" and "make sure the frame didn't change," which were happening on a nanosecond scale.<br />
** The worst case with someone having this change in an actual problematic way would be a multiplayer desync of some varying severity, but given that we already have network desync repair planned as a core key feature this isn't exactly a big deal. Originally this was also code that was defensively checking to see about single-player cross-threading issues, but those are all long-since fixed (2+ years ago).<br />
** Basically this was a case of some false positive popping up in interrupting you for no good reason if your processor was fast enough.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an exceptionally rare error that could happen with multiple ships pulling the same order out of the pool if your machine is just really too excellent at multithreading for some reason. Now instead of complaining at you, it just fixes itself. Originally the complain-at-you code was in case we made some code mistakes that would cause this, but the rarity of this error pretty much shows we don't have any such errors. But man, cross-threading stuff on a few particular machines really is popping out some interesting cases.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where astro train depots weren't tracking the number of trains that arrived between save/reload. Whoops.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* When you load a quick start, it now sets the first player name to be whatever your local profile's name is, and then the ones after that (if any) become "Player 2," "Player 3," etc.<br />
** This solves a lot of the underlying names still being "Puffin" or various people who contributed quick starts.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.006 Freedom Of Fleet Line Combination ==<br />
(Released November 7th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== The Ability To Have Duplicate Ship Lines In One Fleet ===<br />
<br />
* The game now allows for duplicate ship lines in a single fleet. This was something that people REALLY wanted, and we get why, but it was a tricky technical thing. Our first idea for this today wasn't valid for multiplayer it turned out, but thankfully we came up with something that is.<br />
** This also includes the ability for initial fleet designs to add more than one copy of a fleet line to itself, whereas before it would just combine them. So you could have two bomber lines in a single fleet design now, for example.<br />
** Note that this will NOT work for drones in fleets at the moment. Those can't be swapped around by players anyway, and there didn't seem to be any reason to make this part work. It could be extended later if we really need to, but it seemed pointless.<br />
** Only the player mobile fleets have this new ability. Command stations, NPC fleets, battlestations/citadels, and so forth all still combine their fleet lines if the type matches. Those can't be swapped around, and it makes much more sense for them to work like they always have.<br />
** It's possible there may be some bugs with this (mainly of the sort of something not building when it's a secondary ship line in a fleet, or things not being able to swap properly when there are duplicate lines), but if so please do report those to us and bear with us.<br />
** Thanks to nas1m, Asteroid, and many others for requesting this -- rather forcefully at times in the case of some steam reviewers or folks on discord, but we got the message. This was tricky as heck to implement, and may cause a few bugs for a bit, but it's clear how important this is to people.<br />
<br />
* When hacking for dark spire ships, it now always puts each new ship you get in its own ship line rather than ever adding to an existing line.<br />
** Additionally, it checks to make sure you have enough empty slots before it will work.<br />
<br />
* Dyson hacks seem to have been assuming that you'll increase the ship cap on existing lines, so for now we've left that working as it always has.<br />
<br />
* ARSes now CAN grant duplicate ship lines to a fleet, and instead of merging they now stay as separate ship lines.<br />
<br />
* Doing a hack to double the cap of a ship line SHOULD work properly in cases where you have multiple ship lines inside a single fleet, only doubling one of them and then allowing the other one to be doubled later if you want.<br />
** This needs testing, though, as it was kind of complicated.<br />
<br />
==== New Bomber Starting Fleet ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Bomber Fleet as a starting option, which includes two different identical lines of Fusion Bombers, plus also Parasitic Bombers. This helps to highlight the fact that you can have very-thematic fleets for anyone just perusing these things from the lobby, so that hopefully this is a teaching moment.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the tooltip showing the number of ships an ARS granted didn't factor in Mark Level increases. Note it still doesn't factor in any additional multipliers like ICGs<br />
<br />
* Fixed some more Frigates being seeded as Strike options in ARS.<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an ArgumentOutOfRangeException that could happen in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations P2 because of a race condition. It's harmless and no longer puts up an error message in your face.<br />
** Thanks to Rob from eXplorminate for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a pretty nasty memory leak that could happen around planned metal flows, particularly given that they were being used from a single pool but for two different threading areas.<br />
** This was something that would affect things even when the metal flows UI wasn't open, because of race conditions between two threads. It was also causing some errors and other race conditions in general, all of which are now fixed.<br />
** It was a very unusual sort of situation with a very special-case data structure (the time-based pool), and that was just... really an edge case thing. It also was not really causing errors or a memory leak in all cases, even though it was in some. Why it would be particularly severe for the one player who reported it, while nobody else had crashes related to this, is mildly baffling. But that's the nature of race conditions for you, honestly.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a couple of memory leaks and other things that caused excessive memory churn while actively viewing the metal flows interface. These were things that would be given back to the player and thus not truly a memory leak in general; it was leaking on the heap and then coming back later.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The last of the memory-leaky-type things related to metal flows is now fixed. This one was introduced possibly as far back as September 2018 by Chris, or possibly more recently when changing another bit of code to make a copy per list instead of having a reference in another list. At any rate, we were creating a metric ton of extra metal flow data that was then getting churned out of the memory pool by the garbage collector, and generally wasting some CPU time and efficiency. Now things properly get returned to the pool.<br />
** On the metal flows screen, there is still some climbing RAM that you see for a while, but then it stabilizes and eventually drops. That seems to be mostly related to temporarily cached sprite quads being used by TextMeshPro, and with such large amounts of text that changes frequently that's probably unavoidable. It's not a true memory leak anymore, and doesn't spike more than something like 60mb at peak in our current tests, where it was hundreds of mb in the same tests previously.<br />
** Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Clarify the Threat tooltip to say that the Visible Threat reported is only from Watched planets<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx of reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a couple of changes that may fix custom flagships being placed at a higher mark level than their base should be if the planet they are on is a higher mark.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an invisible nullref exception that could happen on quitting the game program in some rare circumstances.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Show Fleet Ship Line Numbers" settings option to the Debug section that is for helping us root out problems with multiple ship lines of the same type within a fleet.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen inside LazyLoadSquadWrapper when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Norfeder for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed another rare indexing exception that could happen inside GetEntityByID when there were multiple threads looking at a ship at the same time that it was removed from the game.<br />
** Thanks to Phenomphear for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Reduced firepower and health of Instigator and Warden Fleet Bases.<br />
** People liked it when shown the values before the release, but it seems to have caused issues elsewhere. For deepstriking defense, probably need to be another method.<br />
** Also lowered the range a tad of both and removed the forcefield from the Warden Fleet Base.<br />
<br />
* Upped Parasite damage slightly, doubled the zombification damage amount.<br />
** So now they zombify in 5 shots, and 1 at MK7.<br />
<br />
* Bumped up starting metal storage to the maximum value.<br />
<br />
* Home Human Settlements gain 260 metal per mark, up from 120.<br />
<br />
* Reduced metal cost of Plasma Turrets and Beam Cannons by half.<br />
<br />
* Human Home Command metal income 900 - > 2,200, increase by 400 per mark.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations now benefit from the Citadel Technology.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Citadel Tech from 3,000/4,500/6,000 to 2,000/3,000/4,000.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Sentries Tech from 1000/1500/2000/2500 to 500/750/1000/1250.<br />
<br />
* Watchman Frigate energy usage 7,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.005 Answering Your Top Requests ==<br />
(Released November 5th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some code to dump the current state of the Hunter Fleets in threat popup display window. Only enabled with the Debug_Tooltip setting. <br />
** Intended for debugging/internal testing.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Line And Count Revisions ===<br />
<br />
* There are now a maximum of 5 ship lines (other than drones, things like hydra heads, and the fleet leaders) that any fleet can have. Previously it was 6 for some fleets, 7 for others.<br />
** This applies to the ARS and other ships.<br />
** This is defined in central xml so that we can tune it if need be.<br />
<br />
* ALL strike fleets are now considered to have 5x slots for strikecraft and frigates, and their "empty slots" are no longer a "physical thing" (people reporting oddness on how these custom fleets worked will know what this means).<br />
** This lets you take any fleet that you capture and swap stuff around so that it has a full 5 slots of stuff on it, which is really handy.<br />
** This also makes the interface for empty slots a lot more condensed and easy to read when you're swapping something else to them.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an oversight that was causing players to be able to build more than a single copy of each of the empty flagships in the game.<br />
** This in turn caused various issues, such as trying to move empty slots between two Stealth Alpha fleets would not work, etc. That was never supposed to let you have more than one in the first place! Go figure.<br />
<br />
==== ARS Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* You are no longer allowed to hack an ARS for a ship line if that fleet already has the ship line<br />
** If there is any way to merge ship lines then people will want full ability to merge/split ship lines, which is not something Chris wants to allow. So for consistency's sake, this is being removed.<br />
** Fleet Capacity Extenders have been added as a replacement for this mechanic, and those are both clearer as well as being WAY more powerful.<br />
<br />
* When you find an ARS, it now works much differently. Rather than having just ONE ship type available at it, it has five. It will always have 4 strikecraft and 1 frigate type.<br />
** When you click the "Grant Ship Line" hack on the ARS, it no longer just does the hack -- instead, a new popout sidebar window appears, asking you which of the lines you wish to have granted to the fleet in question.<br />
** This shows you the fleet in question, what ships it has, and reds out any options that are invalid for that particular fleet because they happen to be invalid.<br />
** This gives you a TON more control over how you grow your fleets via ARS, without you having to do a bunch of expenditures of hacking points on re-rolls of the ARS.<br />
** This also gives us the framework for having hacks in general that let you make a sub-choice in them after choosing to do the hack itself, which is a powerful new ability for hacks. We'll be using this again super soon for upgrading specific ship line ship caps in a fleet via a new structure.<br />
** The fact that there are five options now is reflected in the text and will affect existing savegames.<br />
<br />
* If you DO choose to re-roll an ARS, it will give you five fresh ships. They may or may not have overlap with the prior batch or with your current fleet's contents.<br />
<br />
==== The Arrival Of Fleet Capacity Extenders ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new structure that you can find throughout the galaxy in new savegames: Fleet Capacity Extender<br />
** Hacking this structure doubles the ship cap for one of the fleetship types belonging to the Fleet that did the hacking (your choice as to which type).<br />
** This DOES show up in existing quick starts, but won't seed in savegames you're actively playing.<br />
** This new structure essentially is a far-more-powerful version of the secondary function that people used to like on ARSes (that we removed in this build).<br />
*** The fact that it was confusing to merge ship lines via the ARS was a good reason to remove that function, but this new structure is more powerful and doesn't have the strangeness of being a sometimes-thing. It always works like it works.<br />
** About the same number of these are seeded as ARSes, except not one on the adjacent planet to your start. The richness of what you can conquer is now a lot higher.<br />
<br />
* To prevent a lot of exploits that people would have started doing immediately, the upgrades from Fleet Capacity Extenders can no longer be applied to the same ship line in the same fleet more than once.<br />
<br />
==== Custom Fleet Revisions ====<br />
<br />
* The custom fleets, which previously had a max cap of 7, now only have a max cap of 5 like everything else.<br />
** It's possible that these fleets, or other fleets that got upgrades to 6 from an ARS, are over the new cap in old savegames. That won't harm anything.<br />
<br />
* Rather than having 9 explicit custom fleets (three regular, three cloaked, three speedy), the game now has a single type of custom fleet (regular) that you can build 9 of.<br />
** This makes the menu way less overwhelming down in the custom fleets section, and it doesn't give any special fleet leaders (speedy or cloaked) that are better than what you find out in the galaxy.<br />
<br />
=== EXP Revamp And Spending Science To Upgrade Specific Planets ===<br />
<br />
* The non-turret defenses, and command stations in general, no longer get mark levels based on EXP going up on their fleets.<br />
<br />
* Mobile player offensive fleets are still able to gain EXP like they always have been, and in the main it is still very useless for most of them (since only their flagships upgrade, for the most part; very useful for things with a powerful flagship but otherwise not much).<br />
** Note that this will get more useful in the future as we start adding in perks for these types of fleets that will affect other ships as you level up. That's just a TBD item.<br />
** The goal with these is still to have a bit of that flair of "hero stuff" that people have been asking for since the early days of AI War 1. We're proceeding somewhat cautiously with it, keeping it more on the useless end of the spectrum rather than something that takes over the game.<br />
<br />
* All the other kind of fleets are no longer able to gain EXP at all. This means battlestations and command stations, mainly, for you.<br />
** This was, by contrast, super duper useful to the point of being an absurd exploit. But it also wasn't a fun thing, requiring grinding rather than actual strategy of any sort.<br />
** This was one of the really big ways that people could force a victory far faster than they should have been able to, and really mess up the economy of things.<br />
** Existing savegames will lose all their unspent EXP, but WILL keep their existing added levels from this source, simply because a ton of games would have economies in the toilet without these levels remaining for now. But those savegames with leveled-up command stations are definitely overpowered in the player's favor, now.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting and inspiring this and many of the other related changes here.<br />
<br />
* When calculating how many fleets there are on a planet for EXP penalty purposes, it now ONLY counts mobile player fleets. It DOES include support fleets, but not battlestations/citadels, and not command stations.<br />
** So this is something that makes it so that you're penalized a lot less rapidly for having many fleets on a planet.<br />
** For the "max mark level" calculation that it does, it's now only based on the mark level of the mobile offensive fleets, too.<br />
<br />
* A new button has been added in place of the fleet EXP stuff for planetary (command station) type fleets. It's hovertext reads:<br />
** Planetary fleets can be upgraded (all ships within them) by directly spending science. This can be a very science-cost-effective way to get more metal income or energy production.<br />
** Changing the type of command station you're using, or losing the planet and recapturing it, won't cause you to lose your upgrades on this planet.<br />
<br />
* By clicking the above button, you can spend science in a whole new way an upgrade ALL the ships within the planetary fleet by one mark level (regardless of whether normally those would have been upgraded by EXP -- this isn't EXP, and you're paying science for it).<br />
** The cost is pretty cheap for the first added mark, at only 1000 science. The next is 3k, then 6k, then on to the absurd with 9k, 18k, and 36k. So you CAN upgrade one of your planets like crazy if you really want to, but it's prohibitively expensive to do so.<br />
** All of this gives you a lot more flexibility and allows you to do spot-upgrades for purposes of getting a better economy of having better defenses at a location.<br />
** This is pretty important for high level play with the removal of the EXP for command stations (and battlestations/citadels, although they aren't gaining the science unlock ability).<br />
** We may need to tweak the costs of these at some point to think about if we want the first upgrade to be even cheaper, to really tempt you. It's hard to say if this is tempting enough, as we want you to have strong defenses but be weighing that against the more generalized science expenditures that benefit offense AND defense. This of course also benefits your economy in a major way, so we may have to revisit how much more metal generators and the command stations generate as their mark levels go up if we reduce the science costs here. We shall see. For now, conservative steps. Anyone who isn't already a fairly advanced player may not even notice the difference here.<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Teams ===<br />
<br />
* It is now possible for minor factions to have alliances amongst themselves to take down the Player and AI. In the game lobby, several factions can now join "Team Red", "Team Green" or "Team Blue". All factions on the same Team are allied against everyone else in the game.<br />
** Supported minor factions: Marauders, Nanocaust, Devourer, Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Add a new quickstart to "Fun With Factions" demonstrating this mechanic<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Toggling objective importance is now done with a Right Click. Left click keeps the old behaviour (usually centering you on the planet in question)<br />
** This was suggested by a few people on discord I think? I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* Fix a surprising bug where the AI wasn't correctly generating threat when attacked by a player if the respective strength ratios were within certain ranges.<br />
** This might have some actual balance implications<br />
*** Thanks to zeus for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Death effect damage is no longer a strangely high number. Actually, this change allows for a lot more diversification in how effective units are at applying it. The start of this is done, with more tuning to follow.<br />
** This is most likely a somewhat large shift in the balance of it, which feels a tad necessary? Quite a few stories of mass hordes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference when calculating energy usage<br />
** Reported by Edmaniac<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the experimental pursuit mode implementation that could cause issues in "normal" mode where your units would not shoot at things properly.<br />
** Reported by a number of people<br />
<br />
* Structures that are under construction shouldn't generate AIP anymore if killed<br />
** reported by Chthon and zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Fix some confusion about killing reconquest command stations if you haven't paid the AIP price for that planet yet. It now correctly charges you AIP and lets you scout. The tooltip for such a reconquest command station tells you what's happening<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Destablilize Exogalactice Wormhole hack wasn't correctly killing the wormhole<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for the bug report<br />
<br />
* On particularly large maps (> 120 planets), increase the places that Officer Fleets are allowed to spawn<br />
<br />
* Fix an exciting bug where AOE shots with > 10 potential targets were doing 10% damage to each potential target. So if there were 20 targets each taking 10% damage, that's 200% of allowed damage done. 50 targets would be 500% damage.<br />
** This was particularly obvious for high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where AOE shots were doing too much damage when killing lots of stacked units<br />
** Again obvious with high-mark siege frigates<br />
** Reported by Puffin<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug with the tooltip on Alarm Posts; it had the ratios reversed<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Allow marauders to build outposts if the significantly outnumber the enemy; this prevents a single cloaked ship from stymying them.<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Make the Cloaking hovertext a bit more obvious with colour<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the tooltip for uncaptured flagships where it was showing the Strength if all its units were at level 1, instead of reflecting your actual mark levels<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the bug report<br />
<br />
* In the science screen, the Ship Types You Could Capture now show the mark level for that ship line<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Your ships will now target down Eyes automatically in pursuit mode, once you've disabled their invulnerability<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The Objective tooltip for an ARS now shows the ship line in the colour of the mark level you have for it<br />
** Thanks to NB_FlankStrike for reporting<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for a notification of a wave against one of your planets now tells you your defensive strength. <br />
** Suggested by NB_FlankStrike<br />
<br />
* Improve the tooltip for hacks that increase the cost for the next hack of that type to improve clarity<br />
** I think someone on steam got confused about this<br />
<br />
* Maybe improve the spacing for the X map. No promises.<br />
** Thanks to gigastar and cthonic_one for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Slight tweaks to the AIP hovertext to improve readability<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where several minor-faction specific hacks were not showing the hacking points used correctly in the hacking log<br />
** Thanks to Interloper for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improve the readability of the distribution node hovertext<br />
** Suggested by Cyber-Kun<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for an upgrade in the Science Menu now tells you approximately how much Strength increase there would be to your fleets<br />
** Thanks to donblas and Phenomphear for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference related to the Spire Objective<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip to explain about automatically building engineers and factories and so on.<br />
** From a comment by donblas<br />
<br />
* Hovering over a save game in the Load menu will tell you how many times that save game has been loaded. So if you're stuck at a particularly hard spot then you'll get some feedback as to how hard it is<br />
<br />
* The intel tab entries for the hacks for the tech vault and the ARS and the FCE are now three different colors, so that you can tell them apart at a glance if you have a huge galaxy completely explored. This way you can see at a glance what is what, now that it's sorting (rightfully so) by how easy or hard it is to get to each one.<br />
<br />
* Any sidebar build items that would be uncategorized are now invisible instead. These are assumed to be things that exist for legacy purposes but that we don't want to build.<br />
** It sometimes also winds up including random stuff like gravitic battlestations or whatnot that could be constructed but should not have been.<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, it no longer shows the ship cap for command stations (that was spurious, anyway).<br />
<br />
* On the build sidebar UI, for flagships that you can construct it now shows the total of that kind that you have in the galaxy as well as what the galaxy count is for them.<br />
<br />
==== Instigator Polish ====<br />
<br />
* Instigators now have a permanent notification (like wave notifications)<br />
** Note this reuses the Wormhole Invasion icon for the notification for the moment<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Instigators no longer show a Cumulative Effect, just a description of what the effect does and how many times it has fired.<br />
** The units for Cumulative Effect weren't meaningful to anyone who wasn't a developer, and it just confused people<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the ship-spawning instigator base had a bunch of decimal points in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for bringing this to my attention<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Zombification no longer works on Dyson ships, Dire Guardians and such things. It was kindof OP.<br />
** The old behaviour can be enabled as a Galaxy Setting<br />
<br />
* Different AI Difficulties now increase the mark level at different AIP amounts. As a result of this, different AIs can be at different mark levels.<br />
** Suggested by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* The Hunter and Warden fleets now get decloaking ships, in the hopes of preventing permanent scouting by cloaked units<br />
** From a discussion on discord I think?<br />
<br />
* If your fleet outnumbers the AI "enough" on a planet then all the Guard Posts will release their ships so the ships can run away<br />
<br />
* Allow units spawned from Guard Posts to run away more quickly from an overwhelming attack<br />
<br />
* Buffed Astro Train durability and damage a bit, albedo 0.3 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Increased self construction rate of Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon reload time 4s -> 6s, damage 1,810 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Gave Forcefield Frigates the same priority as Forcefield Generators.<br />
** So the AI will ignore it in general if there are unprotected targets to go after.<br />
** Might cause a weird thing with Siphoners, but see how it goes?<br />
<br />
* Increased Hull Tech cost by 2,500.<br />
<br />
* Increased durability of things like Raid Engines, Alarm Posts, Data Centers, and Co Processors.<br />
<br />
* Major Data Center only reduces AIP by 60, and increases by 90 on death.<br />
<br />
* Increased chance of wormhole Tachyon Sentinels.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now has Pulsar Tanks in place of MLRS Corvettes, and Vanguards in place of Grenade Launcher Corvettes. Also removed 1 of the starting Siege Frigates.<br />
** This Fleet had an issue in that it had crazy synergy, with it being mostly Splash and Heavy Tech, plus not really fitting the Doorkicker name much. Both Pulsars and Vanguards have Doorkicker like abilities, and since these units can properly attack single targets, 1 Siege Frigate can be safely removed without impacting the Fleet too much, as these were apparently their own issue.<br />
<br />
* AIP Floor is now increased by 35% of AIP gain, up from 20%.<br />
<br />
* Metabolizing Gangsaw engine_gx 14 -> 13.<br />
<br />
* Reduced minimum and maximum unit type counts in the more thematic Fleets (i.e the ones with mass Fusion Bombers).<br />
** Incredibly synergistic inherently, with far more units in general too.<br />
<br />
* Reduced the count of some of the "flat upgrade" units, like Heavy and Parasitic Fusion Bombers.<br />
<br />
* Buffed the damage output of most of the normal Guard Posts as well as a few of the Dire.<br />
<br />
==== Economy And Engineering ====<br />
<br />
* Drastically reduced the assist construction and repair rate of Engineers.<br />
** It was possible for these to eventually end up assisting Factories to absurd amounts - actually a good bit more than the Factory.<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvesters income 80 -> 60, amount gained per mark 40 -> 30.<br />
** This might not be enough, come to think of it. Player unit costs never increase unlike Classic, which means late game costs to rebuild after a fleetwipe are pretty low compared to here, leading to the below "slapping" event.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station income gained per mark 400 -> 150.<br />
** While the player does have less income, the rate at which it can be spent is also much lower, so it's likely the player would start to noticeably lose a battle and retreat a good while before depleting their reserves.<br />
** Also, while we don't want people to be sitting around for ages waiting after a fleetwipe for it to replenish, it was also rather silly that you could do things like, to quote someone "Bleed out the praetorian guard by slapping it with wads of cash".<br />
<br />
* Reduced energy cost of Turrets a bit.<br />
<br />
==== Eyes ====<br />
<br />
* Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships<br />
** This makes Eyes pretty useless against minor factions. Unclear what (if anything) should be done about that.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid.<br />
<br />
* Eyes are now MK7.<br />
** Mostly important for the Ion Eye.<br />
<br />
* Tripled range of Plasma Eye.<br />
** Is now planet wide range, like the Ion Eye. No more sneaking about out of range.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Eye damage tripled, max targets hit before spreading damage reduced to a third.<br />
** Means it can focus a lot more on single targets than before.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now works on albedo of 0.4.<br />
** Yes, this means it can target most Frigates now. Eyes check Fleets, and not units, so this is possible. Also lets it target a few more Strikecraft.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now has splash damage on each shot. Radius of 1,000, hitting 5 targets.<br />
** Done this way instead of just increasing shot count, as that many shots could be a bit too bright and painful to look at. Simple enough to change.<br />
<br />
* Both Eyes now have tachyon systems.<br />
<br />
==== Flagships ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly reduced Transport Flagship priority.<br />
** AI should focus more on killing the actual combat units around rather than chasing an unarmed ship and getting shot to bits during it.<br />
** Combined with the far weaker Engineers reducing the fleet replenishment rate to more...reasonable speeds, hopefully this prevents a lot of attritioning?<br />
<br />
* Reduced durability of Transport Flagships.<br />
** Mostly applicable during deepstrikes.<br />
<br />
* Differentiated the Transport Flagship types:<br />
** Normal ones are the same (including the above).<br />
** Cloaked ones are now a good bit slower.<br />
** Fast ones now have less health.<br />
<br />
* Ships unloaded from a transport now have a delay before firing.<br />
** Hopefully should make the "Unload units, snipe target, load again, run away" strategy less OP. Further changes may be necessary.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Hacks now define if they work based on the closest hacker or not, using a new tag use_closest_hacker_for_check.<br />
** Before it was inferring if it should do that, which was potentially going to be confusing down the line.<br />
<br />
* A variety of bugfixes and improvements to the internal hacking logic.<br />
<br />
* Flagships now move much more slowly when hacking<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting that you could just run away from the nanocaust hack response<br />
<br />
* Increased Cost of Intra-Galactic-Coordinator Hack (120 if owe AIP, 60 without).<br />
<br />
* More hacks now have an escalating cost to them (1.2x what it was last time).<br />
<br />
* Shortened and cheapened the Ion Cannon and Mass Driver hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased cost of Grant Ship Line and Grant Tech hacks.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully increased the difficulty of the Super Terminal.<br />
** This seriously'll need more feedback. There are so many variables in it that whatever test games Puffin has is probably missing something else.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Convert ARS to Science.<br />
<br />
* Some minor duration changes to a few.<br />
<br />
* Added Exo-Waves on completion to a few hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased response strength of quite a few AI hacks.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.003 Sortable Objectives ==<br />
(Released October 28th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where ARS hacks were allowing you to get 7 ship lines instead of 6<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix an OBOB where we were reporting inconsistent stack numbers in the hover entity info text<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* New installations of the game now save 3 autosaves instead of 1<br />
** Suggested by yupyip<br />
<br />
* Flagships in Hold Fire Mode no longer deploy drones<br />
** SUggested by CWW256 on discord<br />
<br />
* Clicking on an Objective will now tag it with an Importance. Clicking once makes an Objective High importance, putting it at the top of the displayed list. Clicking again will make it Low importance, putting that objective at the bottom. Clicking a third time makes it Normal.<br />
** Suggested by Greeniguana<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to hoverEntity and fix a possible null reference<br />
** Thanks to kerzain for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tutorial 4 now mentions you can hover on the AIP amount on the top bar for some more information.<br />
** Thanks to Potkeny in Discord for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology hack now mentions not increasing the cost of unlocking it with Science.<br />
<br />
* Hack Intra-Galactic Coordinator and Hack Global Command Augmenter now note exactly what the reduced cost is if you have paid the AIP cost for that planet.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Science resource bit at the top now has the same blue colour for all the amounts, rather than being a light green, so it's consistent with every other mention.<br />
<br />
* Metal section of the top bar now has actual proper colouring.<br />
<br />
* Cost to fully extract all the science from a planet is now in green, like most hacks are.<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Sabotage Hack now mentions it doesn't cause an AIP increase for destroying structures which would normally do so.<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved the Experience tooltip information to have the correct logic and perhaps read a little bit better.<br />
<br />
* The "Ally to AI" setting description now explicitly says that all player-allied factions are also allied.<br />
** From a discussion with Astra on discord<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Hacking resource hovertext on the top bar now has the hacking point amounts in green rather than a red.<br />
<br />
* AIP hovertext on the top bar has some minor colour additions, as well as an explanation of what the AIP Floor actually is, as well as stating reduction is never wasted.<br />
** Thanks to Nuc_Temeron, Halfshell cat, right01, amblingalong and Pexpy in Steam Discussion for prompting this.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines now show on the galaxy map.<br />
** Suggested by gigastar in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Hunter Waves option is renamed to Threat Waves, and description updated to be clearer.<br />
** They never actually joined the Hunter Fleet immediately - they were threat, so it was rather in error.<br />
<br />
* Added some information about how threat is generated, and it eventually joining the Hunter Fleet to the info displayed by hovering over the top bar area.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Decoy Drone damage halved, tripled build time, health reduced 25%.<br />
** Puffin was finding these were a bit absurd in extended practice. More testing required.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology Hack cost increased to 20.<br />
<br />
* The Engineer and Factory changes from previous, as those were missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.002 ARSes, Instigators, and Tech Vaults, Oh My ==<br />
(Released October 25th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* ALL of these changes are thanks to Badger and Puffin. Chris was working on the world's longest AMA for some reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/dmhlu6/ama_i_am_chris_park_founder_of_arcen_games_and/<br />
<br />
* Add some new Quick Starts by community member zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Experimental Targeting Change<br />
** Under Galaxy Settings -> Units there's now a setting to enable/disable a new pursuit mode.<br />
** This mode makes ships prefer to kill all nearby units before moving on; hopefully it will make Drones less apt to go aggro guard posts everywhere.<br />
*** Looking for player feedback on this<br />
*** This also will affect the way AI ships will fight, so I'm loooking for feedback on that aspect as well<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagships now cost very little energy.<br />
** This was originally so they would be hurt more by Nucleophilic units, but you can usually just micro them around and that's...not really fun or interesting. So just greatly reduce it, since you were otherwise being penalised for using the custom ones.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and seemingly others for bringing up.<br />
<br />
* The Human Resistance Fighters now help less often in battles, so it feels more rare/special when they do. They also can't go back to a planet for at least 15 minutes after their last time there.<br />
** I forget who asked for this (sorry). They used to attack about 60% of the time, now it's more like 30%<br />
<br />
* Macrophages now need more metal to do things on Hostile To Players Only mode. Also decrease base telium income when that telium has harvesters on the map; harvesting should be the primary form of income<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Crippled flagships now have a 5 minute delay until they are eligible to be repaired. This is to make crippling a Bigger Deal in battles where you might have engineers<br />
** Note that taking the crippled flagship out of combat (ie to another planet where there are no enemies) will reset the repair delay<br />
*** From a discussion about flagships on discord<br />
<br />
* Engineers and Combat Engineers have less health, and are also much higher target priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories are much higher priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a few problems with quickstarts<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Dark Spire could give errors after it has killed all the players and AIs in the game.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for bringing about the triumph of the Dark Spire<br />
<br />
* Fix a strange null reference exception in some findHumanKing code in the game lobby<br />
** Spotted by Nuc_Temeron on stream<br />
<br />
* Fixed Mini Cluster Bombs being swappable. Woops.<br />
** Thanks to Mayheim on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Launching with OpenGL instead of DirectX11 can be problematic for some people, so on GOG the default launch is now DirectX11. On Steam it still shows you the option of which you want, but starts with DirectX11 as the default.<br />
** Thanks to Ronin Storm and Pheespud for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Replace a few mentions of FRD with Pursuit Mode in the Settings<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Auto-Kite setting<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx<br />
<br />
* The button in the lower left that just said "Coming Soon" now says "Chat Menu. Coming Soon" so it's clear what it is.<br />
* Include mention of the shortcut for toggling between the galaxy map/planet screen in the tooltip for the planet name in the top left.<br />
* Improve the tooltip for the clock to mention the buttons that control game speed<br />
* Add more colours to the incoming wave tooltip<br />
** From a remarkably uncivil and poorly written screed on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the explanation for the Praetorian Guard<br />
** Thanks to unicurse for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window available when you click on the Threat icon in the resource bar now shows threat in traditional Strength units (with the raw value divided by 1K).<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx and Puffin for pointing this out<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window now shows the total visible hunter/warden strength in the galaxy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Nanocaust ships were winding up being counted as Threat incorrectly<br />
<br />
* Improve the colouring in the science tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* Some tutorial improvements. Includes a bunch of colour.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for pointing it out.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the AIP history display when claiming structures<br />
<br />
* If a wave is against a minor faction that owns a planet, the game now tries harder to show the faction name in the tooltip. <br />
* If a wave is not against a player planet, the icon will turn grey more consistently.<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Pretty neat idea.<br />
** Thanks to Jaridan on Steam for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Add some colour to the counterattack notification hovertext to improve readability.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hacking description for local watch hacks<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Show better colours for zombies in tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip, Apthorpe and darkarchon<br />
<br />
=== ARS Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'cant hack due to too many ship lines' message for the ARS hack to explicitly call out which fleet you are using, and mention that the hack is done by the closest flagship<br />
** Some people on Steam were finding this confusing.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where custom fleets couldn't hack ARS for more ship lines<br />
** Thanks to zeus and Chromatism for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Lone Wolf Fleets could hack ARS<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where things like Hydra Heads were being counted as ship lines for the purposes of an ARS hack<br />
** This bug has popped up in so many places, fixing it is like, well, killing the heads on a hydra<br />
*** Thanks to yupyip for reporting this one<br />
<br />
* ARS Reroll hacks cost less Hacking Points but have a stronger response<br />
<br />
* ARS to Science conversion hack now grants more science<br />
<br />
* ARSs are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to ARS hacks, given that every other changes constitute a buff to the player<br />
<br />
=== Instigator Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to Instigators; decrease their power and make the bases spawn less frequently<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Instigator Bases weren't correctly tracking their cumulative effect<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting I look at this<br />
<br />
* Fix some punctuation issues with Instigator Base descriptions<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases now report how many times the effect has triggered<br />
<br />
=== Tech Vault Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The "Turn Tech Vault into Science" hack now grants a bit more science<br />
<br />
* Add a "Reroll Tech granted by Tech Vault" hack<br />
<br />
* Hacking a Tech Vault for science no longer increases the cost of the next upgrade<br />
** It seems like everyone wants this<br />
<br />
* Tech Vaults are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to Tech Vault hacks, given that every other changes constitute a strong buff to the player<br />
<br />
== Version 1.001 Official Game Launch! ==<br />
(Released October 21st, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some Tips with a brief explanation of what the AI sub-fleets (Warden, hunter etc) do.<br />
<br />
* The first time you click the Single Player menu (after this build), it gives you a modal prompt asking you if you'd like to do the tutorials first, or if you'd like to just play. This should help prevent people from missing that there are tutorials.<br />
** We did NOT add the tutorials to the Single Player menu, however, as that just gets very cluttered and makes the whole menu harder to read.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The Tutorials button on the right side of the main menu is now colorized and flashes very subtly every half second between two almost-identical colors. This should be much more noticeable without being obnoxious, and without cluttering up something like the single-player menu.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and Badger for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the hovertext for a command station in the sidebar reported the wrong number of turrets<br />
** Thanks to Wurfell on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The AIP history for games begun from Quick Starts will now show AIP change from you as from your username, not "Puffin"<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that can happen in EmitOnAOEParticles.<br />
** It will now log more info, and just do so silently, and not actually impede play like it previously did.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Super Terminal now mentions the Exo-Galactic Strikes.<br />
** Thanks to kocur4d for prompting.<br />
<br />
* Don't let the AI launch mini-waves after exploration/watching hacks<br />
** It was confusing. Thanks to Puffin for report.<br />
<br />
* The Metal launch option on OSX has been removed, as that was still launching under OpenGL anyway.<br />
<br />
* Non-Steam builds no longer try to log into Steam and complain in the log if they can't, and nor do they show "Not logged into Steam" on the main menu.<br />
** This gave the impression that the Steam client was required, when it definitely in no way is. These behaviors do still exist for Steam copies of the game, but just so that you can tell if you're not logged in right for whatever reason.<br />
<br />
* Improve the Instigator Base description to explicitly state that the base effect ends with the death of the base<br />
** Suggested by Apthorpe and Echthelon<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The Dark Spire Ward now instantly blows up any DS ships that enter the planet. The Ward's description has been updated to match<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the report.<br />
<br />
* Doubled range of Devourer Golem.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for bringing up the Devourer.<br />
<br />
* Doubled drone count of the basic Combat Factory.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Repair units now repair shields at the same rate as hull.<br />
** Outdated change from when personal shields cost metal to repair.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked cost of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
==== Golems and Arks ====<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem damage 1,000 -> 2,000, Sabot damage 2,000 -> 3,000, range 8000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem damage 700 -> 1,250, Sabot damage 1,500 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem speed 600 -> 1,000, damage 200 -> 350.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem damage 100,000 -> 200,000.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 450 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 50 -> 80, can only target mobile units, can't target high mass targets, costs 50 AIP to capture instead of 20, and is a Lone Wolf like the Hive Golem.<br />
** AI Botnet Golem has a lower chance to spawn on AI planets as well.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
** Note existing ones will still have their Fleet, and will kind of look a bit odd in the Intel Tab saying it's a Lone Wolf, even though it's still got a Fleet with it. New ones will be normal.<br />
<br />
* Standardised AI Golems to be 3x the durability and damage of a player Golem.<br />
** They were pretty close as is, apparently.<br />
** Also gave them proper costs now.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira damage 3,000 -> 7,000, now takes half damage for 5 seconds after using a wormhole, does bonus damage to shields and also has vampirism, similar to the Siphoner unit. <br />
<br />
* Thanatos single shot weapon damage 6,000 -> 12,000, Parasite Bolt damage 600 -> 900.<br />
<br />
* Ark One damage 350 -> 1050.<br />
<br />
* Orchid damage 7,000 -> 14,000, repair rate increased 50%, repair range doubled.<br />
<br />
* Gryn damage 6,000 -> 16,000, increased fleet unit construction rate 33%.<br />
<br />
* Ark AIP cost reduced from 20 to 15.<br />
<br />
* Reduced AI counterattack bonus for crippling some player Fleet centerpieces.<br />
<br />
==== Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Mass Combat Engineer starting Support Fleet design now uses the Rejuvenator Combat Factory instead.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting replacing this, as it was really unappealing.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.954 Hacking Log! ==<br />
(Released October 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* When you click on the Hacking icon in the resource bar you get a history of all the hacking points you've spent.<br />
** Nota Bene: This will only apply to hacks you do after you install this patch<br />
<br />
* Tweak the helping hands tooltip to mention leaving the marauders their own planets<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* For the hover planet info, explicitly call out if taking the planet would cause AIP, and show the AIP in Red to make it stand out. Also more explicitly call out minor faction owners<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the game was showing incorrect colours for enemy strength on galaxy screen if the planet was owned by a minor faction.<br />
** Thanks to Genrazian for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having partially claimed or hold-firing flagships could prevent building things<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bunch of typos all over the place<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for hunting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the tooltip for GCAs was lying to you about how many turrets they granted<br />
** Reported by RockyBst, Democracy and probably others<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Helping Hands quickstart to make sure the Nanocaust is your ally<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the fix and Genrazian for the impetus<br />
<br />
== Version 0.953 Hotfixes For Certain Linux + Hardware Combinations ==<br />
(Released October 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* On Vulkan on Linux in certain circumstances, there was some form of shader error in the Amplify Bloom rendering. That issue should now be fixed.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Just like windows has launch options allowing you to select between OpenGL and DirectX11, Linux now lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Vulkan - Experimental, and macOS lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Metal - Experimental.<br />
** This needs testing, and is a Steam client update only, not actually a change to the game.<br />
<br />
* Completely rebuilt the asset bundles and their projects to be based on Unity 2019.1.7, same as the main project has been for some time, and to make sure that they explicitly have Vulkan and Metal shader support built into themselves now that the game supports those new platforms.<br />
** This should hopefully solve the issues that we were still seeing with a few people using Vulkan on Linux, as well as potentially some "shader not compiled for this platform" issues with OpenGL on Linux for certain ships that were compiled against an older version of Unity.<br />
** This MAY also fix the Gyrn refractive glass not appearing in-game on any platform, although we haven't test this yet. It may be that we need to write our own shader for that, or update the one from Circonia Studios that we were using previously. Most likely it was an issue that was coming across because of different unity versions, though, we're not sure.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tutorial fix from Craig.<br />
<br />
* Enable strength icons with borders on the galaxy map. (I find it makes a big difference in readability when they overlap links of a similar color.)<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for implementing!<br />
<br />
* Updated a whole bunch of our shaders that were not going to properly work with Metal or Vulkan simply because they were being compiled with exclusive platforms set to directx11 and opengl.<br />
** These should now work, and include things like the icons for ships, and many of the ships themselves. But it hasn't been tested yet. It certainly won't hurt anything, anyhow.<br />
<br />
* The Ciconia Studio glass shaders that we were using for the Gyrn bubble have been updated to their latest version, which should provide better compatibility and hopefully have those actually show up again in-game.<br />
** Why those were showing up in the prep projects but not the actual game is something of a mystery. If this doesn't work, we'll just have to create our own refractive shader with rim lighting, but we'd rather not waste the time if this simple update works. Please do let us know!<br />
<br />
* Fixed one backer name in the credits (Kevin A Munoz), which did not translate over well into pure basic-ascii characters when we ran it through a handy processor (https://pteo.paranoiaworks.mobi/diacriticsremover/) to get rid of unicode characters not supported by our fonts.<br />
** If other folks find that their name got a bit mangled, please do let us know! There were SO many people's names that it was impossible to go through them all manually.<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the shaders for the Gyrn glass bits so that it uses a refractive shader based on Amplify Shader Editor and thus should actually render in these newer unity builds.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.952 A Little Help From Scary Friends ==<br />
(Released October 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Create a tip that points to the instructions in the wiki for how to create your own planet name list. I figure people will want to do this at some point.<br />
<br />
* Spelling/grammar and clarification improvements to some tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Craig and Badger for pointing things out.<br />
<br />
* We FINALLY have all of the kickstarter and backerkit backers thanked in the credits for the game. It's... um... a lot.<br />
<br />
* The credits screen has been split into three scrolling panels, rather than one giant one that scrolls everything. It's also now in two columns rather than three.<br />
** The left column is the same as it was before.<br />
** The center column now has just the top kickstarter backers, aka those at Mark III or higher levels of backing. That's the first 784 people, all backing at $44 or more.<br />
** The right column now has the Mark II and down backers, which is the remaining 2,264 people out of the 3,048 total backers.<br />
** These splits make it so that the scrollbars are actually sensitive enough that you can find what you're looking for. AND we alphabetized the backer names in each category, so that if you know your category you can find your name now.<br />
** Yeah this isn't really a top priority for the game in some ways, but it's a matter of showing respect for the people that made it possible in the first place. There are other kickstarter rewards for specific tiers, and some kickstarter stretch goals, that will happen post-1.0. But this is one of those basic "this needs to be in there for people on day 1 of launch" things.<br />
<br />
=== New "Helping Hands" Quick Start ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Quick Start to the Basics category, called Helping Hands. This really weighs the settings in the players favour, and is intended as an easy to win scenario that just lets you experience things with little stress.<br />
** Badger came up with this.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some changes to the out-of-date planet info representation<br />
** Thanks Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Some changes were made to make sure a player knows which Flagship is hacking (and doesn't try to make that flagship leave the planet)<br />
** Put in a line between the Hacker and the Target to really remind the player visually that the hacker is bound to the target (a great suggestion from Asteroid)<br />
** Add some text to the Hacking Notification reminding the player that the hacking flagship can't leave the system. <br />
*** Thanks to a bug report from kmunoz<br />
<br />
* Improve the hacking resource bar tooltip to show the number of hacking points spent per AI faction and the number of hacking points that will increase the hacking response level<br />
** This is something people have wanted for a while<br />
<br />
* Rather than confusingly opening a multiplayer submenu with little "coming soon" tooltips, the multiplayer button on the main menu now pops up a lengthy text note directly from Chris which explains the backstory and what is coming and a bit about the development process that led us here.<br />
** Big thanks to Craig for suggesting this.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting for showing an entity's world location.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug command to give all your fleets 1K Exp. Good for impatient people.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "level up" message for Planetary Fleets<br />
** Suggested by ArquebusX<br />
<br />
* Fix a nasty bug where the AI killing stacks could cause counterattack strength to increase enormously<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix an off by one error when showing the "What Level a Fleet will level up to next" message in the Fleet tab<br />
<br />
* Extra defensive entities seeded for the AI (like Golems for the Golemite) now patrol their planets in an imposing fashion, instead of just sitting in one spot.<br />
** Only affects new games<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when scrapping a command station<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debug handling in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations for a crash that could apparently happen during one of the tutorials for some people, and also put in extra debugging logic so that if it does happen again we'll know more precisely what the problem is. It should also no longer halt gameplay in general if such an error does happen.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer, related to GameCommands being null.<br />
** This is probably a problem with how GameCommands are being used somewhere, and might rear its head in the form of some desyncs in multiplayer when we get back to reimplementing that. Just one more reason why the desync auto-repair work we have planned is going to be so essential. It's hard to know if a bug like this comes from something a modder was doing, or a mistake on our own part, or what; but either way, the game needs to be resilient to that in both single player and multi player, and that's a good example of why our upcoming hybridized approach to lock-step versus sync-correcting the game (RTS versus action game styles, blended) is going to be well worth the wait.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game will prioritize Combat Fleets over Support Fleets when choosing the hacker. It will only use support fleets when there are no combat fleets on a planet<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Tutorial tweaks ====<br />
* Tutorials no longer display 'homeworld under attack' notifications, which aren't pertinent to any existing tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Autobuild settings no longer apply to tutorials; this is mostly so developers can test tutorials the way a new player would see them<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Threat Interactions ===<br />
* Some minor factions generate Threat that winds up just annoying players, in particular Anti-AI zombies.<br />
** Add an XML field that can be applied to any Faction that says 'any threat provoked by this faction will just go back to sleep once the enemies are gone'<br />
** Current factions with that field:<br />
*** Zombies<br />
*** Devourer<br />
*** Dyson Sphere<br />
*** Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Note that putting this field on the Human faction would make for an entertainingly confused AI, like fighting Guy Pearce from Memento.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The AI's planetary reinforcement cap can now increase as AIP increased (otherwise planets never really got stronger than they are at the beginning of the game except if Threat or subfleets wander through).<br />
** At difficulties <= 5, no change. At 6, the AI gets a 10% power increase per 100 AIP. At 7, 20%, difficulty 8-10 a 30% increase.<br />
<br />
* Cost of hacking Global Command Augmenter if you haven't paid the AIP for the planet reduced from 120 to 60.<br />
<br />
* Cost of Reroll ARS reduced from 80 to 20.<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to control AIP generation from allied factions<br />
** When you have allied factions like the Marauders or Nanocaust, when they kill command stations and so on it generates AIP. This is a balancing mechanism to keep these games from being too easy.<br />
** This can now be disabled mid-game. Disabling this makes the game much much easier, but should help in making some beginner-level quickstarts<br />
<br />
== Version 0.951 Hotfixes ==<br />
(Released October 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix typo in metal popup window<br />
<br />
* Don't let structures generate energy while you are still building them<br />
<br />
* Fix galaxy map possible/incoming wave animation being displayed for links between the AI and another faction than the player, even for unknown worlds and during map generation.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Fix null Reference when holding R on the C-view of a fleet you haven't captured yet. As a side-effect, the units highlighted in the R-view are now the ones on the currently selected planet, not necessarily the one the unit being viewed is on.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* When attacking an AI homeworld, killing all the guard posts is enough to cancel the counterattack, you don't also have to kill the AI King<br />
** Reported by zeusalmight and Nuc_Temeron on Steam<br />
<br />
* Further differentiate the lower AI difficulties by increasing their overconfidence ratio a good amount<br />
** This should make them much more willing to attack and fail.<br />
<br />
* Internally improved some of the documentation on why the sound effects play quite like they do when there's a voice effect and a sound effect playing at near the same time. This should solve some confusion that devs and modders could have.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== OS Compatibility ===<br />
<br />
* We've disabled "graphics jobs" in unity, as that may have been causing some problems on a very few machines (certain older intel cards, mainly not windows boxes).<br />
<br />
* We've updated linux to now default to using Vulkan rather than OpenGLCore.<br />
** Vulkan is only able to be triggered by directly having it be the default, and not by the command line, so this is how we had to do it.<br />
** On linux, you can use the command line -force-glcore to make it use OpenGL again if Vulkan is giving you trouble. But now you have a choice about it.<br />
<br />
* On OSX, we now support Metal, although it still uses OpenGLCore by default (and actually in this case we can't give any definite assurances that Metal will work completely correctly).<br />
** But if you want to give it a shot for whatever reason, you can enable that with force-gfx-metal in the command line to make it use metal instead of the default OpenGLCore. Previously that command line prompt would fail.<br />
<br />
* More info: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html<br />
<br />
=== Audio tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the 'ai wave arrives' taunt wasn't being played for some code paths<br />
* warden and hunter only taunt when they think they will win.<br />
* Correctly play the AI killed your command station taunt (the game will 80% of the time choose a taunt and 20% will choose the old 'planet lost' audio).<br />
* Don't spam the game with 'player command station under attack' notifications <br />
* Don't play more than one 'player ship constructor killed' message per planet per attack. This taunt currently only triggers on the death of a Factory. Previously you could get 3 taunts from the 3 factories on a military command station planet, which seemed a bit excessive especially since you also usually get the taunt for the command station too.<br />
** Possibly these messages should be changed to be for the crippling of a combat factory instead of killing a factory.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the AI taunts so that a specific taunt group can't play more frequently than every 30 seconds, as opposed to every 4.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.950 First Press Build ==<br />
(Released October 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* More work on adding support for numStacksKilled when handling death effects. Should get most everything now<br />
** Including Dark Spire, Metabolization, Zombification, etc...<br />
<br />
* Slightly tweak the Dyson Antagonizer warp in time<br />
<br />
* The Dyson Antagonizer now prefers to spawn on lower mark planets until the AIP is reasonably high<br />
** This behaviour now matches Instigator Bases<br />
<br />
* If you have a fleet in Load Mode but some elements of that fleet are on remote planets, those elements will try to find the Flagship and load themselves, instead of just sitting there<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures and don't want to click more than necessary<br />
<br />
* Non-Combatants like Engineers and Transports no longer cause Guard Posts to release their ships<br />
** So if you have a fleet in Transport mode with all ships transported, flying through AI planets should no longer cause the AI to generate Threat. I believe this was really confusing players, since the game encourages Deep Striking, but Deep Striking was releasing tons of Threat from planets you never attacked<br />
<br />
* Add a quickstart from community member Nuc_Temeron.<br />
** His description:<br />
*** In this scenario there are two level 7 AIs (Thief and Ensnarer) with Shark B enabled, which gives the Hunter fleets a quick surge of strength whenever you lose a base. Defend your territory well! You will have to depend on your allies, the Human Resistance Fighters (Intensity 8), to overcome these greedy swarms! The AIs are also supported by shipments from Astro Trains at Intensity 8 so you can't stay on defense for long.<br />
*** The Macrophage has also infested this zone at Intensity 6 and is hostile to all.<br />
*** The player starts with the Doorkicker Fleet, the Minelayer Battlestation and the Overloader Combat Factory in an 80-star Octopus zone.<br />
<br />
* Some Tutorial tweaks from Puffin<br />
<br />
* Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet<br />
<br />
=== Newly integrated AI taunts ===<br />
* 16 for AI Destroys player Command Station.<br />
* 13 for AI Destroys Player Golem.<br />
* 5 for AI Recaptures Planet.<br />
* 9 for AI Sends Wave.<br />
* 2 for Player Frees Dyson Sphere.<br />
* 10 for Hunter Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 8 for Overlord Transforms.<br />
* 12 for Player Claims Flagship.<br />
* 10 for Player Claims Golem.<br />
* 14 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (High Mark Planet).<br />
* 16 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (Low Mark Planet).<br />
* 5 for Player Destroys Warden Fleet Base.<br />
* 4 for Player Finds AI Overlord.<br />
* 5 for Player Fortress Destroyed.<br />
* 12 for Player Home Command Station Under Attack.<br />
* 7 for Player Stationary Constructor Destroyed.<br />
* 19 for AI Launches Counterattack.<br />
* 14 for Warden Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 1 for Warden Fleet Retreats (unused for now).<br />
** This is a total of 174 voice lines in 18 categories!<br />
** Thanks to Nathan Frisson for his awesome job voicing the AI in these clips; to a variety of players and staff for contributing fun lines for him to say; to Pablo Vega for processing this out so that he sounds wonderfully menacing, as well as splitting the files, removing mouth sounds and breaths and so on that would make it not sound like an AI; to Badger and Puffin for selecting the best takes and organizing them properly so that we could get them into our sound pipeline; and to Badger for actually wiring up the parts of the code that trigger these.<br />
<br />
* This obviously needs additional testing; if you think a line should be playing and it's not then a mantis report + save game would be appreciated!<br />
<br />
* There is now a dedicated audio bus to the AI taunting you, and it has its own gain settings and so on that are a bit louder than the "routine voices" that you hear elsewhere.<br />
** This also now will let us mix the AI voice in however we choose to do so.<br />
** We have a separate voice mixer for the AI voice lines now, and since those are much more complicated in terms of effects we have those coming in as a barely-compressed PCM stereo track. Downsampling, adaptive sampling, and/or mono makes it muddy fast.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* When unloading ships from a Transport, they inherit "time spent on planet" from the Transport so you can't cheese First Few Seconds On Planet bonus effects<br />
** Thanks to Smaug on Steam for reporting and Puffin for testing the fix<br />
<br />
* Remove some outdated text in the Scouting objective tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Telkir for reporting<br />
<br />
* Prevent Astro Train objectives from leaking the location of trains you shouldn't be able to see<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where for non-AI homeworld planets, the AI was spawning extra Guard Posts instead of Dire Guardians<br />
** This should make things much more interesting. Note that dires are still limited to high mark planets<br />
<br />
* Fix an Off by One Error when the game was telling you what level a fleet was<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference when ships would try to join the Praetorian Guard (ie the AI overlord is being attacked)<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the "metal income per planet" display was showing inaccurate information<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where it was much harder than necessary to maneouver flagships in tight spaces. If you wound up clicking on an allied unit the flagship's rebuild metal flow would make it try to assist, which is ... unhelpful.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fleets in Load Mode no longer deploy drones. This enables you to sneak combat factories past high-mark planets without the drones triggering lots of threat<br />
** Requested by overzot on steam<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the visual line for ships claiming other ships was not displaying. Turns out an image that was once white that we were using as part of its material got changed to black at some point, thus making it effectively invisible because of the math of how the shader was run.<br />
** We took this change to go ahead and make the claim lines more attractive in general, and they now have a cyan-greenish look to them, but double-beamed, so that they look kinda like the repair lines but still distinct.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and BadgerBadger for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Added in an OnLoad from savegame fix that should prevent stationary ships from being twitchy and thinking they should pursue you. This bit is untested.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game no longer gives a harmless "Could not do Shutdown for network, the engine network interface was null" message if the game is shutting down prematurely for whatever reason.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor issue where the game was reporting that your target framerate and vysnc count were being set right before they were, rather than right after. If it was failing, you'd have had no idea.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs the system info about itself far earlier in the load process, to help with cases where potentially we're unable to load things for some reason; we'll still get the system info in the debug files from now on.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The game's bootup log now is all-inclusive about all the steps that it takes, inside ArcenDebugLog.txt, so that in the event of a problem we now find out when that happens.<br />
** This makes for a much longer log every time you start up the game, but it's not something that is visible to players unless they go into their debug logs for whatever. And the information from it is definitely useful.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs what version it is on as soon as it can, but NOT before it can (heh), which it was temporarily doing on an internal build when we started logging system data really super early.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoNotShowAndAlsoDoNotSendToUnityLog verbosity level that lets us skip showing certain things in the unity log but still send it to the ArcenDebugLog.txt file. This is a big deal for us in terms of not having our unity editor logs flooded with stuff that we'd want to collect in a bug report but don't need to see every last time.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of selection issues on the galaxy map with fleets not always deselecting properly and instead sometimes being additive, etc.<br />
** It's actually a number of bugs all in one, because basically there was some older per-planet logic that was still being used here (and on planets) from back when cross-planet selection was only kinda-sorta a thing. Now it all works consistently galaxy-wide, or at least should. But if you see any remaining (or new) bugs, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif and Asteroid for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, hitting the escape key would just clear your selection on the current planet. Now it clears the selection on all the planets, as it should.<br />
** We didn't see the "when a fleet traverse a wormhole, it's selection is lost. This issue only occurs if the selection was made in the planet view. If you select the fleet on the galaxy map, it works correctly." issue, but probably what it really was was the above one. Or something fixed in the batch right before that. If it's still something anyone else sees, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with the planet links where their collision capsules were intersecting with the collision boxes of planets and ship icons on the galaxy map.<br />
** This was having the effect of making it so that quite often you couldn't select specific ships except at certain zoom levels, or couldn't click planets or ships reliably in general (zoom level and scale of icons did play a role here also).<br />
** Basically, the solution was to make it so that we first raycast to find ONLY the planets and ships/fleets, if there are any under the mouse cursor. These use one set of physx layers.<br />
** Only if we don't find anything with that first raycast do we then do a second raycast against the new physx layer that the links now use. Now it doesn't matter if the capsules for the links overlap with planets or ship icons (no way to stop that, really), because it will ALWAYS give preference to the other icons first, and only go for the links between planets if the icons fail.<br />
** Thanks to Smaug, I-KP, and Pat for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Energy Usage bar now gives detailed feedback for what is consuming your energy (broken down by fleet) and what planets are generating the most energy<br />
** Requested by darkarchon<br />
<br />
* The Tooltip for Tech Vault objectives now list which ship lines will benefit from hacking the tech vault<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* For the Flagship/GCA objectives, show the count of ship lines before listing the ship lines so I don't have to count them<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* Improvements to the R-Click "Strong Against" view:<br />
** Fixed damage bonuses listed in this view not always matching the mirror "weak against" view.<br />
** Show only units you discovered on the map, leading to a lot less clutter early-game.<br />
** Sort units that are in the same system as the friendly unit you're examining at the beginning of the list, and bold them.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the code and kmunoz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* CPAs always now give 10 minutes warning; given how impactful they are, a long warning period is justified. Previously they were getting less warning time than a regular Wave by default<br />
<br />
* When a Fleet levels up, only say "Some ship types may level up with the fleet" if the fleet actually contains ship lines that will level up<br />
** This was annoying Badger, since most ship lines don't level up anymore but the game made you think they did.<br />
<br />
* New icons for the Tech Menu!<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
* Better alignment for hotkey indicators on standing order buttons and for the icons in the build sidebar<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
=== Changes for lower AI difficulties (<= 5) ===<br />
<br />
* There were some complaints that there wasn't enough differentiation between high and low mark AIs, so we're making some changes to make lower mark games have an easier feel in a number of ways<br />
* Seed extra ARSs and Tech Vaults in the galaxy<br />
* Seed more low-mark planets near the player<br />
* Nerf AI income <br />
* Nerf AI defenses<br />
* Make the Hunter and Warden fleets dumber by allowing them to trickle into a battle piecemeal instead of waiting for reinforcements<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with hazxan on Steam<br />
<br />
== Version 0.900 Custom Fleets With Empty Slots ==<br />
(Released October 11th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Instead of spawning instantly, a Dyson Antagonizer now warps in over time, giving the player a chance to destroy it before the Sphere gets Antagonized.<br />
** Requested by zeus almighty. You'd think he could have just struck it with a lightning bolt or seduced it in the form of a goose...<br />
<br />
=== Tutorial and Tips Work ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Tutorial 99", which is even in its description just a note to be sure and check out the "How to Play" section of the game and other resources.<br />
** Since various people seem to miss those other resources but easily see the tutorials list, having this always be the last tutorial in the list no matter how many other tutorials we add seemed like a good idea.<br />
<br />
* Also got rid of the "Example Tutorial" that was junking up the tutorials screen, since now there are plenty of much more involved examples that are also actually fully-functional tutorials.<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip under the Modding section to explain how to make your own Quick Starts<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units sometimes were waiting out of range instead of closing to firing distance<br />
** Reported by kmunoz and Telcontar on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where flagships could just wander away from where you told them to go<br />
** Reported by kmunoz.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen in the wave notifications.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really rare nullref that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debugging to fix ships not rendering right in some rare circumstances and thus causing a cascade of all things not rendering. Now it should fail gracefully if it fails at all, and give us more information on where it failed, then let you keep playing without making everything disappear.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== "Custom Fleets", Aka The Remedy For Control Groups ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed things up so that fleet flagships can be constructed from the build sidebar, or other self-constructing means. This was never possible before in the engine, turns out.<br />
<br />
* There are 9 possible fleets that you can create at any of your command stations, now. Each one has 7 empty ship lines in it, and they are 3x cloaked, 3x velocity (fast flagship), and 3x workhorse (normal flagship).<br />
** These can be constructed at any point and you can start putting some of your specialized ships into them via ship swapping. The interface makes this clear and suggests it, as well. Basically for people who wanted to pull aside just their melee ships or cloaked raiders or whatever, now you can do that; this lets you control "sub fleets" in effect, by splitting your existing ship lines among more fleets, exchanging empty slots for ship lines you find elsewhere.<br />
** This was something that Chris went back and forth on a lot of times in terms of how to handle control groups that were more specific than 1+ fleets at a time. Ultimately the display and automation benefits of having control groups always stay linked to just 1+ fleets outweighed the benefits of changing that; but in order to allow for players to have smaller custom fleets as they may desire, activated by control group as they may desire, here's this new feature.<br />
** This is, of course, in addition to the hotkeys for quickly selecting units of specific criteria a while ago (cloaked units, melee units, whatever). This is for when you want to make a permanent or semi-permanent sub-grouping of ships for whatever reason (of which there are many valid ones to have).<br />
** Thanks to a lot of people, including Nameless Terror, ulu, Asteroid, and others for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== UI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Standing order buttons now display their key shortcut on the button itself, provided it can be expressed in a single letter (so X and V are displayed, Delete isn't).<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Science bar now has icons for the various techs.<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Wave progress indicator on galaxy map links now animates smoothly instead of once every second. (No associated visual at the moment, Chris didn't find the proposed particle effect good enough.)<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* For all mobile flagships and citadels (not lone flagships, though), there is a new "Flagship Movement Mode" in their fleet status window.<br />
** Your flagships are usually precious enough that you don't want them to roam around in pursuit mode or attack-move mode. HOWEVER, you will often want to set them into those modes in order to make any ships they construct pop out in those modes.<br />
** When this is set to"Stay Put Unless Direct Order", it acts as you might expect and causes the flagship to ignore things like Pursuit mode, but for ships it creates to be put in that mode (and obey it).<br />
** When this is set to "Roam If Instructed" mode, the flagship will pursue when in pursuit mode, attack when in attack-move mode, and so on. This can be useful for Arks and Golems in some cases, or even for things like Combat Factories (on peaceful worlds).<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Refinement of Fleets]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Pre-And-Post_Launch_Polish&diff=37035AI War 2:Pre-And-Post Launch Polish2019-11-01T16:43:20Z<p>Ovalcircle1: </p>
<hr />
<div>== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop ([https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/ more info here]).<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
The game is solid at this point and something we're really proud of and that players are having fun with. But inevitably, the more people we have playing it, the more things get brought to our attention to refine and make as smooth and fun as possible. This is basically a period we've set aside for doing that sort of thing, rather than focusing on any major new content drops or other major new features.<br />
<br />
There may still be the odd major new thing, who knows -- sometimes the volunteers or modders wind up creating something and we're certainly not going to turn that down! But by the start of this phase the game was mature and really huge already, so focusing on polish seems like the way to best serve the largest group of people.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.004 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* Toggling objective importance is now done with a Right Click. Left click keeps the old behaviour (usually centering you on the planet in question)<br />
** This was suggested by a few people on discord I think? I don't remember who<br />
<br />
* You are no longer allowed to hack an ARS for a ship line if that fleet already has the ship line<br />
** If there is any way to merge ship lines then people will want full ability to merge/split ship lines, which is not something Chris wants to allow. So for consistency's sake, this is being removed.<br />
<br />
* Death effect damage is no longer a strangely high number. Actually, this change allows for a lot more diversification in how effective units are at applying it. The start of this is done, with more tuning to follow.<br />
** This is most likely a somewhat large shift in the balance of it, which feels a tad necessary? Quite a few stories of mass hordes.<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference when calculating energy usage<br />
** Reported by Edmaniac<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential bug in the experimental pursuit mode implementation that could potentially cause issues in "normal" mode<br />
<br />
* Structures that are under construction shouldn't generate AIP anymore if killed<br />
** reported by Chthon and zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference related to the Spire Objective<br />
** Thanks to donblas for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix some confusion about killing reconquest command stations if you haven't paid the AIP price for that planet yet. It now correctly charges you AIP and lets you scout. The tooltip for such a reconquest command station tells you what's happening<br />
** Thanks to zeus for reporting<br />
<br />
* The Hunter and Warden fleets now get decloaking ships, in the hopes of preventing permanent scouting by cloaked units<br />
** From a discussion on discord I think?<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Destablilize Exogalactice Wormhole hack wasn't correctly killing the wormhole<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for the bug report<br />
<br />
* On particularly large maps (> 120 planets), increase the places that Officer Fleets are allowed to spawn<br />
<br />
* Different AI Difficulties now increase the mark level at different AIP amounts. As a result of this, different AIs can be at different mark levels.<br />
** Suggested by Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
=== Instigator Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Instigators now have a permanent notification (like wave notifications)<br />
** Note this reuses the Wormhole Invasion icon for the notification for the moment<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Instigators no longer show a Cumulative Effect, just a description of what the effect does and how many times it has fired.<br />
** The units for Cumulative Effect weren't meaningful to anyone who wasn't a developer, and it just confused people<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Buffed Astro Train durability and damage a bit.<br />
<br />
* Increased self construction rate of Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon reload time 4s -> 6s, damage 1,810 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Gave Forcefield Frigates the same priority as Forcefield Generators.<br />
** So the AI will ignore it in general if there are unprotected targets to go after.<br />
** Might cause a weird thing with Siphoners, but see how it goes?<br />
<br />
* Increased Hull Tech cost by 2,500.<br />
<br />
* Increased durability of things like Raid Engines, Alarm Posts, Data Centers, and Co Processors.<br />
<br />
* Major Data Center only reduces AIP by 60, and increases by 90 on death.<br />
<br />
* Increased chance of wormhole Tachyon Sentinels.<br />
<br />
* Doorkicker Starting Fleet now has Pulsar Tanks in place of MLRS Corvettes, and Vanguards in place of Grenade Launcher Corvettes. Also removed 1 of the starting Siege Frigates.<br />
** This Fleet had an issue in that it had crazy synergy, with it being mostly Splash and Heavy Tech, plus not really fitting the Doorkicker name much. Both Pulsars and Vanguards have Doorkicker like abilities, and since these units can properly attack single targets, 1 Siege Frigate can be safely removed without impacting the Fleet too much, as these were apparently their own issue.<br />
<br />
==== Economy And Engineering ====<br />
<br />
* Drastically reduced the assist construction and repair rate of Engineers.<br />
** It was possible for these to eventually end up assisting Factories to absurd amounts - actually a good bit more than the Factory.<br />
<br />
* Metal Harvesters income 80 -> 60, amount gained per mark 40 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Station income gained per mark 400 -> 150.<br />
** While the player does have less income, the rate at which it can be spent is also much lower, so it's likely the player would start to noticeably lose a battle and retreat a good while before depleting their reserves.<br />
** Also, while we don't want people to be sitting around for ages waiting after a fleetwipe for it to replenish, it was also rather silly that you could do things like, to quote someone "Bleed out the praetorian guard by slapping it with wads of cash".<br />
<br />
* Reduced energy cost of Turrets a bit.<br />
<br />
==== Eyes ====<br />
<br />
* Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships<br />
** This makes Eyes pretty useless against minor factions. Unclear what (if anything) should be done about that.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid.<br />
<br />
* Eyes are now MK7.<br />
** Mostly important for the Ion Eye.<br />
<br />
* Tripled range of Plasma Eye.<br />
** Is now planet wide range, like the Ion Eye. No more sneaking about out of range.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Eye damage tripled, max targets hit before spreading damage reduced to a third.<br />
** Means it can focus a lot more on single targets than before.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now works on albedo of 0.4.<br />
** Yes, this means it can target most Frigates now. Eyes check Fleets, and not units, so this is possible. Also lets it target a few more Strikecraft.<br />
<br />
* Ion Eye now has splash damage on each shot. Radius of 1,000, hitting 5 targets.<br />
** Done this way instead of just increasing shot count, as that many shots could be a bit too bright and painful to look at. Simple enough to change.<br />
<br />
==== Flagships ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly reduced Transport Flagship priority.<br />
** AI should focus more on killing the actual combat units around rather than chasing an unarmed ship and getting shot to bits during it.<br />
** Combined with the far weaker Engineers reducing the fleet replenishment rate to more...reasonable speeds, hopefully this prevents a lot of attritioning?<br />
<br />
* Reduced durability of Transport Flagships.<br />
** Mostly applicable during deepstrikes.<br />
<br />
* Differentiated the Transport Flagship types:<br />
** Normal ones are the same (including the above).<br />
** Cloaked ones are now a good bit slower.<br />
** Fast ones now have less health.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* A variety of bugfixes and improvements to the internal hacking logic.<br />
<br />
* Flagships now move much more slowly when hacking<br />
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting that you could just run away from the nanocaust hack response<br />
<br />
* Increased Cost of Intra-Galactic-Coordinator Hack (120 if owe AIP, 60 without).<br />
<br />
* More hacks now have an escalating cost to them (1.2x what it was last time).<br />
<br />
* Shortened and cheapened the Ion Cannon and Mass Driver hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased cost of Grant Ship Line and Grant Tech hacks.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully improved the difficulty of the Super Terminal.<br />
** This seriously'll need more feedback. There are so many variables in it that whatever test games Puffin has is probably missing something else.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of Convert ARS to Science.<br />
<br />
* Some minor duration changes to a few.<br />
<br />
* Added Exo-Waves on completion to a few hacks.<br />
<br />
* Increased response strength of quite a few AI hacks.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.003 Sortable Objectives ==<br />
(Released October 28th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where ARS hacks were allowing you to get 7 ship lines instead of 6<br />
** Thanks to Vault for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix an OBOB where we were reporting inconsistent stack numbers in the hover entity info text<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* New installations of the game now save 3 autosaves instead of 1<br />
** Suggested by yupyip<br />
<br />
* Flagships in Hold Fire Mode no longer deploy drones<br />
** SUggested by CWW256 on discord<br />
<br />
* Clicking on an Objective will now tag it with an Importance. Clicking once makes an Objective High importance, putting it at the top of the displayed list. Clicking again will make it Low importance, putting that objective at the bottom. Clicking a third time makes it Normal.<br />
** Suggested by Greeniguana<br />
<br />
* Add some defensive code to hoverEntity and fix a possible null reference<br />
** Thanks to kerzain for reporting<br />
<br />
* Tutorial 4 now mentions you can hover on the AIP amount on the top bar for some more information.<br />
** Thanks to Potkeny in Discord for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology hack now mentions not increasing the cost of unlocking it with Science.<br />
<br />
* Hack Intra-Galactic Coordinator and Hack Global Command Augmenter now note exactly what the reduced cost is if you have paid the AIP cost for that planet.<br />
<br />
=== Visual Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Science resource bit at the top now has the same blue colour for all the amounts, rather than being a light green, so it's consistent with every other mention.<br />
<br />
* Metal section of the top bar now has actual proper colouring.<br />
<br />
* Cost to fully extract all the science from a planet is now in green, like most hacks are.<br />
** Thanks to GophTheGreat for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Sabotage Hack now mentions it doesn't cause an AIP increase for destroying structures which would normally do so.<br />
** Thanks to Ranakastrasz for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Improved the Experience tooltip information to have the correct logic and perhaps read a little bit better.<br />
<br />
* The "Ally to AI" setting description now explicitly says that all player-allied factions are also allied.<br />
** From a discussion with Astra on discord<br />
<br />
* Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.<br />
** Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Hacking resource hovertext on the top bar now has the hacking point amounts in green rather than a red.<br />
<br />
* AIP hovertext on the top bar has some minor colour additions, as well as an explanation of what the AIP Floor actually is, as well as stating reduction is never wasted.<br />
** Thanks to Nuc_Temeron, Halfshell cat, right01, amblingalong and Pexpy in Steam Discussion for prompting this.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines now show on the galaxy map.<br />
** Suggested by gigastar in Discord.<br />
<br />
* Hunter Waves option is renamed to Threat Waves, and description updated to be clearer.<br />
** They never actually joined the Hunter Fleet immediately - they were threat, so it was rather in error.<br />
<br />
* Added some information about how threat is generated, and it eventually joining the Hunter Fleet to the info displayed by hovering over the top bar area.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Decoy Drone damage halved, tripled build time, health reduced 25%.<br />
** Puffin was finding these were a bit absurd in extended practice. More testing required.<br />
<br />
* Grant Technology Hack cost increased to 20.<br />
<br />
* The Engineer and Factory changes from previous, as those were missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 1.002 ARSes, Instigators, and Tech Vaults, Oh My ==<br />
(Released October 25th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* ALL of these changes are thanks to Badger and Puffin. Chris was working on the world's longest AMA for some reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/dmhlu6/ama_i_am_chris_park_founder_of_arcen_games_and/<br />
<br />
* Add some new Quick Starts by community member zeusalmighty<br />
<br />
* Experimental Targeting Change<br />
** Under Galaxy Settings -> Units there's now a setting to enable/disable a new pursuit mode.<br />
** This mode makes ships prefer to kill all nearby units before moving on; hopefully it will make Drones less apt to go aggro guard posts everywhere.<br />
*** Looking for player feedback on this<br />
*** This also will affect the way AI ships will fight, so I'm loooking for feedback on that aspect as well<br />
<br />
=== Balance Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagships now cost very little energy.<br />
** This was originally so they would be hurt more by Nucleophilic units, but you can usually just micro them around and that's...not really fun or interesting. So just greatly reduce it, since you were otherwise being penalised for using the custom ones.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and seemingly others for bringing up.<br />
<br />
* The Human Resistance Fighters now help less often in battles, so it feels more rare/special when they do. They also can't go back to a planet for at least 15 minutes after their last time there.<br />
** I forget who asked for this (sorry). They used to attack about 60% of the time, now it's more like 30%<br />
<br />
* Macrophages now need more metal to do things on Hostile To Players Only mode. Also decrease base telium income when that telium has harvesters on the map; harvesting should be the primary form of income<br />
** Thanks to zeus for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Crippled flagships now have a 5 minute delay until they are eligible to be repaired. This is to make crippling a Bigger Deal in battles where you might have engineers<br />
** Note that taking the crippled flagship out of combat (ie to another planet where there are no enemies) will reset the repair delay<br />
*** From a discussion about flagships on discord<br />
<br />
* Engineers and Combat Engineers have less health, and are also much higher target priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories are much higher priority for the AI.<br />
** From discussion about support fleets on discord.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a few problems with quickstarts<br />
** Thanks to Arnaud for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Dark Spire could give errors after it has killed all the players and AIs in the game.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for bringing about the triumph of the Dark Spire<br />
<br />
* Fix a strange null reference exception in some findHumanKing code in the game lobby<br />
** Spotted by Nuc_Temeron on stream<br />
<br />
* Fixed Mini Cluster Bombs being swappable. Woops.<br />
** Thanks to Mayheim on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Launching with OpenGL instead of DirectX11 can be problematic for some people, so on GOG the default launch is now DirectX11. On Steam it still shows you the option of which you want, but starts with DirectX11 as the default.<br />
** Thanks to Ronin Storm and Pheespud for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Replace a few mentions of FRD with Pursuit Mode in the Settings<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the Auto-Kite setting<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx<br />
<br />
* The button in the lower left that just said "Coming Soon" now says "Chat Menu. Coming Soon" so it's clear what it is.<br />
* Include mention of the shortcut for toggling between the galaxy map/planet screen in the tooltip for the planet name in the top left.<br />
* Improve the tooltip for the clock to mention the buttons that control game speed<br />
* Add more colours to the incoming wave tooltip<br />
** From a remarkably uncivil and poorly written screed on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the explanation for the Praetorian Guard<br />
** Thanks to unicurse for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window available when you click on the Threat icon in the resource bar now shows threat in traditional Strength units (with the raw value divided by 1K).<br />
** Thanks to Thotimx and Puffin for pointing this out<br />
<br />
* The 'Threat Detail' window now shows the total visible hunter/warden strength in the galaxy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Nanocaust ships were winding up being counted as Threat incorrectly<br />
<br />
* Improve the colouring in the science tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for reporting<br />
<br />
* Some tutorial improvements. Includes a bunch of colour.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for pointing it out.<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the AIP history display when claiming structures<br />
<br />
* If a wave is against a minor faction that owns a planet, the game now tries harder to show the faction name in the tooltip. <br />
* If a wave is not against a player planet, the icon will turn grey more consistently.<br />
<br />
* Alarm Posts now show up on the galaxy map.<br />
** Pretty neat idea.<br />
** Thanks to Jaridan on Steam for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Add some colour to the counterattack notification hovertext to improve readability.<br />
** Thanks to yupyip for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the hacking description for local watch hacks<br />
** Thanks to Volatar for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Show better colours for zombies in tooltips<br />
** Thanks to yupyip, Apthorpe and darkarchon<br />
<br />
=== ARS Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Improve the 'cant hack due to too many ship lines' message for the ARS hack to explicitly call out which fleet you are using, and mention that the hack is done by the closest flagship<br />
** Some people on Steam were finding this confusing.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where custom fleets couldn't hack ARS for more ship lines<br />
** Thanks to zeus and Chromatism for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Lone Wolf Fleets could hack ARS<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where things like Hydra Heads were being counted as ship lines for the purposes of an ARS hack<br />
** This bug has popped up in so many places, fixing it is like, well, killing the heads on a hydra<br />
*** Thanks to yupyip for reporting this one<br />
<br />
* ARS Reroll hacks cost less Hacking Points but have a stronger response<br />
<br />
* ARS to Science conversion hack now grants more science<br />
<br />
* ARSs are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to ARS hacks, given that every other changes constitute a buff to the player<br />
<br />
=== Instigator Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Some nerfs to Instigators; decrease their power and make the bases spawn less frequently<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Instigator Bases weren't correctly tracking their cumulative effect<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting I look at this<br />
<br />
* Fix some punctuation issues with Instigator Base descriptions<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases now report how many times the effect has triggered<br />
<br />
=== Tech Vault Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The "Turn Tech Vault into Science" hack now grants a bit more science<br />
<br />
* Add a "Reroll Tech granted by Tech Vault" hack<br />
<br />
* Hacking a Tech Vault for science no longer increases the cost of the next upgrade<br />
** It seems like everyone wants this<br />
<br />
* Tech Vaults are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time<br />
** A small nerf to Tech Vault hacks, given that every other changes constitute a strong buff to the player<br />
<br />
== Version 1.001 Official Game Launch! ==<br />
(Released October 21st, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add some Tips with a brief explanation of what the AI sub-fleets (Warden, hunter etc) do.<br />
<br />
* The first time you click the Single Player menu (after this build), it gives you a modal prompt asking you if you'd like to do the tutorials first, or if you'd like to just play. This should help prevent people from missing that there are tutorials.<br />
** We did NOT add the tutorials to the Single Player menu, however, as that just gets very cluttered and makes the whole menu harder to read.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The Tutorials button on the right side of the main menu is now colorized and flashes very subtly every half second between two almost-identical colors. This should be much more noticeable without being obnoxious, and without cluttering up something like the single-player menu.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid and Badger for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the hovertext for a command station in the sidebar reported the wrong number of turrets<br />
** Thanks to Wurfell on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The AIP history for games begun from Quick Starts will now show AIP change from you as from your username, not "Puffin"<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare exception that can happen in EmitOnAOEParticles.<br />
** It will now log more info, and just do so silently, and not actually impede play like it previously did.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Polish ===<br />
<br />
* Super Terminal now mentions the Exo-Galactic Strikes.<br />
** Thanks to kocur4d for prompting.<br />
<br />
* Don't let the AI launch mini-waves after exploration/watching hacks<br />
** It was confusing. Thanks to Puffin for report.<br />
<br />
* The Metal launch option on OSX has been removed, as that was still launching under OpenGL anyway.<br />
<br />
* Non-Steam builds no longer try to log into Steam and complain in the log if they can't, and nor do they show "Not logged into Steam" on the main menu.<br />
** This gave the impression that the Steam client was required, when it definitely in no way is. These behaviors do still exist for Steam copies of the game, but just so that you can tell if you're not logged in right for whatever reason.<br />
<br />
* Improve the Instigator Base description to explicitly state that the base effect ends with the death of the base<br />
** Suggested by Apthorpe and Echthelon<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The Dark Spire Ward now instantly blows up any DS ships that enter the planet. The Ward's description has been updated to match<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the report.<br />
<br />
* Doubled range of Devourer Golem.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for bringing up the Devourer.<br />
<br />
* Doubled drone count of the basic Combat Factory.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Repair units now repair shields at the same rate as hull.<br />
** Outdated change from when personal shields cost metal to repair.<br />
<br />
* Tweaked cost of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
==== Golems and Arks ====<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem damage 1,000 -> 2,000, Sabot damage 2,000 -> 3,000, range 8000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem damage 700 -> 1,250, Sabot damage 1,500 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem speed 600 -> 1,000, damage 200 -> 350.<br />
<br />
* Artillery Golem damage 100,000 -> 200,000.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 450 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 50 -> 80, can only target mobile units, can't target high mass targets, costs 50 AIP to capture instead of 20, and is a Lone Wolf like the Hive Golem.<br />
** AI Botnet Golem has a lower chance to spawn on AI planets as well.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
** Note existing ones will still have their Fleet, and will kind of look a bit odd in the Intel Tab saying it's a Lone Wolf, even though it's still got a Fleet with it. New ones will be normal.<br />
<br />
* Standardised AI Golems to be 3x the durability and damage of a player Golem.<br />
** They were pretty close as is, apparently.<br />
** Also gave them proper costs now.<br />
<br />
* Rorqual Hegira damage 3,000 -> 7,000, now takes half damage for 5 seconds after using a wormhole, does bonus damage to shields and also has vampirism, similar to the Siphoner unit. <br />
<br />
* Thanatos single shot weapon damage 6,000 -> 12,000, Parasite Bolt damage 600 -> 900.<br />
<br />
* Ark One damage 350 -> 1050.<br />
<br />
* Orchid damage 7,000 -> 14,000, repair rate increased 50%, repair range doubled.<br />
<br />
* Gryn damage 6,000 -> 16,000, increased fleet unit construction rate 33%.<br />
<br />
* Ark AIP cost reduced from 20 to 15.<br />
<br />
* Reduced AI counterattack bonus for crippling some player Fleet centerpieces.<br />
<br />
==== Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Mass Combat Engineer starting Support Fleet design now uses the Rejuvenator Combat Factory instead.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting replacing this, as it was really unappealing.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.954 Hacking Log! ==<br />
(Released October 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* When you click on the Hacking icon in the resource bar you get a history of all the hacking points you've spent.<br />
** Nota Bene: This will only apply to hacks you do after you install this patch<br />
<br />
* Tweak the helping hands tooltip to mention leaving the marauders their own planets<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* For the hover planet info, explicitly call out if taking the planet would cause AIP, and show the AIP in Red to make it stand out. Also more explicitly call out minor faction owners<br />
** From a conversation with Genrazian<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the game was showing incorrect colours for enemy strength on galaxy screen if the planet was owned by a minor faction.<br />
** Thanks to Genrazian for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having partially claimed or hold-firing flagships could prevent building things<br />
** Thanks to listsandlists for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bunch of typos all over the place<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for hunting!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the tooltip for GCAs was lying to you about how many turrets they granted<br />
** Reported by RockyBst, Democracy and probably others<br />
<br />
* Tweaks to the Helping Hands quickstart to make sure the Nanocaust is your ally<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the fix and Genrazian for the impetus<br />
<br />
== Version 0.953 Hotfixes For Certain Linux + Hardware Combinations ==<br />
(Released October 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* On Vulkan on Linux in certain circumstances, there was some form of shader error in the Amplify Bloom rendering. That issue should now be fixed.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Just like windows has launch options allowing you to select between OpenGL and DirectX11, Linux now lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Vulkan - Experimental, and macOS lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Metal - Experimental.<br />
** This needs testing, and is a Steam client update only, not actually a change to the game.<br />
<br />
* Completely rebuilt the asset bundles and their projects to be based on Unity 2019.1.7, same as the main project has been for some time, and to make sure that they explicitly have Vulkan and Metal shader support built into themselves now that the game supports those new platforms.<br />
** This should hopefully solve the issues that we were still seeing with a few people using Vulkan on Linux, as well as potentially some "shader not compiled for this platform" issues with OpenGL on Linux for certain ships that were compiled against an older version of Unity.<br />
** This MAY also fix the Gyrn refractive glass not appearing in-game on any platform, although we haven't test this yet. It may be that we need to write our own shader for that, or update the one from Circonia Studios that we were using previously. Most likely it was an issue that was coming across because of different unity versions, though, we're not sure.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Tutorial fix from Craig.<br />
<br />
* Enable strength icons with borders on the galaxy map. (I find it makes a big difference in readability when they overlap links of a similar color.)<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for implementing!<br />
<br />
* Updated a whole bunch of our shaders that were not going to properly work with Metal or Vulkan simply because they were being compiled with exclusive platforms set to directx11 and opengl.<br />
** These should now work, and include things like the icons for ships, and many of the ships themselves. But it hasn't been tested yet. It certainly won't hurt anything, anyhow.<br />
<br />
* The Ciconia Studio glass shaders that we were using for the Gyrn bubble have been updated to their latest version, which should provide better compatibility and hopefully have those actually show up again in-game.<br />
** Why those were showing up in the prep projects but not the actual game is something of a mystery. If this doesn't work, we'll just have to create our own refractive shader with rim lighting, but we'd rather not waste the time if this simple update works. Please do let us know!<br />
<br />
* Fixed one backer name in the credits (Kevin A Munoz), which did not translate over well into pure basic-ascii characters when we ran it through a handy processor (https://pteo.paranoiaworks.mobi/diacriticsremover/) to get rid of unicode characters not supported by our fonts.<br />
** If other folks find that their name got a bit mangled, please do let us know! There were SO many people's names that it was impossible to go through them all manually.<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the shaders for the Gyrn glass bits so that it uses a refractive shader based on Amplify Shader Editor and thus should actually render in these newer unity builds.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.952 A Little Help From Scary Friends ==<br />
(Released October 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Create a tip that points to the instructions in the wiki for how to create your own planet name list. I figure people will want to do this at some point.<br />
<br />
* Spelling/grammar and clarification improvements to some tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Craig and Badger for pointing things out.<br />
<br />
* We FINALLY have all of the kickstarter and backerkit backers thanked in the credits for the game. It's... um... a lot.<br />
<br />
* The credits screen has been split into three scrolling panels, rather than one giant one that scrolls everything. It's also now in two columns rather than three.<br />
** The left column is the same as it was before.<br />
** The center column now has just the top kickstarter backers, aka those at Mark III or higher levels of backing. That's the first 784 people, all backing at $44 or more.<br />
** The right column now has the Mark II and down backers, which is the remaining 2,264 people out of the 3,048 total backers.<br />
** These splits make it so that the scrollbars are actually sensitive enough that you can find what you're looking for. AND we alphabetized the backer names in each category, so that if you know your category you can find your name now.<br />
** Yeah this isn't really a top priority for the game in some ways, but it's a matter of showing respect for the people that made it possible in the first place. There are other kickstarter rewards for specific tiers, and some kickstarter stretch goals, that will happen post-1.0. But this is one of those basic "this needs to be in there for people on day 1 of launch" things.<br />
<br />
=== New "Helping Hands" Quick Start ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Quick Start to the Basics category, called Helping Hands. This really weighs the settings in the players favour, and is intended as an easy to win scenario that just lets you experience things with little stress.<br />
** Badger came up with this.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some changes to the out-of-date planet info representation<br />
** Thanks Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Some changes were made to make sure a player knows which Flagship is hacking (and doesn't try to make that flagship leave the planet)<br />
** Put in a line between the Hacker and the Target to really remind the player visually that the hacker is bound to the target (a great suggestion from Asteroid)<br />
** Add some text to the Hacking Notification reminding the player that the hacking flagship can't leave the system. <br />
*** Thanks to a bug report from kmunoz<br />
<br />
* Improve the hacking resource bar tooltip to show the number of hacking points spent per AI faction and the number of hacking points that will increase the hacking response level<br />
** This is something people have wanted for a while<br />
<br />
* Rather than confusingly opening a multiplayer submenu with little "coming soon" tooltips, the multiplayer button on the main menu now pops up a lengthy text note directly from Chris which explains the backstory and what is coming and a bit about the development process that led us here.<br />
** Big thanks to Craig for suggesting this.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Add a debug setting for showing an entity's world location.<br />
<br />
* Add a debug command to give all your fleets 1K Exp. Good for impatient people.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Tweak the "level up" message for Planetary Fleets<br />
** Suggested by ArquebusX<br />
<br />
* Fix a nasty bug where the AI killing stacks could cause counterattack strength to increase enormously<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix an off by one error when showing the "What Level a Fleet will level up to next" message in the Fleet tab<br />
<br />
* Extra defensive entities seeded for the AI (like Golems for the Golemite) now patrol their planets in an imposing fashion, instead of just sitting in one spot.<br />
** Only affects new games<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when scrapping a command station<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debug handling in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations for a crash that could apparently happen during one of the tutorials for some people, and also put in extra debugging logic so that if it does happen again we'll know more precisely what the problem is. It should also no longer halt gameplay in general if such an error does happen.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer, related to GameCommands being null.<br />
** This is probably a problem with how GameCommands are being used somewhere, and might rear its head in the form of some desyncs in multiplayer when we get back to reimplementing that. Just one more reason why the desync auto-repair work we have planned is going to be so essential. It's hard to know if a bug like this comes from something a modder was doing, or a mistake on our own part, or what; but either way, the game needs to be resilient to that in both single player and multi player, and that's a good example of why our upcoming hybridized approach to lock-step versus sync-correcting the game (RTS versus action game styles, blended) is going to be well worth the wait.<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game will prioritize Combat Fleets over Support Fleets when choosing the hacker. It will only use support fleets when there are no combat fleets on a planet<br />
** Thanks to Craig for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Tutorial tweaks ====<br />
* Tutorials no longer display 'homeworld under attack' notifications, which aren't pertinent to any existing tutorials.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Autobuild settings no longer apply to tutorials; this is mostly so developers can test tutorials the way a new player would see them<br />
<br />
=== Minor Faction Threat Interactions ===<br />
* Some minor factions generate Threat that winds up just annoying players, in particular Anti-AI zombies.<br />
** Add an XML field that can be applied to any Faction that says 'any threat provoked by this faction will just go back to sleep once the enemies are gone'<br />
** Current factions with that field:<br />
*** Zombies<br />
*** Devourer<br />
*** Dyson Sphere<br />
*** Macrophage<br />
<br />
* Note that putting this field on the Human faction would make for an entertainingly confused AI, like fighting Guy Pearce from Memento.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* The AI's planetary reinforcement cap can now increase as AIP increased (otherwise planets never really got stronger than they are at the beginning of the game except if Threat or subfleets wander through).<br />
** At difficulties <= 5, no change. At 6, the AI gets a 10% power increase per 100 AIP. At 7, 20%, difficulty 8-10 a 30% increase.<br />
<br />
* Cost of hacking Global Command Augmenter if you haven't paid the AIP for the planet reduced from 120 to 60.<br />
<br />
* Cost of Reroll ARS reduced from 80 to 20.<br />
<br />
* Add a setting to control AIP generation from allied factions<br />
** When you have allied factions like the Marauders or Nanocaust, when they kill command stations and so on it generates AIP. This is a balancing mechanism to keep these games from being too easy.<br />
** This can now be disabled mid-game. Disabling this makes the game much much easier, but should help in making some beginner-level quickstarts<br />
<br />
== Version 0.951 Hotfixes ==<br />
(Released October 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix typo in metal popup window<br />
<br />
* Don't let structures generate energy while you are still building them<br />
<br />
* Fix galaxy map possible/incoming wave animation being displayed for links between the AI and another faction than the player, even for unknown worlds and during map generation.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Fix null Reference when holding R on the C-view of a fleet you haven't captured yet. As a side-effect, the units highlighted in the R-view are now the ones on the currently selected planet, not necessarily the one the unit being viewed is on.<br />
** Fix from Asteroid<br />
<br />
* When attacking an AI homeworld, killing all the guard posts is enough to cancel the counterattack, you don't also have to kill the AI King<br />
** Reported by zeusalmight and Nuc_Temeron on Steam<br />
<br />
* Further differentiate the lower AI difficulties by increasing their overconfidence ratio a good amount<br />
** This should make them much more willing to attack and fail.<br />
<br />
* Internally improved some of the documentation on why the sound effects play quite like they do when there's a voice effect and a sound effect playing at near the same time. This should solve some confusion that devs and modders could have.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== OS Compatibility ===<br />
<br />
* We've disabled "graphics jobs" in unity, as that may have been causing some problems on a very few machines (certain older intel cards, mainly not windows boxes).<br />
<br />
* We've updated linux to now default to using Vulkan rather than OpenGLCore.<br />
** Vulkan is only able to be triggered by directly having it be the default, and not by the command line, so this is how we had to do it.<br />
** On linux, you can use the command line -force-glcore to make it use OpenGL again if Vulkan is giving you trouble. But now you have a choice about it.<br />
<br />
* On OSX, we now support Metal, although it still uses OpenGLCore by default (and actually in this case we can't give any definite assurances that Metal will work completely correctly).<br />
** But if you want to give it a shot for whatever reason, you can enable that with force-gfx-metal in the command line to make it use metal instead of the default OpenGLCore. Previously that command line prompt would fail.<br />
<br />
* More info: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html<br />
<br />
=== Audio tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the 'ai wave arrives' taunt wasn't being played for some code paths<br />
* warden and hunter only taunt when they think they will win.<br />
* Correctly play the AI killed your command station taunt (the game will 80% of the time choose a taunt and 20% will choose the old 'planet lost' audio).<br />
* Don't spam the game with 'player command station under attack' notifications <br />
* Don't play more than one 'player ship constructor killed' message per planet per attack. This taunt currently only triggers on the death of a Factory. Previously you could get 3 taunts from the 3 factories on a military command station planet, which seemed a bit excessive especially since you also usually get the taunt for the command station too.<br />
** Possibly these messages should be changed to be for the crippling of a combat factory instead of killing a factory.<br />
<br />
* Adjusted the AI taunts so that a specific taunt group can't play more frequently than every 30 seconds, as opposed to every 4.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.950 First Press Build ==<br />
(Released October 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* More work on adding support for numStacksKilled when handling death effects. Should get most everything now<br />
** Including Dark Spire, Metabolization, Zombification, etc...<br />
<br />
* Slightly tweak the Dyson Antagonizer warp in time<br />
<br />
* The Dyson Antagonizer now prefers to spawn on lower mark planets until the AIP is reasonably high<br />
** This behaviour now matches Instigator Bases<br />
<br />
* If you have a fleet in Load Mode but some elements of that fleet are on remote planets, those elements will try to find the Flagship and load themselves, instead of just sitting there<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures and don't want to click more than necessary<br />
<br />
* Non-Combatants like Engineers and Transports no longer cause Guard Posts to release their ships<br />
** So if you have a fleet in Transport mode with all ships transported, flying through AI planets should no longer cause the AI to generate Threat. I believe this was really confusing players, since the game encourages Deep Striking, but Deep Striking was releasing tons of Threat from planets you never attacked<br />
<br />
* Add a quickstart from community member Nuc_Temeron.<br />
** His description:<br />
*** In this scenario there are two level 7 AIs (Thief and Ensnarer) with Shark B enabled, which gives the Hunter fleets a quick surge of strength whenever you lose a base. Defend your territory well! You will have to depend on your allies, the Human Resistance Fighters (Intensity 8), to overcome these greedy swarms! The AIs are also supported by shipments from Astro Trains at Intensity 8 so you can't stay on defense for long.<br />
*** The Macrophage has also infested this zone at Intensity 6 and is hostile to all.<br />
*** The player starts with the Doorkicker Fleet, the Minelayer Battlestation and the Overloader Combat Factory in an 80-star Octopus zone.<br />
<br />
* Some Tutorial tweaks from Puffin<br />
<br />
* Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet<br />
<br />
=== Newly integrated AI taunts ===<br />
* 16 for AI Destroys player Command Station.<br />
* 13 for AI Destroys Player Golem.<br />
* 5 for AI Recaptures Planet.<br />
* 9 for AI Sends Wave.<br />
* 2 for Player Frees Dyson Sphere.<br />
* 10 for Hunter Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 8 for Overlord Transforms.<br />
* 12 for Player Claims Flagship.<br />
* 10 for Player Claims Golem.<br />
* 14 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (High Mark Planet).<br />
* 16 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (Low Mark Planet).<br />
* 5 for Player Destroys Warden Fleet Base.<br />
* 4 for Player Finds AI Overlord.<br />
* 5 for Player Fortress Destroyed.<br />
* 12 for Player Home Command Station Under Attack.<br />
* 7 for Player Stationary Constructor Destroyed.<br />
* 19 for AI Launches Counterattack.<br />
* 14 for Warden Fleet Arrives.<br />
* 1 for Warden Fleet Retreats (unused for now).<br />
** This is a total of 174 voice lines in 18 categories!<br />
** Thanks to Nathan Frisson for his awesome job voicing the AI in these clips; to a variety of players and staff for contributing fun lines for him to say; to Pablo Vega for processing this out so that he sounds wonderfully menacing, as well as splitting the files, removing mouth sounds and breaths and so on that would make it not sound like an AI; to Badger and Puffin for selecting the best takes and organizing them properly so that we could get them into our sound pipeline; and to Badger for actually wiring up the parts of the code that trigger these.<br />
<br />
* This obviously needs additional testing; if you think a line should be playing and it's not then a mantis report + save game would be appreciated!<br />
<br />
* There is now a dedicated audio bus to the AI taunting you, and it has its own gain settings and so on that are a bit louder than the "routine voices" that you hear elsewhere.<br />
** This also now will let us mix the AI voice in however we choose to do so.<br />
** We have a separate voice mixer for the AI voice lines now, and since those are much more complicated in terms of effects we have those coming in as a barely-compressed PCM stereo track. Downsampling, adaptive sampling, and/or mono makes it muddy fast.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* When unloading ships from a Transport, they inherit "time spent on planet" from the Transport so you can't cheese First Few Seconds On Planet bonus effects<br />
** Thanks to Smaug on Steam for reporting and Puffin for testing the fix<br />
<br />
* Remove some outdated text in the Scouting objective tooltip<br />
** Thanks to Telkir for reporting<br />
<br />
* Prevent Astro Train objectives from leaking the location of trains you shouldn't be able to see<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where for non-AI homeworld planets, the AI was spawning extra Guard Posts instead of Dire Guardians<br />
** This should make things much more interesting. Note that dires are still limited to high mark planets<br />
<br />
* Fix an Off by One Error when the game was telling you what level a fleet was<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a potential null reference when ships would try to join the Praetorian Guard (ie the AI overlord is being attacked)<br />
** Reported by Ozone<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the "metal income per planet" display was showing inaccurate information<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where it was much harder than necessary to maneouver flagships in tight spaces. If you wound up clicking on an allied unit the flagship's rebuild metal flow would make it try to assist, which is ... unhelpful.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fleets in Load Mode no longer deploy drones. This enables you to sneak combat factories past high-mark planets without the drones triggering lots of threat<br />
** Requested by overzot on steam<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the visual line for ships claiming other ships was not displaying. Turns out an image that was once white that we were using as part of its material got changed to black at some point, thus making it effectively invisible because of the math of how the shader was run.<br />
** We took this change to go ahead and make the claim lines more attractive in general, and they now have a cyan-greenish look to them, but double-beamed, so that they look kinda like the repair lines but still distinct.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and BadgerBadger for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Added in an OnLoad from savegame fix that should prevent stationary ships from being twitchy and thinking they should pursue you. This bit is untested.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The game no longer gives a harmless "Could not do Shutdown for network, the engine network interface was null" message if the game is shutting down prematurely for whatever reason.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor issue where the game was reporting that your target framerate and vysnc count were being set right before they were, rather than right after. If it was failing, you'd have had no idea.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs the system info about itself far earlier in the load process, to help with cases where potentially we're unable to load things for some reason; we'll still get the system info in the debug files from now on.<br />
** Thanks to eldaking for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The game's bootup log now is all-inclusive about all the steps that it takes, inside ArcenDebugLog.txt, so that in the event of a problem we now find out when that happens.<br />
** This makes for a much longer log every time you start up the game, but it's not something that is visible to players unless they go into their debug logs for whatever. And the information from it is definitely useful.<br />
<br />
* The game now logs what version it is on as soon as it can, but NOT before it can (heh), which it was temporarily doing on an internal build when we started logging system data really super early.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoNotShowAndAlsoDoNotSendToUnityLog verbosity level that lets us skip showing certain things in the unity log but still send it to the ArcenDebugLog.txt file. This is a big deal for us in terms of not having our unity editor logs flooded with stuff that we'd want to collect in a bug report but don't need to see every last time.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of selection issues on the galaxy map with fleets not always deselecting properly and instead sometimes being additive, etc.<br />
** It's actually a number of bugs all in one, because basically there was some older per-planet logic that was still being used here (and on planets) from back when cross-planet selection was only kinda-sorta a thing. Now it all works consistently galaxy-wide, or at least should. But if you see any remaining (or new) bugs, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif and Asteroid for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, hitting the escape key would just clear your selection on the current planet. Now it clears the selection on all the planets, as it should.<br />
** We didn't see the "when a fleet traverse a wormhole, it's selection is lost. This issue only occurs if the selection was made in the planet view. If you select the fleet on the galaxy map, it works correctly." issue, but probably what it really was was the above one. Or something fixed in the batch right before that. If it's still something anyone else sees, please let us know.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with the planet links where their collision capsules were intersecting with the collision boxes of planets and ship icons on the galaxy map.<br />
** This was having the effect of making it so that quite often you couldn't select specific ships except at certain zoom levels, or couldn't click planets or ships reliably in general (zoom level and scale of icons did play a role here also).<br />
** Basically, the solution was to make it so that we first raycast to find ONLY the planets and ships/fleets, if there are any under the mouse cursor. These use one set of physx layers.<br />
** Only if we don't find anything with that first raycast do we then do a second raycast against the new physx layer that the links now use. Now it doesn't matter if the capsules for the links overlap with planets or ship icons (no way to stop that, really), because it will ALWAYS give preference to the other icons first, and only go for the links between planets if the icons fail.<br />
** Thanks to Smaug, I-KP, and Pat for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== UI improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Clicking on the Energy Usage bar now gives detailed feedback for what is consuming your energy (broken down by fleet) and what planets are generating the most energy<br />
** Requested by darkarchon<br />
<br />
* The Tooltip for Tech Vault objectives now list which ship lines will benefit from hacking the tech vault<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* For the Flagship/GCA objectives, show the count of ship lines before listing the ship lines so I don't have to count them<br />
** Badgers are very lazy creatures<br />
<br />
* Improvements to the R-Click "Strong Against" view:<br />
** Fixed damage bonuses listed in this view not always matching the mirror "weak against" view.<br />
** Show only units you discovered on the map, leading to a lot less clutter early-game.<br />
** Sort units that are in the same system as the friendly unit you're examining at the beginning of the list, and bold them.<br />
** Thanks to Asteroid for the code and kmunoz for the bug report<br />
<br />
* CPAs always now give 10 minutes warning; given how impactful they are, a long warning period is justified. Previously they were getting less warning time than a regular Wave by default<br />
<br />
* When a Fleet levels up, only say "Some ship types may level up with the fleet" if the fleet actually contains ship lines that will level up<br />
** This was annoying Badger, since most ship lines don't level up anymore but the game made you think they did.<br />
<br />
* New icons for the Tech Menu!<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
* Better alignment for hotkey indicators on standing order buttons and for the icons in the build sidebar<br />
** Thanks Asteroid!<br />
<br />
=== Changes for lower AI difficulties (<= 5) ===<br />
<br />
* There were some complaints that there wasn't enough differentiation between high and low mark AIs, so we're making some changes to make lower mark games have an easier feel in a number of ways<br />
* Seed extra ARSs and Tech Vaults in the galaxy<br />
* Seed more low-mark planets near the player<br />
* Nerf AI income <br />
* Nerf AI defenses<br />
* Make the Hunter and Warden fleets dumber by allowing them to trickle into a battle piecemeal instead of waiting for reinforcements<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with hazxan on Steam<br />
<br />
== Version 0.900 Custom Fleets With Empty Slots ==<br />
(Released October 11th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Instead of spawning instantly, a Dyson Antagonizer now warps in over time, giving the player a chance to destroy it before the Sphere gets Antagonized.<br />
** Requested by zeus almighty. You'd think he could have just struck it with a lightning bolt or seduced it in the form of a goose...<br />
<br />
=== Tutorial and Tips Work ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Tutorial 99", which is even in its description just a note to be sure and check out the "How to Play" section of the game and other resources.<br />
** Since various people seem to miss those other resources but easily see the tutorials list, having this always be the last tutorial in the list no matter how many other tutorials we add seemed like a good idea.<br />
<br />
* Also got rid of the "Example Tutorial" that was junking up the tutorials screen, since now there are plenty of much more involved examples that are also actually fully-functional tutorials.<br />
<br />
* Add a Tip under the Modding section to explain how to make your own Quick Starts<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where units sometimes were waiting out of range instead of closing to firing distance<br />
** Reported by kmunoz and Telcontar on Steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where flagships could just wander away from where you told them to go<br />
** Reported by kmunoz.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen in the wave notifications.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a really rare nullref that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some extra debugging to fix ships not rendering right in some rare circumstances and thus causing a cascade of all things not rendering. Now it should fail gracefully if it fails at all, and give us more information on where it failed, then let you keep playing without making everything disappear.<br />
** Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== "Custom Fleets", Aka The Remedy For Control Groups ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed things up so that fleet flagships can be constructed from the build sidebar, or other self-constructing means. This was never possible before in the engine, turns out.<br />
<br />
* There are 9 possible fleets that you can create at any of your command stations, now. Each one has 7 empty ship lines in it, and they are 3x cloaked, 3x velocity (fast flagship), and 3x workhorse (normal flagship).<br />
** These can be constructed at any point and you can start putting some of your specialized ships into them via ship swapping. The interface makes this clear and suggests it, as well. Basically for people who wanted to pull aside just their melee ships or cloaked raiders or whatever, now you can do that; this lets you control "sub fleets" in effect, by splitting your existing ship lines among more fleets, exchanging empty slots for ship lines you find elsewhere.<br />
** This was something that Chris went back and forth on a lot of times in terms of how to handle control groups that were more specific than 1+ fleets at a time. Ultimately the display and automation benefits of having control groups always stay linked to just 1+ fleets outweighed the benefits of changing that; but in order to allow for players to have smaller custom fleets as they may desire, activated by control group as they may desire, here's this new feature.<br />
** This is, of course, in addition to the hotkeys for quickly selecting units of specific criteria a while ago (cloaked units, melee units, whatever). This is for when you want to make a permanent or semi-permanent sub-grouping of ships for whatever reason (of which there are many valid ones to have).<br />
** Thanks to a lot of people, including Nameless Terror, ulu, Asteroid, and others for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
=== UI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Standing order buttons now display their key shortcut on the button itself, provided it can be expressed in a single letter (so X and V are displayed, Delete isn't).<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Science bar now has icons for the various techs.<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* Wave progress indicator on galaxy map links now animates smoothly instead of once every second. (No associated visual at the moment, Chris didn't find the proposed particle effect good enough.)<br />
** Implemented by Asteroid<br />
<br />
* For all mobile flagships and citadels (not lone flagships, though), there is a new "Flagship Movement Mode" in their fleet status window.<br />
** Your flagships are usually precious enough that you don't want them to roam around in pursuit mode or attack-move mode. HOWEVER, you will often want to set them into those modes in order to make any ships they construct pop out in those modes.<br />
** When this is set to"Stay Put Unless Direct Order", it acts as you might expect and causes the flagship to ignore things like Pursuit mode, but for ships it creates to be put in that mode (and obey it).<br />
** When this is set to "Roam If Instructed" mode, the flagship will pursue when in pursuit mode, attack when in attack-move mode, and so on. This can be useful for Arks and Golems in some cases, or even for things like Combat Factories (on peaceful worlds).<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: The Refinement of Fleets]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=Getting_Started&diff=36682Getting Started2019-10-12T18:08:52Z<p>Ovalcircle1: More Capitalization, Grammar., Shortening phrases. Part 2</p>
<hr />
<div>__FORCETOC__<br />
== Newcomers ==<br />
<br />
'''Welcome to AI War 2!'''<br />
<br />
AI War 2 is a combination of RTS, 4X, and Tower Defense. You'll be continuously commanding units in battle, explore the galaxy, and defend your planets all at once.<br />
<br />
It's recommended to start with the tutorials.<br />
<br />
Once those are done (or for the impatient), look in the Quick Start section of single player and check out one of the beginner situations. This should help you familiarize yourself with the game's mechanics and quirks. There is also a lot of "How to Play" documentation available from the in-game main menu. <br />
<br />
In general, AI War 2 isn't about going guns blazing and capturing everything in sight. That'll just get you killed. It's about taking only what you need and being as quiet as possible so you don't draw the attention of the AI. The AI doesn't play by the rules, or rather, it plays by a different set of rules. The AI can afford to throw countless ships at you. You (in general) can't do the same. Pick your targets strategically, methodically and carefully. Don't be afraid to cut and run if you start loosing a battle.<br />
<br />
At the top of the UI, you'll see a big red number with the accompanying letters AIP. This is AI Progress, AKA how pissed off the AI is against you. The higher this number rises, the more attention the AI directs to you. At the start of the game, the AI is busy attending to business outside the galaxy (it's probably trying to fight the Spire in the Andromeda Galaxy), but as you start taking planets from the AI and destroying its infrastructure, it'll start turning its attention towards you.<br />
<br />
Remember! There are many different ways to play this game. The game is fluid, and what may work against one AI type may not work against another, so adapt and revise how you play constantly. Variety is the spice of life after all.<br />
<br />
The AI can be divided into 6 components, AI Sentinels, AI Threat, AI Warden Fleet, AI Hunter Fleet, AI Instigators and AI Praetorian Guard.<br />
*The AI Sentinels are the main AI faction you'll be fighting. AI Sentinels are usually dormant, found inside Guardposts, or sent as attack waves towards your planets. Most AI units start out as Sentinels but can become AI Threat under certain circumstances, usually after a certain amount of time after you aggro them.<br />
*The AI Threat are AI forces actively waiting to strike. These units are ready to come at any time they sense a weakness. Threat is provoked typically by AI defenders who escape a planet after you attack it, or the remainder of defeated waves<br />
*The AI Warden Fleet are used by the AI to defend only. They will never be committed to an attack on your planets.<br />
*The AI Hunter Fleet will constantly probe your planets for weaknesses and will attack whenever they feel like they can win.<br />
*The AI Instigators are not immediately apparent until later into the game. Every hour or so, an Instigator base will spawn somewhere in the galaxy. Instigators spawn close to your homeworld and on low level planets initially, but the higher AIP goes, thew will spawn farther away and on higher mark planets. Instigator bases have a variety of nasty effects, ranging from increasing the amount of strength the AI will put into its waves, to spawning units every now and then to attack you. Instigators are usually not immediately threatening, but do not take your time dealing with them. The longer they remain active, the deadlier they get!<br />
*The AI Praetorian Guard behaves like the AI Warden Fleet, except they will only appear near and on AI home worlds and WILL attack any nearby human planets.<br />
<br />
<br />
===General Tips===<br />
*Don't attempt to conquer everything, only capture planets that have something important/you need, or have strategic value. A planet that has a Zenith Power Generator or a fleet, or worlds directly adjacent to your home world are good for example.<br />
*At certain AIP points, the AI "techs up" its units, so that the Warden Fleet, Hunter Fleet, and waves will be one level higher. This is a major buff to the AI's strength, so be careful about increasing the AIP too much too quickly.<br />
*There is a cap to how strong the Warden Fleet can get. Once it reaches that cap, any resources devoted to the Warden Fleet instead adds to wave budget. IF you see waves suddenly spike up in strength and no/very little AIP has increased, it's probably because the Warden Fleet is at its maximum capacity. Start grinding down the Warden Fleet to return waves to normal strength.<br />
*Neutering planets refers to killing everything on an AI planet except for the Warpgate and Command Station. This makes the planet almost harmless to travel through. Don't just leave it. Note: The AI can rebuild turrets if they were originally around the Command Station on the planet. Be aware. <br />
<br />
===Abbreviations===<br />
*ZPG: Zenith Power Generator<br />
*ZMC: Zenith Matter Converter<br />
*ARS: Advanced Research Station<br />
*IGC: Intra-Galactic Coordinator<br />
*ZT: Zenith Trader<br />
*AIP: AI progress<br />
*ST: Super Terminal<br />
*SA: Spire Archive<br />
*DSVG/VG: Dark Spire Vengeance Generator/Vengeance Generator<br />
*DS: Dyson Sphere (Note: Dyson Sphere and Dark Spire both have the same abbreviation, DS, so read the surrounding text to see what which faction someone is talking about)<br />
<br />
== Veterans ==<br />
<br />
Welcome back to AI War. The AI has taken over the galaxy (again), but lots of things have changed.<br />
<br />
===Major Mechanic Changes===<br />
*In general, AI War 2 is not as micro intensive as classic, and many things have been removed due to redundancy, clutter, or making things easier to understand.<br />
*Fleetships are renamed to Strikecraft and Starships are renamed to Frigates.<br />
*Instead of producing Strikecraft and Frigates immediately, they are bound to a Flagship. You can't just, say for example, immediately build 150 Fighters, Bombers, missile frigates and a bonus ship. Instead, you must have a Flagship that has those units attached to it. Once built however, there is no limit to how far a Strikecraft or frigate can go across the galaxy, like AI War Classic.<br />
**Flagships are captured much like Golems from Classic and they are what lets you expand your military power. Flagships come in 3 varieties, strike (generic transport Flagship, but many Strikecraft and Frigates), officer (Flagship has a gimmick or is very powerful on it's own) and Lone Wolf fleets (no supporting Strikecraft or frigates, but the Flagship is INSANELY powerful).<br />
**Flagships cannot die. Instead, when they reach 10% health, they become crippled. While crippled, a Flagship cannot have Strikecraft or Frigates assigned to it built and if it has a weapon, can't shoot. The Flagship can still move however and be repaired back to full strength. While this means that you can't lose your Golems anymore, the AI still gets LOTS of salvage for reprisal.<br />
*Units now have shields, which is basically a second health bar. However, anything with a fusion attack such as Raider Frigates and Bombers will ignore a certain % of shields. (For example, a Raider Frigate has 90% fusion damage, so an attack that deals 1000 damage will decrease the target's health by 900 and shields by 100)<br />
*ARS no longer give their contents via capturing their planets, but by hacking them.<br />
*Hull and ammo types are gone.<br />
**These have been replaced with the stats Armor, Albedo, Engine and Mass. More info can be found on [[AI War 2: Units of Measurement]]<br />
*You no longer spend knowledge on individual unit upgrades, but instead on categories divided into weapon types and hull types.<br />
**While you spend more knowledge short term, with multiple units upgraded at once, you save knowledge long term.<br />
**All ships are no longer built as individual marks. Instead they are upgraded all at once (For example: if you have MK2 V-Wings somewhere in the galaxy, and you upgrade the Generalist tech category, ALL V-Wings currently alive and built after this upgrade will become MK3.)<br />
*Hacking points are now earned per planet, rather per AIP.<br />
**Each planet has 30 Hacking points and you can only earn them by building a Command Station on that planet.<br />
*Colony ships no longer exist.<br />
**In order to build Command Stations on planets, you must have a Flagship on that planet as well as no AI Command station.<br />
*Energy collectors do not exist anymore. Instead, Economic Command Stations produce 2 energy collectors' worth of energy, Logistical Command Stations produce 1 energy collector's worth of energy and Military Command Stations produce no energy at all.<br />
*Salvage no longer exists, so it's pointless to build a world designed specifically to collect it, but you can make a point of farming EXP to increase that Command station's Level to make it harder for the AI to remove.<br />
*Cloaking is no longer an "on/off" state, but rather each ship that has cloaking has a certain amount of cloaking points, and every time it shoots or gets detected, it loses cloak points by a set amount or certain rate respectively. Once cloak points reach 0, THEN, the ship is no longer cloaked. A ship cannot recharge cloak points until all its cloak points reach 0 and is not being detected or firing for 5 seconds.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Minor Changes===<br />
*Wormhole guardposts no longer exist.<br />
**Yay! No more annoying 2 damage attacks<br />
*The Devourer Golem is killable (Fun fact: In Classic, the Devourer Golem used to be killable, but had insane vampirism. But then the Fallen Spire ships got added, which allowed players to cheese and destroy it rather easily. It was quickly made truly invincible after that.)<br />
**He respawns though. For some reason he also likes to eat the Zenith Trader too.<br />
*Translocation isn't an instant teleport, but rather a burst knockback, which is essentially the same thing.</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=Getting_Started&diff=36678Getting Started2019-10-12T04:48:19Z<p>Ovalcircle1: More Capitalization, Grammar., Shortening phrases</p>
<hr />
<div>__FORCETOC__<br />
== Newcomers ==<br />
<br />
'''Welcome to AI War 2!'''<br />
<br />
AI War 2 is a combination of RTS, 4X, and Tower Defense. You'll be continuously commanding units in battle, explore the galaxy, and defend your planets all at once.<br />
<br />
It's recommended to start with the tutorials.<br />
<br />
Once those are done (or for the impatient), look in the quick start section of single player and check out one of the beginner situations. This should help you familiarize yourself with the game's mechanics and quirks. There is also a lot of "How to Play" documentation available from the in-game main menu. <br />
<br />
In general, AI War 2 isn't about going guns blazing and capturing everything in sight. That'll just get you killed. It's about taking only what you need and being as quiet as possible so you don't draw the attention of the AI. The AI doesn't play by the rules, or rather, it plays by a different set of rules. The AI can afford to throw countless ships at you. You (in general) can't do the same.<br />
<br />
Remember! There are many different ways to play this game. The game is fluid, and what may work against one AI type may not work against another, so adapt and revise how you play constantly. Variety is the spice of life after all.<br />
<br />
The AI can be divided into 6 components, AI Sentinels, AI Threat, AI Warden Fleet, AI Hunter Fleet, AI Instigators and AI Praetorian Guard.<br />
*The AI Sentinels are the main AI faction you'll be fighting. AI Sentinels are usually dormant, found inside guardposts, or sent as attack waves towards your planets. Most AI units start out as Sentinels but can become AI Threat under certain circumstances, usually after a certain amount of time after you aggro them.<br />
*The AI Threat are AI forces actively waiting to strike. These units are ready to come at any time they sense a weakness. Threat is provoked typically by AI defenders who escape a planet after you attack it, or the remainder of defeated waves<br />
*The AI Warden Fleet are used by the AI to defend only. They will never be committed to an attack on your planets.<br />
*The AI Hunter Fleet will constantly probe your planets for weaknesses and will attack whenever they feel like they can win.<br />
*The AI Instigators are not immediately apparent until later into the game. Every hour or so, an Instigator base will spawn somewhere in the galaxy. Instigators spawn close to your homeworld and on low level planets initially, but the higher AIP goes, thew will spawn farther away and on higher mark planets. Instigator bases have a variety of nasty effects, ranging from increasing the amount of strength the AI will put into its waves, to spawning units every now and then to attack you. Instigators are usually not immediately threatening, but do not take your time dealing with them. The longer they remain active, the deadlier they get!<br />
*The AI Praetorian Guard behaves like the AI Warden Fleet, except they will only appear near and on AI home worlds and WILL attack any nearby human planets.<br />
<br />
<br />
===General Tips===<br />
*Don't attempt to conquer everything, only capture planets that have something important/you need, or have strategic value. A planet that has a Zenith Power Generator or a fleet, or worlds directly adjacent to your home world are good for example.<br />
*At certain AIP points, the AI "techs up" it's units, so that the warden, hunter, and waves will be one level higher. This is a major buff to the AI's strength, so be careful about increasing the AIP too much too quickly.<br />
*There is a cap to how strong the Warden Fleet can get. Once it reaches that cap, any resources devoted to the Warden Fleet instead adds to wave budget, so if you see waves suddenly spiking up in strength and no/very little AIP has increased, it's probably because the Warden Fleet is at it's maximum. Start grinding the warden fleet down to return waves to normal strength.<br />
<br />
===Abbreviations===<br />
*ZPG: Zenith Power Generator<br />
*ZMC: Zenith Matter Converter<br />
*ARS: Advanced Research Station<br />
*IGC: Intra-Galactic Coordinator<br />
*ZT: Zenith Trader<br />
*AIP: AI progress<br />
*ST: Super Terminal<br />
*SA: Spire Archive<br />
*DSVG/VG: Dark Spire Vengeance Generator/Vengeance Generator<br />
*DS: Dyson Sphere (Note: Dyson Sphere and Dark Spire both have the same initials, DS, so read the surrounding text to see what which faction someone is talking about) <br />
<br />
== Veterans ==<br />
<br />
Welcome back to AI War. The AI has taken over the galaxy (again), but lots of things have changed.<br />
<br />
===Major Mechanic Changes===<br />
*In general, AI War 2 is not as micro intensive as classic, and many things have been removed due to redundancy, clutter, or making things easier to understand.<br />
*Fleetships are renamed to Strikecraft and Starships are renamed to Frigates.<br />
*Instead of producing Strikecraft and frigates immediately, they are bound to a flagship. You can't just, say for example, immediately build 150 fighters, bombers, missile frigates and a bonus ship. Instead, you must have a flagship that has those units attached to it. once built however, there is no limit to how far a strikecraft or frigate can go across the galaxy, like classic.<br />
**Flagships are captured much like Golems from classic and they are what lets you expand your military power. Flagships come in 3 varieties, strike (generic transport flagship, but many strikecraft and frigates), officer (flagship has a gimmick or is very powerful on it's own) and lone wolf fleets (no supporting strikecraft or frigates, but the Flagship is INSANELY powerful).<br />
**Flagships cannot die. Instead, when they reach 10% health, they become crippled. While crippled, a flagship cannot have strikecraft or frigates assigned to it built and if it has a weapon, can't shoot. the flagship can still move however and be repaired back to full strength. While this means that you can't loose your Golems anymore, the AI still gets LOTS of salvage for reprisal.<br />
*Units now have shields, which is basically a second health bar. however, anything with a fusion attack such as raider frigates and bombers will ignore a certain % of shields. (example, a raider frigate has 90% fusion damage, so an attack that deals 1000 will damage health by 900 and shields by 100)<br />
*ARS no longer give their contents via capturing their planets, but by hacking them.<br />
*Hull and ammo types are gone.<br />
**These have been replaced with the stats Armor, Albedo, Engine and Mass. More info can be found on [[AI War 2: Units of Measurement]]<br />
*You no longer spend knowledge on individual unit upgrades, but instead on categories divided into weapon types and hull types.<br />
**While you spend more knowledge short term, with multiple units upgraded at once, you save knowledge long term.<br />
**All ships are no longer built as individual marks. Instead all ships are upgraded at once (example: if you have MK2 V-Wings somewhere in the galaxy, and you upgrade the generalist tech category, ALL v-wings currently alive and built after this upgrade will become MK3.)<br />
*Hacking points are now earned per planet, rather per AIP.<br />
**Each planet has 30 Hacking points and you can only earn them by building a command station on that planet.<br />
*Colony ships no longer exist.<br />
**In order to build command stations on planets, you must have a Flagship on that planet as well as no AI Command station.<br />
*Energy collectors do not exist anymore, instead, economic command stations produce 2 energy collectors worth of energy, logistics produce 1 energy collectors worth of energy and military command stations produce no energy at all.<br />
*Salvage no longer exists, so it's pointless to build a world designed specifically to collect salvage, but you can make a point of farming EXP to increase that command station's level to make it harder for the AI to remove.<br />
*Cloaking is no longer an "on/off" state, but rather each ship that has cloaking has a certain amount of cloaking points, and every time it shoots or gets detected, it loses cloak points by a set amount or certain rate respectively. Once cloak points reach 0, THEN, the ship is no longer cloaked. A ship cannot recharge cloak points until all it's cloak points reach 0 and is not being detected or firing.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Minor Changes===<br />
*Wormhole guardposts no longer exist.<br />
**Yay! No more annoying 2 damage attacks!</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=Getting_Started&diff=36673Getting Started2019-10-12T04:17:41Z<p>Ovalcircle1: Capitalization, Grammar., Shortening phrases</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== Newcomers ==<br />
<br />
'''Welcome to AI War 2!'''<br />
<br />
AI War 2 is a combination of RTS, 4X and Tower Defense. You'll be continiously commanding units in battle, explore the galaxy, and defend your planets all at once.<br />
<br />
It's recommended to start with the tutorials.<br />
<br />
Once those are done (or for the impatient), look in the quick start section of single player and check out one of the beginner situations. This should help you familiarize yourself with the game's mechanics and quirks. There is also a lot of "How to Play" documentation available from the in-game main menu. <br />
<br />
In general, AI War 2 Isn't about going guns blazing and capturing everything in sight. That'll just get you killed. It's about taking only what you need and being as quiet as possible so you don't draw the attention of the AI. The AI doesn't play by the rules, or rather, it plays by a different set of rules. The AI can afford to throw countless ships at you. You (in general) can't do the same.<br />
<br />
Remember! There are many different ways to play this game. The game is fluid, and what may work against one AI type may not work against another, so adapt and revise how you play constantly. Variety is the spice of life after all.<br />
<br />
The AI can be divided into 6 components, AI sentinels, AI threat, AI wardens, AI hunters, AI instigators and AI praetorian guard.<br />
*The AI sentinels are the main AI faction you'll be fighting. AI sentinels are usually dormant, found inside guardposts, or sent as attack waves towards your planets. Most AI units start out as sentinels but can become AI Threat under certain circumstances, usually after a certain amount of time after you aggro them.<br />
*The AI threat are AI forces actively waiting to strike. These units are ready to come at any time they sense a weakness. Threat is provoked typically by AI defenders who escape a planet after you attack it, or the remainder of defeated waves<br />
*The AI wardens are used by the AI to defend only. They will never be committed to an attack on your planets.<br />
*The AI hunters will constantly probe your planets for weakness and will attack whenever they feel like they can win.<br />
*The AI instigators are not immediately apparent until later into the game. Every hour or so, an instigator base will spawn somewhere in the galaxy. Instigators spawn close to your homeworld and on low level planets initially, but the higher AIP goes, the farther and higher mark planets an instigator base can spawn on. Instigator bases have a variety of nasty effects, ranging from increasing the amount of strength the AI will put into it's waves, to spawning units every now and then to attack you. Instigators are usually not immediately threatening, but do not take your time dealing with them. The longer they remain active, the deadlier they get!<br />
*the AI praetorian guard behaves like the AI wardens, except they will only appear near and on AI home worlds and WILL attack any nearby human planets.<br />
<br />
<br />
General Tips<br />
*Don't attempt to conquer everything, only capture planets that have something important/you need, or have strategic value. A planet that has a Zenith Power Generator or a fleet, or worlds directly adjacent to your home world are good for example.<br />
*At certain AIP points, the ai "techs up" it's units, so that the warden, hunter, and waves will be one level higher. This is a major buff to the AI's strength, so be careful about increasing the AIP too much too quickly.<br />
*There is a cap to how strong the warden fleet can get. Once it reaches that cap, any resources devoted to the warden fleet instead add to wave budget, so if you see waves suddenly spiking up in strength and no/very little AIP has increased, it's probably because the warden fleet is at it's maximum. Start grinding the warden fleet down to return waves to normal strength.<br />
<br />
Abbreviations<br />
*ZPG: zenith power generator<br />
*ZMC: zenith matter converter<br />
*ARS: advanced research statoin<br />
*IGC: intra galactic coordinator<br />
*ZT: zenith trader<br />
*AIP: AI progress<br />
*ST: super terminal<br />
*SA: spire archive<br />
*DSVG/VG: dark spire vengeance generator/vengeance generator<br />
<br />
== Veterans ==<br />
<br />
Welcome back to AI War. The AI has taken over the galaxy (again), but lots of things have changed.<br />
<br />
'''Major Mechanic Changes'''<br />
*In general, AI War 2 is not as micro intensive as classic, and many things have been removed due to redundancy, clutter, or making things easier to understand.<br />
*Fleetships are renamed to strikecraft and starships are renamed to frigates.<br />
*Instead of producing strikecraft and frigates immedietly, they are bound to a flagship. You can't just, say for example, immedietly build 150 fighters, bombers, missile frigates and a bonus ship. instead, you must have a flagship that has those units attached to it. once built however, there is no limit to how far a strikecraft or frigate can go across the galaxy, like classic.<br />
**Flagships are captured much like golems from classic and they are what lets you expand your military power. Flagships come in 3 varieties, strike (generic transport flagship, but many strikecraft and frigates), officer (flagship has a gimmick or is very powerful on it's own) and lone wolf fleets (no supporting strikecraft or frigates, but flagship is INSANELY powerful).<br />
**Flagships cannot die. Instead, when they reach 10% health, they become crippled. While crippled, a flagship cannot have strikecraft or frigates assigned to it built and if it has a weapon, can't shoot. the flagship can still move however and be repaired back to full strength. While this means that you can't loose your golems anymore, the AI still gets LOTS of salvage for reprisal.<br />
*Units now have shields, which is basically a second health bar. however, anything with a fusion attack such as raider frigates and bombers will ignore a certain % of shields. (example, a raider frigate has 90% fusion damage, so an attack that deals 1000 will damage health by 900 and shields by 100)<br />
*ARS no longer give their contents via capturing their planets, but by hacking them.<br />
*Hull and ammo types are gone.<br />
**These have been replaced with the stats Armor, Albedo, Engine and Mass. More info can be found on [[AI War 2: Units of Measurement]]<br />
*You no longer spend knowledge on individual unit upgrades, but instead on categories divided into weapon types and hull types.<br />
**While you spend more knowledge short term, with multiple units upgraded at once, you save knowledge long term.<br />
**All ships are no longer built as individual marks. instead all ships are upgraded at once (example: if you have mk2 v-wings somewhere in the galaxy, and you upgrade the generalist tech category, ALL v-wings currently alive and built after this upgrade will become mk3.)<br />
*Hacking points are now earned per planet, rather per AIP.<br />
**Each planet has 30 Hacking points and you can only earn them by building a command station on that planet.<br />
*Colony ships no longer exist.<br />
**In order to build command stations on planets, you must have a Flagship on that planet as well as no AI Command station.<br />
*Energy collectors do not exist anymore, instead, economic command stations produce 2 energy collectors worth of energy, logistics produce 1 energy collectors worth of energy and military command stations produce no energy at all.<br />
*Salvage no longer exists, so it's pointless to build a world designed specifically to collect salvage, but you can make a point of farming EXP to increase that command station's level to make it harder for the AI to remove.<br />
*Cloaking is no longer an "on/off" state, but rather each ship that has cloaking has a certain amount of cloaking points, and every time it shoots or gets detected, it loses cloak points by a set amount or certain rate respectively. Once cloak points reach 0, THEN, the ship is no longer cloaked. A ship cannot recharge cloak points until all it's cloak points reach 0 and is not being detected or firing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Minor Changes'''<br />
*Wormhole guardposts no longer exist.<br />
**Yay! No more annoying 2 damage attacks!</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Arrival_of_Fleets&diff=35813AI War 2:The Arrival of Fleets2019-06-30T22:30:27Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Strikecraft */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* The old-style tutorials are gone, and we're still in progress with replacing that with [[AI_War_2:_The_Arrival_of_Fleets#Tutorials_Are_Out.2C_How_To_Play_Is_In|three different styles of other help/onboarding in-game mechanisms]].<br />
<br />
* Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is temporarily disabled''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.<br />
<br />
* There are a variety of ships/units that don't have final graphics at the moment, though they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
* We're in progress with a major revamp of some systems based on cumulative feedback in order to push the game even more towards the feel of the original game... despite further divergence from it at a mechanical level.<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After 3 months of Early Access and 2+ years of development, we've reached a point where we know what we want the 1.0 version of the game to look like. SO very much about this game already works well, but there are some major deficits coming into this phase when comparing this sequel to the original game. The aim of this phase is to close those gaps and make this clearly the superior product in terms of playability, fun factor, the amount of fun thinking-about-interesting-challenges you do during gameplay, and so on. <br />
<br />
There's also of course still more polish and bugfixing that we want to get done, and the lobby redo is still scheduled of course (but quick starts are an awesome alternative, and have helped us to defer a final design for the lobby as we formed up some other bits of the game first), but we're feeling really good about this final sprint toward 1.0. We still do need to also finish some graphics for the existing ships, but they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
There is some more content coming as part of this phase, kind of by definition -- fleets as a concept Change Everything in a good way -- but the focus is on taking what is a pretty awesome game with a lot of depth and pushing it to a level that we hope beats the pants off the original, finally. Stay tuned.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.872 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* Add a setting for FRD mode available via GalaxySettings; if you disable it then your ships will spread out a bit more in FRD. It's a pretty subtle difference. <br />
=== Tractor Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The AI will now have tractor ships actively try to kidnap your ships and drag them off planet. This includes AI Black Widow Golems, Tractor Guardians, Etherjet Tractors and their variants...<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Tractor Systems can now be configured to tractor more things at higher mark levels. I'm not sure what mischief Puffin is going to use this for, but I look forward to finding out<br />
** Requested by Puffin<br />
<br />
* Ships caught in a tractor beam are always allowed to shoot at the tractor source that has caught them. Also they will be more likely to shoot at said tractor source<br />
** Requested by Puffin<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Remove some duplicated logic in the GameEntity HoverText. No functional change<br />
<br />
* AI Drones will now fight to the death instead of retreating from the planet; they would just attrition to death anyway once they left the planet<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Make Clusters: Small and Clusters: Medium map types work<br />
** Thanks to UFO for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Mobile Combat Factories (and Gyrn) are no longer allowed to build ships while crippled.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where reprisal waves were double-sized. Also the notification now shows the "time till wave is sent" in the icon itself. The hovertext for the notification also explains that the waves are 1.5x normal wave size. <br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the report<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception in the EntityHover code<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where ships deployed from guard posts against minor factions (in particular, the Dyson Sphere) would just go after the player<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the report and TechSY730 for some additional saves. Possibly other people reported it as well?<br />
<br />
* The "Debug: Kill Enemies" button now kills all units hostile to the player on a planet, not just AI units<br />
** Thanks to Oval for requesting<br />
<br />
* Fix (or at least significantly improve) a bug where your units would stutter as they moved toward enemies to fight. This has the pleasant side effect of making autobombs and the like suck slightly less.<br />
** Reported by a lot of people, including Puffin and Ecthelon<br />
<br />
* Make Autobombs and other melee units no longer fire shots sequentially; this improves the delay before Autobombs go off. It's still not great, but it's an improvement.<br />
<br />
* Hopefully fix a rare null reference in the Decollision code<br />
<br />
* Improve the Incoming Damage Detection code to take multishot ships into account. This should (hopefully) make your units better able avoid overkilling targets.<br />
<br />
* Ships dragged through a wormhole via tractors will now pop out a short distance from the tractoring unit, instead of stacked right on top of the tractor<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where a hostile-to-player only or hostile-to-AI only devourer golem would no longer try to kill the zenith trader<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where ships could go through wormholes while the game was paused<br />
** Thanks to hawk for reporting<br />
<br />
* Scrapping units on planets with Dark Spire Vengeance Generators now correctly generates energy for the VG<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased many of the Instigator Base effects.<br />
** Strengthen Waves and Strengthen Hunter Fleet are quadrupled.<br />
** Strengthen CPA and Strengthen Wormhole Invasion are doubled.<br />
** Strengthen Warden Fleet is tripled.<br />
** Unit Spawner now spawns every 90s instead of 20, but spawns significantly more each time. This means it is a much more consolidated force, rather than a trickle.<br />
*** Thanks to Badger for reporting these aren't something to be bothered with at all.<br />
<br />
* Pike unit high hull health bonus reduced from 4x to 2x.<br />
** Unlike MLRS, which operate on low health and thus effectively had a cap on how much the effect could do, Pikes could often one shot units entirely with this bonus. Coupled with the fact they already have another damage bonus, this was a bit much in practice.<br />
** The bonus is still cool, so it's preferred to keep it. Want to keep an eye on it though, since that's a nasty result of it that was only just spotted and may have contributed to the feel of Strikecraft being mere chaft.<br />
<br />
* A minor nerf to reprisal waves<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station damage boost 50% -> 25%, increase per mark 50% -> 25%.<br />
** This was likely far too much beforehand, but with Experience allowing these to rank up, it needs to come down.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station metal production 60 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Added a bunch of mono-type AI Ship Groups for Guard Posts and Turrets.<br />
** So now a bunch of AI planets will have only one type of Post, and one type of Turret. There is still the possibility of having an utter mishmash, but far less.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth and Annoying Orange for bringing the point up separately that this mess forces generalist compositions and the old conundrum of "anti-bomber Post under a Forcefield" from Classic, in a way.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Arrays, Ensnarer Battlestation, Black Widow Golem Ark, Tractor Guardians and Ensnarer Turrets now all gain some tractor count per Mark.<br />
<br />
* Cloaking and Tachyon Systems now increase their Points by 50% of their base value each time they Mark up.<br />
** Now upgrading Tachyon Arrays and Sentry Frigates actually does something beyond health, and this lets sneaky units last longer around lower tier detectors.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Space Plane and Mirages now only take 1% damage from enemies beyond their range, down from 50% and 25% respectively.<br />
** This is more like their Classic incarnation, with the change of they can be hurt by the thing they're targeting, as there is no way to bypass radar dampening here.<br />
<br />
* Mirages now have the same health as Space Planes, damage 65 -> 40, bypasses personal shields completely, and has a damage bonus against anything with healthy hulls.<br />
** Essentially, it's now terrible at actually killing something outright, but amazing at weakening it for something else to clean up.<br />
** Thanks to StarKelp for developing this idea!<br />
<br />
* Etherjet Cloak re-enabled, damage and reload time quadrupled on all variants, albedo 0.3 -> 0.7, speed 1,200 -> 1,600.<br />
** For some reason, they were able to Tractor while Cloaked for some time now, so that system is re-enabled, and the weapon is adjusted to slow the rate they drain their own Cloaking Points.<br />
** Coupled with the new AI behaviour with Tractor units, these should hopefully behave more like their Classic incarnations.<br />
<br />
==== Frigates ====<br />
<br />
* Brawlers lose all shields, gain it in hull. Their missiles now cause knockback, some engine stun, and also have a damage multiplier against anything slower than its base speed. Damage 300 -> 200, reload time 3s -> 2s.<br />
** It's now kind of like the Translocator Starship? Shove little guys around and slow them down with some damage as a bonus.<br />
** Also thanks to StarKelp for developing this idea! It's a little different, but the spirit is there I think.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Frigate shield size increased, size of the ship itself decreased, shields 200k -> 250k.<br />
** So it covers more, and isn't taking up as much of that space itself. Also lasts a bit longer, since it'll probably be hit more often.<br />
<br />
* Siphoner shields 120k -> 160k, damage 2,000 -> 250, reload time 4s -> 1s, now does 5x the damage to a target if it has more than 50% personal shields left. Vampirism gain changed from 5HP per 1 damage to 7HP per 1 damage.<br />
** Lasts a bit longer for the same reason, shoots faster so it's a more constant regeneration, and better suited to breaking down things like Guard Posts and...well, siphoning the shields off stuff.<br />
<br />
==== Flagships ====<br />
<br />
* Armored Golem damage 2,000 -> 1,000, Sabot damage 3,000 -> 2,000.<br />
** This thing by far dominates its Fleet, and was really pushing the smaller units out of the game, since things had to be balanced for the player having these.<br />
** It was actually pretty absurd, being the toughest and best damage dealer of the bunch so...no surprise people felt it was dominating.<br />
<br />
* Cursed Golem damage 1,250 -> 700, Sabot damage 2,000 -> 1,500.<br />
** A similar case. This thing is much longer ranged than the Armored, and has paralysis to boot (including the very rare ability to paralyse bigger targets), and so also dominated the Fleet.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem damage 500 -> 450.<br />
** Really minor, but just brings it in a tad more.<br />
<br />
* Black Widow Golem damage 500 -> 200, tractor count 350 -> 250.<br />
** Same deal with the above ones. This thing has a lot more shots than normal for the purpose of engine stun, so the damage is definitely low per shot.<br />
** Tractor count is since it now gains some with Mark.<br />
<br />
==== Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guard Post albedo 0.4 -> 0.7.<br />
** Missed it long ago.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guard Post damage 1,200 -> 600.<br />
** This thing had far too high a generalist damage. Coupled with the high hull health bonus, it was capable of slaughtering things it really shouldn't have been.<br />
<br />
* Moved half of Guard Post hull into shields.<br />
** In a previous update, Guard Post durability was doubled. This unfortunately really hurt Fusion Bombers, coupled with the fact you generally have less of these specifically than you used to early on.<br />
** By shifting the hull over, they retain their overall durability, but are weaker to Fusion Bombers, letting them be the experts of Post demolition again.<br />
<br />
* Moved two thirds of Dire Guard Post hull into shields.<br />
** They now follow the same hull/shield ratio as the normal Posts.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.871 More Control, Part 1 ==<br />
(Released June 24th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix some bugs in map generation where people were seeing either weird errors or hangs.<br />
** Thanks to a number of people reporting problems, including Pilcrow, UFO andKillerFrogs.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Factories without any valid flagships to build for were still creating metal flows.<br />
<br />
* A number of improvements have been made to the Metal Flow Planning window, including scaling the metal requests to the sim speed, no longer receiving the 'Unknown Ship' message, and no longer omitting a bunch of flows<br />
** Thanks to Majordomo in particular for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Gyrn now displays information about what ships it is building for other fleets<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== 26 New In-Game Tips/Strategies For New And Returning Players ===<br />
<br />
* 11 new tips/strategies have been added for the For Returning Players section.<br />
** The goal here is to get people up to speed very quickly on just what is different from the first game, if they already know how to play the first game.<br />
** If you're new to the series in general, you can skip this section.<br />
<br />
* 4 new offensive strategies have been added, to get people going on some of the basic ideas there.<br />
<br />
* 6 new defensive strategies have been added, again to get people going on some of the basics.<br />
<br />
* 4 explanations have been added for non-AI factions in the Other Factions section of the strategy/tips guide.<br />
** This isn't remotely as comprehensive as it should be, and having secondary tips for some of them with specific strategies and ideas would be welcome in the future. But these at least give some more context that was previously only in the release notes.<br />
<br />
* 1 modding topic has been added so far, and just directs people to the wiki for the moment.<br />
** We'll add more later, but for now that is the most direct thing.<br />
<br />
* The Fleet Management and Economic Management sections of the getting started/tips in-game wiki thing have been removed temporarily since they don't have content yet.<br />
** Some things are changing in that area soon, so it was worth waiting on that.<br />
<br />
=== New Starting Fleet Type: Support Fleet! ===<br />
<br />
* Like we recently added a new Starting Battlestation to get players off onto a quicker start, we are also now adding a Starting Support Fleet.<br />
** There are only three options on this one, but they are all useful:<br />
*** Combat Engineers And Factory<br />
**** A decent number of combat engineers that can go anywhere you please, enemy planets or otherwise -- plus a mobile factory that you can take with you even deep into enemy territory!<br />
**** 1x Combat Factory, 5x Combat Engineer<br />
*** Mass Combat Engineers<br />
**** Lots of engineers that can go anywhere you please, enemy planets or otherwise. But no mobile factory capabilities.<br />
**** 1x Transport Flagship, 10x Combat Engineer<br />
*** Engineers And Overloader Factory<br />
**** A small number of combat engineers that can go anywhere you please, enemy planets or otherwise -- plus a mobile factory that you can take with you even deep into enemy territory... that also speeds up allied ships when it is around!<br />
**** 1x Overloader Combat Factory, 3x Combat Engineer<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for pointing out just how much a support fleet was needed as one of the earliest things to capture in the game. We definitely don't want you to have to do the same thing over and over at the start, so having you start with one from the get-go gets you more into the part of the game where you're making unique decisions.<br />
<br />
=== Tech Upgrades All Over The Place, And EXP Bonus Limiting ===<br />
<br />
* All of the fleet centerpieces EXCEPT for the lone wolf ones (just the Spire Frigates) and citadels no longer have techs associated with them to upgrade them.<br />
** They instead just upgrade via the EXP gains of their fleet itself.<br />
** This does put a bit less emphasis on the centerpieces compared to the rest of the fleet, and makes them harder to get to high mark levels on their own without EXP.<br />
<br />
* There is a new is_upgraded_via_fleet_exp xml tag that is required for a ship type to actually upgrade via the fleet levels.<br />
** There was some discussion about this devaluing science for some things, for example, so we're making it so that not everything just gets the fleet upgrades for sure. Now we have the flexibility to control that in data.<br />
** Right now, only the fleet centerpieces gain levels from EXP, so that is pretty different. We'll see what we do with this long-term.<br />
** Any ships that get this sort of upgrade now show that after where it shows what techs benefit them.<br />
<br />
* Citadels are actually different in that they are a centerpiece and they have a new tech that is for all of them (just "Citadels" now, not three subcategories), and they don't gain EXP from combat.<br />
** This further differentiates them from regular battlestations, and makes sense with their general feeling.<br />
<br />
* A new and expensive "Engineering" tech has been added, and engineers now are upgraded via this versus only upgrading with their fleets.<br />
** Oh hey, and we're letting engineers actually get upgraded by fleet EXP as well, so that's another bonus.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield generators of all sorts are still upgraded via fleet EXP, and command stations of all sorts are as well.<br />
** So are tractor and tachyon arrays, focused gravity generators, and minefields. These are so un-tempting to upgrade via science that it's nice to have the upgrade automatically sometimes.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generators are also now upgradeable by a very expensive new tech. It doesn't help the starting forcefield generator on the player home, though.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield generators and minefields are no longer capped at mark 4 and 3 respectively.<br />
<br />
* There is no longer a max mark level on the command stations (it was 4), except the home command station (which is still 4).<br />
<br />
* Three new techs are now available for upgrading your command stations via science.<br />
<br />
* Energy collectors are no longer markless, but instead start out as mark 1 and are upgraded via a new energy collection tech.<br />
** Human Cryogenic Pods are also no longer markless, and also get upgraded by this same tech. Double bonus is that this makes them more robust, too.<br />
<br />
* Metal generation spots are no longer markless, but instead start out as mark 1 and are upgraded by a new metal generation tech.<br />
** Home Human Settlements are also no longer markless, and also get upgraded by this same tech. Double bonus is that this makes them more robust, too.<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange in particular for pointing out what an impact it had on the economy to not be able to upgrade metal generators. This makes for an interesting tempting science sink now, too, especially now that Arks and battlestations aren't a science sink anymore.<br />
<br />
* Minefields are now upgradeable via a new tech that is fairly expensive.<br />
<br />
* Tachyon Arrays, Sentry Frigates, and Focused Gravity Generators are now upgradeable via a new Sentries tech.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Arrays are now upgradeable via a new Tractor Beams tech.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for suggesting that we just go ahead and give techs to most of the ship types that didn't previously have them, and to a lot of players for suggesting that potentially not every ship should be upgraded by EXP since that made the game too easy and made science devalued, and could lead to a desire to grind.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.870 Improving Fleet EXP Mechanics ==<br />
(Released June 22nd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Coprocessors no longer block claiming things on the planets they were on. That was not a bug per se, but was a design decision that confused a lot of people and that really wasn't something that needs to be there. They serve a useful-enough purpose without that.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for reminding us about this.<br />
<br />
* Removed mention of ships firing through forcefields in a Tip, since that mechanic doesn't exist at all.<br />
<br />
=== Fleet EXP V2 ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the command station fleets were never gaining EXP.<br />
** Related, now it grants EXP to all fleets that have ships on a planet, not just ones that have their centerpiece there.<br />
<br />
* The amount of EXP that your fleets gain at a planet is now based around how many fleets you have at that planet:<br />
** One fleet gives you a bonus, 200% of normal EXP.<br />
** Two fleets is still a bonus, 150% of normal EXP.<br />
** Three fleets is just the normal amount of EXP.<br />
** Four fleets and up gets into penalties, starting at 80% for 4, 60% for 5, 40% for 6, 20% for 7, 10% for 8, and 5% for 9 or more.<br />
** This is intended to encourage players not to mass their fleets TOO much if they want the efficiency gains from their fleets getting EXP.<br />
** Note that if it's a planetary fleet (command-station based, in other words) that is missing a command station, then it won't be counted for these purposes.<br />
<br />
* The amount of EXP that your fleets gain at at a planet is also now affected by the highest-mark ship of any type that are in any fleets on that planet.<br />
** Note that the high-mark ship could be on a different planet, but part of its fleet is on the local planet, and it still will cause the penalty if there is one.<br />
** If you're one mark higher at max than the enemy you just killed, then you only get 80% of the EXP.<br />
** Two marks is 60%, three is 40%, four is 20%, five is 10%, six or more is 5%.<br />
** This makes it extremely inefficient to farm low-level enemy ships, which is definitely not something we'd want people sitting around exploiting.<br />
<br />
* EXP that is granted to player fleets is now divided evenly amongst all fleets that have any ships on that planet.<br />
** If this would cause the amount of EXP granted to be less than 1, then it gives 1 per fleet.<br />
** Additionally, if there is a planetary fleet present (a command-station-based one) that is missing its command station, it just will skip that one entirely.<br />
** However, if there are any other fleets with crippled centerpieces, then it will still divided out their portion for them, but not give any EXP to them.<br />
** Aka, if the centepiece is missing (from any planet -- it's ok if it's on a different planet) or crippled (wherever it is), then it misses out on its portion of the EXP.<br />
** Unlike what we were discussing for a while, the fleet that actually makes the kill doesn't get any extra EXP.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for non-player ships now show how much EXP they grant, if they grant any, and also show what the bonus or penalty is.<br />
** Holding the key to give the non-abbreviated tooltip even explains the whole thing more, in terms of why there is a bonus or a penalty.<br />
<br />
* Rather than calculating how much exp ships grant in an automated fashion (that led to many strange results), we now are defining it manually via a new exp_to_grant_on_death xml tag:<br />
** AI Overlords (both phases), and ai superfortresses grant 5k EXP.<br />
** AI Command Stations, AI fortresses, AI hunter killers, grant 500.<br />
** AI Reconquest Command Stations, AI golems, Usurpers, zenith forcefield generator, grant 100.<br />
** Normal guardians, guard posts, forcefield generators, grant 50.<br />
** Dire guardians, dire guard posts, grant 75.<br />
** Special forces ninja hideouts, risk analyzers, ion cannons, mass drivers, ai eyes, give 200.<br />
** Data centers, communication nodes, coprocessors, superterminals, troop accelerators, black hole machines, distribution nodes, spire archives, raid engines, player-specific stuff, drones of any sort, marauders, mercenaries, human resistance fighters, astro train spawned stuff, instigator-spawned stuff, tractor arrays, tachyon generators, focused gravity generators, minefields, nanocaust stuff, dark spire stuff, astro train stuff, dyson stuff, instigator base, macrophage stuff, give none.<br />
** Semi self-destructive ships like vampire claws, metabolizing gangsaws, give 5 EXP.<br />
** Fully self-destructive ships like autobombs give nothing.<br />
** Hydra heads also only give 5.<br />
** Frigates give 40.<br />
** Most other ships give 20 unless otherwise specified.<br />
** It's entirely possible that we'll want to adjust some of these at some point in the future, and that's just xml work except for drones, which automatically will blank out any EXP you try to have them grant since they are so very easy to farm.<br />
<br />
* Note that when it comes to EXP, there is still quite a big discussion going on here: https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/beta-ai-war-2-v0-868-released!-'fleet-exp-level-ups-and-starting-battlestations'/<br />
** Most interesting questions at the moment, to Chris at least: <br />
*** Is it a problem that you can currently farm Raid Engines and SuperTerminals and Eyes for EXP, since they generate ships that have EXP?<br />
**** If so, then we could make variants that are specific to those generation-sources, which don't give EXP and which are also faster.<br />
*** Are the thresholds for leveling up your units still too low?<br />
**** If so, then what sort of numbers should we increase them to?<br />
*** Is leveling up all units in a fleet really what we want EXP to do?<br />
**** The best alternative is probably to make it so that only the units that can't be leveled up any other way are able to level up via this. So things like command stations, for instance. And maybe that would start applying to Arks, rather than letting them be upgraded via science? This approach would lead to us having some things that are upgraded via battle experience, and others via science, which seems interesting.<br />
**** Other alternatives like increasing ship caps or whatever are not something that interest Chris at least... not as the core mechanic for EXP, anyway. There is a "you get one perk point per level up" that will allow you to do that sort of thing in the future, anyway, so that's already coming and would be an ancillary boost anyhow. The core question of the moment is whether the mark level increase should apply to ships that can also be upgraded via science.<br />
**** Note that those ships that can be upgraded via science can't generally get more than 4ish marks on their own, unless they're in multiple categories. And it's supposed to be prohibilively expensive to get all the way to mark 7 for a ship line without also augmenting it with EXP-based boosts to the fleet that its in.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.869 How To Play And Tip Of The Day==<br />
(Released June 21st, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The sliders in the options and factions tab of the lobby now only send their commands to sync things up 0.2 seconds after you stop making any changes, making them not flood the network with commands as you drag them around.<br />
** This is not super duper important in the short term, but in MP will be. And it's very relevant for the upcoming fleet management screen, so we needed to go ahead and get this in.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the credits getting funky offset the further down you scrolled.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could cause corrupted savegames to sometimes try to allocate huge amounts of memory (and potentially run out).<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the prior build where savegames were broken because it was saving the names of fleets twice and only reading them once.<br />
<br />
=== Tutorials Are Out, How To Play Is In ===<br />
<br />
* The tutorials button has been removed from the single player section of the main menu.<br />
** We're going to rely on two other kinds of tutorializing, instead of the older method that we used in this game and the original AI War.<br />
*** Firstly, we're going to have more integrated suggestions on what to do next, as little missions that probably grant EXP or similar, which is along the lines of what we did with The Last Federation. This is coming soon.<br />
*** Secondly, we have a huge Intel tab in the game, plus really rich tooltips, that make discovering how new mechanics work pretty much something that is... well, something you can find for yourself.<br />
*** Thirdly, we've got the new How To Play section, which is more like an embedded wiki plus tip of the day, and this should help people much better with advanced questions they have on whatever subject (the wiki itself was considered basically a requirement for playing the original game).<br />
<br />
* There is a new "tip of the day" on the main menu, with one of currently 16 tips that can show up there.<br />
** If you have tips that you'd like to suggest, please feel free to write them up and let us know! We used a lot of player-based tips of the day in the first game, which had about 50ish tips of the day, and that was really successful.<br />
** In fact, some of these tips of the day are adapted from the tips in the first game!<br />
<br />
* There is also a new How To Play menu, which has tips and strategies divided into a number of categories, with longer-form information in it.<br />
** The tips of the day are shown in a Quick Tips section at the bottom of this, for anyone who wants to manually brows those.<br />
** The first section, which is fairly robust at the moment but certainly not all-inclusive, is called "Getting Started."<br />
*** Anyone who wants to contribute ideas for what to put in these sections is also more than welcome to, as things that you wish you'd known or that you feel compelled to look up in release notes or whatever are things that we want to get into here.<br />
** The other sections are all empty at the moment, but are "For Returning Players," basically to talk about the differences from this game and AIWC for people who are coming back from that game; and then Fleet Management, Economic Management, Offensive Strategies, Defensive Strategies, Other Factions, and Modding.<br />
*** We'll be working on filling this stuff out over the coming months, but as noted anyone who has ideas for subjects they'd like us to address, or items they'd like to write themselves, are very welcome to lend a hand.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.868 Fleet EXP Level-Ups and Starting Battlestations ==<br />
(Released June 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add 3 Harder Quickstarts, 5 Fun With Faction Quickstarts, and 2 Civil War Quickstarts.<br />
** Thanks to Mac for providing one of the Civil Wars.<br />
<br />
* The mark level colors have been completely redone, except for mark 1. They now go through a more gradual progression to the original purple that was once mark 5 but is now mark 7, and so now the galaxy map is vastly easier to read in terms of what is where.<br />
** This also helps with telling high-level marks apart in general, too.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Reduced ai_salvage_multiplier from 3 to 0.8.<br />
** The bug fix and calculation change to reprisals in the last release meant that this outdated value was causing you to get really strong reprisals early. Unfortunately, the bad cases only showed up after the release - bah.<br />
*** Thanks to Badger and Ecthelon on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Increased cost_for_ai_to_purchase on Royal Guardians by 50%.<br />
** It still has quite a good deal, but it's not as absurd.<br />
<br />
* Macrophage albedo increased to 0.7.<br />
<br />
==== Boons To Player Energy ====<br />
<br />
* Player homeworlds now include the ability construct up to 10 matter converters, rather than 0.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, the player home planet can now build 3 energy collectors rather than 0.<br />
** Economic command stations can now build 3 rather than 2, and logistical command can now build 2 rather than 1.<br />
** In general, player energy needs are higher now than they used to be, so let's also give more differentiation here. The military command stations still only give 1.<br />
<br />
* In a recent build, we made it so that lower-mark units would cost you less metal to build (depending on how much lower-mark they are compared to their fleet as a whole), as a way to make those units more viable. <br />
** Now this is also applied to energy usage for ships, although the scaling down of energy usage is somewhat less severe.<br />
** For each mark below the max in that fleet, it goes:<br />
*** 1 down: 90%<br />
*** 2: 75%<br />
*** 3: 60%<br />
*** 4: 45%<br />
*** 5: 30%<br />
*** 6+: 20%<br />
** This should help further the goal of the low-mark ships not feeling like a liability unless you simply haven't upgraded their fleet in any way for whatever reason (an entire mark 1 fleet is still going to be costly, so maybe at least upgrade something that will jack up part of the fleet).<br />
<br />
* It is now impossible for drones to ever cost the player any energy. Since you can't control drone production (and really the point is not to do so), them costing energy or metal was always going to be a raw deal. They haven't cost metal for quite some time, either.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in wave spawning where we weren't getting exactly the right number of units in a wave when the wave actually arrived<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where battlestations and citadels could show up in the build sidebar menu.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The debug menu no longer shows (F1), etc, next to options inside it since those hotkeys are no longer bound to that anyhow.<br />
<br />
==== Unity Upgrade To 2019.1.7 ====<br />
<br />
* Upgraded unity from 2019.1.0 to 2019.1.7.<br />
** This has a number of bugfixes, most of which aren't relevant to us, but if you were getting double keystrokes on linux that should now be fixed.<br />
** Additionally, this issue that was fixedin 2019.1.5: UI: removing sprite mesh caching optimization as it was causing too many issues.<br />
*** This is, best guess, going to fix the sidebar issue with the icons going crazy for no good reason. Things like certain icons drawing too large, etc, was probably this. If you see that again, please let us know!<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin, AnnoyingOrange, and Ovalcircle for reporting the icon sidebar issue.<br />
<br />
* TextMeshPro has been upgraded to 2.0.1 from 2.0.0.<br />
<br />
=== Starting Battlestation Options For Players ===<br />
<br />
* Major new feature for player homeworlds! Rather than just starting out with a starting offensive fleet at the start of the game (that you get to pick out of a list of 5), you ALSO now get a starting defensive battlestation fleet (that you also get to pick out of a list of 5).<br />
** The idea here is that this gives you even more customization in terms of how the early game will go, and gives you a significant early-game boost in general.<br />
** This also removes any possibility that your offensive fleet will need to do defensive babysitting of your homeworld, and gives you slightly more choice in just how soon you want to go capture more battlestations (that's still important very early on, but no longer needs to be your first thing in all cases).<br />
** This also, right from the start of the game, makes sure that it's clear that battlestations/citadels are a thing, so that players know to look for more of them and see their mechanics from the start. Otherwise they might just assume that their defensive options are super duper limited in general now (not at all the case!).<br />
** We implemented this as battlestations rather than home command station variants because this does also give you the flexibility to move the battlestation to another planet other than your homeworld if you so desire, which is one of the big nice things about battlestations in general. But also it... as noted... introduces the idea of battlestations well.<br />
** The starting options are:<br />
*** Classic Defenses<br />
**** This classic mix is good at stopping or slowing things as they come through your wormholes, and has good firepower against midsized foes.<br />
**** Gravitic Battlestation, Ambush Turret x30, Grenade Launcher Turret x30, Concussion Turret x30, Tractor Array x7.<br />
*** Shield Defenses<br />
**** Start with an extra forcefield on your home planet, and some very powerful turrets in small quantities. Also snipers.<br />
**** Shieldwall Battlestation, Plasma Turret x7, Beam Cannon x7, Tritium Sniper Turret x30, Tractor Array x7.<br />
*** Eclectic Defenses<br />
**** Wow this is all over the place. Engineering boosts, some regular turrets, minefields, extra tractor beams, and some mobile sentry frigates. Be prepared for anything!<br />
**** Engineering Battlestation, Concussion Turret x30, Plasma Turret x7, Minefield x60, Tractor Array x10, Sentry Frigate x2.<br />
*** Minelayer Defenses<br />
**** Large numbers of all the kinds of minefields, plus area-of-effect type turrets, for when you really want to booby-trap the heck out of your homeworld.<br />
**** Ensnarer Battlestation, Grenade Launcher Turret x30, Fortified Tesla Turret x30, Minefield x60, Area Minefield x60, Paralysis Minefield x60<br />
*** Webbed Defenses<br />
**** This mix is great against cloaking ships, ships with weak engines, groups of small ships, and ships with high energy operation costs.<br />
**** Revealer Battlestation, Spider Turret x40, MLRS Turret x40, Nucleophilic Turret x40, Tractor Array x7.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty and TechSY730 for inspiring this addition.<br />
<br />
* If a quick start is loaded that doesn't have a starting battlestation defined inside it, it now chooses one at random for you rather than throwing an error.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Fleet EXP Now Turns Into Mark Levels For Your Ships! ===<br />
<br />
* Planetary fleets now gain experience points like the mobile offensive and defensive fleets do.<br />
** Old savegames won't have any EXP for those planetary fleets, though, sadly.<br />
<br />
* Something that has been bugging Chris for a while has been the need to manually upgrade fleets when they gain enough EXP. That was always going to be a hassle.<br />
** However, there was still a desire to have flexibility in what sort of bonuses you get as your fleets do well, so there didn't seem to be an "out" on that.<br />
** Instead, however, now we're auto-upgrading fleets as they gain enough EXP, but also granting a "perk point" to the fleet that you can then go back and spend as you wish (once that interface is in).<br />
*** This way, the automation of fleets getting better as they fight better is there -- which is great -- but the flexibility remains for you to be able to upgrade your fleets in various ways using EXP indirectly as a currency. Best of both worlds!<br />
<br />
* Fleets now actually level up as they gain EXP, at EXP levels 4000, 12000, 36000, 108000, 324000, and finally 972000.<br />
** Are these reasonable numbers? It's really really hard to say. Perhaps folks can help us look at this in real world scenarios.<br />
*** The goal of the first level up is that you hit it after having a bit of combat with the fleet, so it's not too hard to get to mark 2 for the fleet.<br />
*** The goal of the second one is that you really have to fight for a while with it before your fleet gains that big bonus.<br />
*** The goal of the third one is that you have a very veteran fleet on your hands that has slain many many foes before you get this one.<br />
*** And then beyond that, these are mostly just for early fleets in ultra long-running games. It's really expected that most of the other upgrades for fleets, most of the time, would come from science and that you're getting a buff of 1-3 marks on average at most in typical games.<br />
** It's entirely likely that our actual numbers are hilariously wrong, so hopefully with feedback we can make some changes in the external constants xml fleet_level_up_exp_cost_1 and similar to get those better.<br />
<br />
* Hovering over the fleet in the sidebar now shows how much EXP that fleet has, and how much more is needed to get to the next level, and what the next level of the fleet is. Note that this is only presently on the fleet tooltip itself, not the tooltip for the fleet centerpiece.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.867 Smarter AI, Better Mark Level Spread, Player Economic Boom ==<br />
(Released June 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Zombies should not be counted as Threat; they can be Hostile to the player, but aren't part of the AI's coordinated attack force<br />
<br />
* Warden Secret Ninja Hideouts are now valid reinforcement points.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for pointing out this oversight.<br />
<br />
* Previously, if ships couldn't shoot at something for whatever reason, they would wait for 0.8t o 1.6 seconds before trying to fire again. This made ship shots more offset, and prevented hammering a fairly CPU-intensive method, but also caused issues with them seeming really sluggish to respond to things or retarget.<br />
** Now they will wait between 0 seconds and 0.2 seconds instead, which should be vastly more tolerable. It will still make the shots firing slightly offset, and will reduce load a bit, but should be imperceptible to players that there's ever a delay of any note going on here.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting and identifying the issue.<br />
<br />
* Put in a fix for the issue with the same music track playing over and over again if you didn't have the classic AI War music enabled.<br />
** Thanks to B and Drinks for reporting, and Badger for hunting it down.<br />
<br />
* The Objective for destroying Coprocessors now tells you how many are left in the galaxy.<br />
<br />
* When importing partial fleet names, or planet names, it no longer trims the whitespace off the edges of them.<br />
** This makes it so that you can make two-word fleet names, for example.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* If a player kills a reconquest AI command station after a minor faction killed the original (so the player is incurring AIP by killing the reconquest AI command station) then allow scouting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a very strange bug that could lead to error messages not popping up because mysteriously the modal popup data was null.<br />
** This will now remove the offending popup message and silently log an error to the log since trying to put another popup in there when the popup just failed is probably not the best idea.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* More debug info has been put into the tooltips for ships when that toggle is turned on in the personal settings debug section. This is revealing to us at the moment how often the targetPriorityList is empty (for some reason!) when ships are trying to pursue enemies. Not sure yet why that is the case, but this is the cause of the "movement stutters" reported by Ecthelon and RocketAssistedPuffin relating to units in pursuit mode. Thanks to Puffin for the repro save.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the strength counting for the side bar and galaxy view, reconstructed turrets should properly contribute to a planet's strength again.<br />
<br />
* Give the player more Dyson Defenders when they hack the Dyson Sphere.<br />
<br />
* Improve the BigCircle code for Simple/Realistic map types to hopefully have it work now.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for the initial bug report and weapon master for some research<br />
<br />
* Only display the 'not enough energy to claim' message in the hovertext for units that haven't been claimed yet<br />
** Otherwise all units would start displaying 'can't claim due to low energy' if you ran out of energy<br />
<br />
* Put in some logic that should prevent things that die to remains from being in a funky state after being rebuilt or re-captured.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI was getting double the income it should. Since we were balancing around this bug, fix the bug but double the underlying income. No net change to the game balance.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engine Notifier tooltips now show the faction the Raid Engine will send a wave at<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines will no longer be triggered by Dark Spire, Macrophage, Devourer or Zombies<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* When hovering a planet in the galaxy map with Verbose mode, if the planet is under the influence of a minor faction it will list that faction.<br />
<br />
* Warden, Hunter and Anti-Player zombies which zombify units will create Anti-Player zombies, not anti-everyone zombies<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Neutral world science extraction hacking now correctly costs AIP if the player would accrue AIP from capturing the planet (ie if a minor faction took out the AI command station).<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The nanocaust will now wait to more thoroughly defeat a planet's defenses before building a construction center<br />
** Reported by Ecthelon on steam<br />
<br />
* Give the AI a bit of bonus hunter income at AIP > 400. Make stacked units do a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines and other nasty things that can interfere with the Dyson Sphere now blow up immediately after game spawn<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust units shouldn't count as Threat anymore<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for reporting very high threat values<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust and Marauders are allowed to kill Raid Engines<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Marauder Outposts were allowed to exceed the raider limit by 1.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Player controlled Nanocaust ships (Abominations/Aberrations) now produce Anti-AI Zombies instead of player-controlled units that aren't in a Fleet.<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Wave modifications ===<br />
<br />
* On higher difficulty the AI will now not send waves against planets that are 'too heavily defended'. It will either pick weaker targets or roll the wave budget over into the next wave. <br />
** This gives the AI a bit better of a chance against a well-defended or turtling player. I was finding that most of the time waves barely tickled my defenses.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI could sometimes send normal waves against neutral planets<br />
<br />
* Add Wave specific traces for improved debugging<br />
<br />
* Rewrote chunks of the wave target finding logic for improved clarity<br />
<br />
* Reprisal waves buffs to match AIWC behaviour. Instead of having strength = Reprisal Level * Base Wave Strength, it's now strength = Base Wave Strength * baseMultiplier * 2^ reprisal level. baseMultiplier ranges from 1.1 (difficulty 1) to 1.8 (difficulty 10).<br />
** If you have a 4x reprisal level wave at difficulty 7 then it is Base Wave Strength * 1.5 * 2^4 = Base Wave Strength * 12, instead of Base Wave Strength * 4.<br />
** Badger found that the AI was not adequately punishing fleet-wipes. This should make it more interesting. Prompted due to some discord griping with Kesseleth and Puffin<br />
<br />
* Shortened some of the autogenerated fleet names.<br />
** Thanks to Viss Valdyr for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Better Handling Of Reinforcements Being Released ===<br />
<br />
* There was a strange thing where units were often being transferred from guard posts to other places, sometimes ones that could not be reinforcement points at all.<br />
** Likely this was an artifact of how we changed reinforcements over time in the design, and the intent of the transfer isn't super duper clear as it is. But the transfer is being kept for now, but now those transferred units are simply not transferred unless the target is also a reinforcement point. We can revisit the transfer itself later if it turns out to be a problem.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this issue in a code review.<br />
<br />
*The game now checks all units (just once per second) to see if they are aggro'd and have any units stored in them to set free, not just the "reinforcement points" that are preordained.<br />
** That way if there are any reinforcements hiding in a unit that was not initially supposed to have them, but that got transferred them by whatever arcane methods (it's okay, really), they will behave properly. There are some cases where this might be desirable behavior, and having the extra flexibility here doesn't cost us much in terms of the CPU usage, so that's good.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting, as well as finding the issues in a code review.<br />
<br />
* Now when a unit dies, if it has reinforcements inside it for whatever reason, it should dump them all out immediately. Previously if you managed to kill a guard post full of reinforcements in under 1 second, then the guards would all die in the fire of their parent. Now they go free and attack you, as was always intended.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting, as well as finding the issues in a code review.<br />
<br />
=== Planet Naming Styles ===<br />
<br />
* As in the first game, the first planet added to the map is now always named "Murdoch." This tends to be a significant planet, and the interest of this happening and frequently being an important planet was not lost on people and kind of became part of AI War lore.<br />
<br />
* There are now multiple planet naming styles that you can choose from:<br />
** Standard (what it has been until now)<br />
*** Inspired by famous scientists, along with real and fictional named planets and locations from other works. Created by Chris and Keith.<br />
** No Gravitas<br />
*** Inspired by phrases and spaceship names in a pretty humorous sci fi series. Created by Draco18s for AIWC (edited by Chris).<br />
** Fantasy Monsters<br />
*** Inspired by the names of monsters in several fantasy games. Created by Zoutzakje for AIWC (edited by Chris).<br />
** Kahuna's Real Stars<br />
*** Absolutely enormous list of actual star names, including codenames for them. Plus a few easter eggs in there. Created by Kahuna for AIWC.<br />
** Kahuna's No-Codename Stars<br />
*** Absolutely enormous list of actual star names, but minus the codename-y sort. Plus a few easter eggs in there. Created by Kahuna for AIWC.<br />
** Cities (DE)<br />
*** Most cities in Germany show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr, and was the original inspiration for this change to the game.<br />
** Cities (UK)<br />
*** Most cities in the UK show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
** Cities (US)<br />
*** Most cities in the US show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
** Cities (RUS)<br />
*** Most cities in Russia show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
** Cities (FR/SPA)<br />
*** Most cities in France and Spain show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. It's a shorter (and combined) list because most of their city names are quite long! Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
<br />
* When using the Real Stars lists, which are tens of thousands of entries long, we discovered that map generation would take several seconds to part of a minute.<br />
** Due to this discovery, we made a big improvement to the speed of name choosing for planets, and as a result all of the lists now generate in approximately the same amount of time (and much faster than before), making the lobby more responsive-feeling.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Marauder Bases now have a bit more health<br />
** Prompted by Ecthelon on Steam<br />
<br />
* Marauders have a bit more income<br />
** Thanks to puffin for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Usurpers can now have higher Marks.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of Concussion Guard Posts, Guardians and Turrets by 3,000.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of MLRS Guard Posts and Turrets by 3,000.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Corvette, Turret, Guard Post reload time 3s -> 4s, damage multiplier 2x -> 4x.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette, Turret, Guardian, Guard Post high hull health damage multiplier 2x -> 4x.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking ====<br />
* Nerf hacking responses, especially the superterminal hacking response<br />
** Thanks to MajorDomo for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Nerf spire archive hacks. Make science extraction hacks a bit harder<br />
** Thanks to ulu for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Sabotage hacks now will blow up the legal target closest to the hacking unit, rather than a random legal target.<br />
** This matches AIWC behaviour.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* AutoBomb damage radius 600 -> 1,200, speed 2,200 -> 2,900.<br />
<br />
* Cluster Bomb speed 1,000 -> 1,800.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard damage resistance upon entering a planet 0.5x -> 0.25x.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette damage 20 -> 30, reload time 4s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
==== Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* Transport shields 500,000 -> 750,000, damage resistance upon entering a planet 0.5x -> 0.25x.<br />
<br />
* Transport range 5,600 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Transport damage 1,500 -> 500.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting a much further range on these, to avoid them being suicidal in combat. To avoid it being a weird fusion sniper, damage is lowered as well. It's pretty much just a weapon so it counts as a combatant.<br />
<br />
* Lost Spire Frigate shield points 750,000 -> 1,750,000.<br />
<br />
* Orchid shield bypass 70% -> 100%, speed 1,400 -> 1,800.<br />
<br />
* Gryn build speed increased 50%.<br />
<br />
==== Tech Upgrades ====<br />
<br />
* Ark Spirit:<br />
** Was: "3500,5500,7500,9500", now: "3000,4500,6000,7500".<br />
<br />
* Ark Heart:<br />
** Was: "3500,5500,7500,9500", now: "3000,4500,6000,7500".<br />
<br />
* Ark Armor:<br />
** Was: "6000,8000,10000,12000", now: "5000,6500,8000,9500".<br />
<br />
* Ark Fist:<br />
** Was: "7000,10000,12000", now: "6000,7500,9000".<br />
<br />
* Citadel Executioner:<br />
** Was: "4500,6750,9000", now: "3500,5000,6500".<br />
<br />
* Citadel Protector:<br />
** Was: "4000,6000,8000", now: "3000,4500,6000".<br />
<br />
* Citadel Consumer:<br />
** Was: "5000,7500", now: "4000,5500".<br />
<br />
* Spire Core:<br />
** Was: "6000,8000,10000,12000", now: "5000,6500,8000,9500".<br />
<br />
==== Marauders ====<br />
<br />
* All Marauder Raider weapon ranges are now at least 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Marauder Raider speed 200 -> 400.<br />
<br />
==== Dyson ====<br />
<br />
* Dyson Defender shield bypass 70% -> 100%.<br />
<br />
* Dyson Sentinel shields 200 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
==== Nanocaust ====<br />
<br />
* Deviant engine_gx 13 -> 14, range 3,800 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Anomaly base shield bypass 60% -> 90%.<br />
<br />
* Mutation range 1,250 -> 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Aberration Prion Beam range 1,250 -> 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Abomination Prion Beam and Nematode range 1,250 -> 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Aberration and Abomination engine_gx 15 -> 18.<br />
<br />
* Deviant, Anomaly and Mutation speed 250 -> 400.<br />
** They now match Aberration and Abomination speed.<br />
<br />
=== Mark Level Balance Overhaul ===<br />
<br />
* The way that AI planets are allocated, mark-level-wise, is now revised very heavily.<br />
** The AI home planets are now Mark 7 instead of 5, and are surrounded by a mix of 7s and 6s rather than 5s and 4s like before.<br />
** Then in the main parts of the galaxy, there's way fewer mark 2 and 3 planets, and a whole lot more that ranges between 3-5 out there.<br />
** There were also previously some random strange mark 1 planets that really should not have existed (those should only be next to player homeworlds!). Now those are randomly tossed between marks 2 and 3.<br />
** This is... a REALLY substantial buff to the power of the AIs, which kind of goes without saying. But it was very strange-feeling that players were able to use mark 7 stuff and AIs were never really doing that. Now the AIs also use the full range of mark levels that are in this game, versus the player being technologically overpowering for them.<br />
** This will probably make a number of other factions need buffs, so please let us know.<br />
** We'll probably need to recolor some of these to make the map easier to read, now that there's more of this stuff out there.<br />
** The ratios might also not be ideal yet, we'll have to see.<br />
** Note that this won't affect existing savegames, but they will be affected by the OTHER changes below, so now older savegames from the fleets period are going to be a tad on the easy side, potentially.<br />
<br />
* The differences between mark levels is now a lot lower than before, so going up in mark levels doesn't make the older mark levels so darn useless.<br />
** This is pretty critical, given how unevenly you're upgrading your forces. And with 7 mark levels now instead of 5, we can afford to be more granular in general.<br />
** This helps to prevent some of the crazy overpowered fleets that people could get super early in the game, and also makes it so that the endgame mark levels is more of something to strive for and actually achieve. It also prevents some fleets from being absolutely useless, or mark 1 ships an absolute liability, early on in the game.<br />
** The changes are as follows:<br />
*** Mark 2:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 2.1 to 1.4<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 1.5 to 1.25<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 2 to 1.25<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 225 to 100<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 3 to 2<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 1.3 to 1.1<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 1.4 to 1.2<br />
*** Mark 3:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 3.2 to 2.1<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 2 to 1.5<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 3 to 1.75<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 450 to 220<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 5 to 3<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 1.6 to 1.3<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 1.8 to 1.4<br />
*** Mark 4:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 4.3 to 2.8<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 2.5 to 2<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 4 to 2.5<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 675 to 400<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 7 to 4<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 1.9 to 1.6<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.1 to 1.75<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 1 to 0.<br />
*** Mark 5:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 5.4 to 3.6<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 3 to 2.5<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 5 to 3<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 900 to 650<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 9 to 6<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 2.1 to 1.9<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.4 to 2.1<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 2 to 1.<br />
*** Mark 6:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 6.5 to 4.2<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 3.5 to 3<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 6 to 3.5<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 1125 to 900<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 11 to 8<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 2.6 to 2.2<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.8 to 2.4<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 3 to 2.<br />
*** Mark 7:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 7.6 to 5.4<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 4 to 3<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 7 to 4<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 1350 to 1150<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 15 to 10<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 3 to 2.4<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.8 to 2.4<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 3.4 to 2.8.<br />
** All of these changes help to make it so that it's partly more about what KIND of ships you have, and not just having the top of the line mark levels.<br />
*** But there's a similar progression to what used to be the top-level mark 5 stuff (which is now mark 7), minus some of the extreme tankiness that was there before.<br />
*** Additionally, there is no longer a crazy spike where mark 2 stuff is just soooo incredibly much better than mark 1. That was problematic, and the entire curve is thus smoothed out a lot more.<br />
*** The goal with all this is that a fleet of mark 1 ships should still be useful even in the midgame, and not such a liability as it is right now. But ALSO that if you have a mark 7 fleet you're not just curb-stomping the AI, who only has mark 5 until now.<br />
*** It's also worth noting that the AI and you both would be teching up more often in this model, but all of these numbers are super duper preliminary and will need testing.<br />
*** Also also it's worth noting that we still need to do some things about lower-mark ships and their costs, to keep those attractive, but those will come separately from this particular balance shift.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for coming up with this general idea, and for the feedback of a lot of other people related to these changes.<br />
<br />
=== Player Economic Balance Boom ===<br />
<br />
* Repairing the engines or personal shields of friendlies is now a free action, it just takes time (but not metal).<br />
** Note that repairing bubble forcefields or hulls still costs metal.<br />
** It's also worth noting that drone production has been a free action for a long time.<br />
** This should help avoid certain metal spikes, cost-wise.<br />
<br />
* In addition to other changes relating to mark levels, now within your fleets your lower-mark ships now get a serious discount in metal cost depending on how much lower-mark they are than the highest-mark ship type in that fleet.<br />
** Aka, if Fleet A has at least one mark 3 ship type in it, then all of its mark 1 and 2 ship types will be discounted. If Fleet B is all mark 1 units, that wouldn't hold true; so there's some benefit to upgrading at least a little bit of something from every fleet.<br />
** These benefits translate into faster build times for low-mark stuff, lower metal expenditures, and lower repair costs. Aka, they make way better chaff -- without tanking your economy -- which is similar to what AI War Classic did. But in this game we had to go with a discounting system rather than an increasing-cost system so that as you upgrade your ships you don't run into a tanked economy for THAT reason.<br />
** The discounts are:<br />
*** 90% of normal cost if 1 mark below the max of the fleet.<br />
*** 75% of normal cost of 2 marks below.<br />
*** 55% if 3 marks below.<br />
*** 35% if 4 marks below.<br />
*** 25% if 5 marks below.<br />
*** 10% if 7 marks below.<br />
** These values can be tuned in the external constants xml, and we also will be making other economic changes to balance in general, probably. But this core change should make it so that a lot more things are useful a lot more of the time.<br />
<br />
==== Seeing Your Metal Outflows ====<br />
<br />
* A basic display of metal outflows is now displayed when you click the metal resource line in the top bar of the GUI.<br />
** There are some funky things that this is showing and/or not showing, so please let us know as you find them. Some of what we've seen might just be old savegames, but it's hard to say.<br />
** Eventually we'd like these to be more robust reports that come out on all the resources in the top bar, including things about the AIs and other factions (whatever details you are allowed to know) when you click AIP, for instance.<br />
** This uses a modal popup with a scrollbar, which is a lot more suited for really long-form text data (as long as it needs to be!), so this is basically considered driving down to a much more detailed level compared to the tooltip, which is more realtime and more brief/summary in nature.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for the initial implementation and idea!<br />
<br />
=== New Mechanic STYLE: Fleet Bonuses From Member Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new supercharges_min_speed_of_rest_of_player_fleet xml property for ships, which is now applied to Raiders.<br />
** When this is on, as with the case for Raiders, then all of the other non-centerpiece ships within any PLAYER fleet that also contains these ships get boosted up to at least the speed of the raiders.<br />
** This is in response to people noting that often Raiders were not super useful because they're very fast but everything else was not, so it's not like you could build a giant strike fleet out of them.<br />
** But even more than that, this is kind of a first-item showcase for how we can create new synergies from different ships in a fleet, compared to having to exploit existing/inherent ones. In other words, we can make it so that a ship that "doesn't play well with others" is able to make others more awesome in a way that is similar to itself, thus making fleets... even more slightly procedural in nature, is one way to put it?<br />
** We arent' having procedural ships, per se, but this lets the procedural fleets actually adjust the other ships within their fleets. This is only for human players, and probably we can think of some various other interesting things to do with this that will make some ships more useful and varied in surprising new ways.<br />
** It's worth noting that we'll definitely want suggestions for "hey this ship isn't very useful with many others, maybe part of its abilities could transfer over," and then also there are simply some ship types (etherjets?) that probably should be limited to AI-side-only simply because they're too esoteric for player use. That said, this whole piece is a marathon, not a sprint, and this is more of a case study of the sorts of cool things we can do over time, long-term.<br />
** The alternative was going to be trying to really make it so that "unhelpful fleeet compositions" were not ever created, but that was going to really limit the types of fleets people would see. It's a lot more interesting to make it so that the weak fleets get buffed by new abilities that ships can grant to their fleet, we figured.<br />
** Thanks to a ton of players for the discussion that inspired this.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.866 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released June 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed Enraged Macrophages having 1/10th of the shields of normal Macrophages.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for spotting.<br />
<br />
* Macrophages now spawn at the correct mark level<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we were checking the Stacking Cutoff in the wrong way, and that was basically Breaking Everything.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.865 The Return Of Deepstriking ==<br />
(Released June 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Improvements and Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, the header sizes for some of the text on the map tab line items is now a bit larger.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, on the map tab it now has the Randomize button up next to the Map Seed, as a half-width button again, to show its lesser importance. This definitely helps it be confused with the Regenerate Map button less.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting the confusion.<br />
<br />
* The game now supports actions being triggered when you press enter or return in textboxes.<br />
** We have to hook this up via a new OnEnterOrReturnPressed() method on a case-by-case basis, but the first place that this is now being used is in the lobby on the map seed textbox. Pressing enter in that now causes the map to regenerate.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== In-Game Ability To Change A Subset Of These ====<br />
<br />
* The Performance section of the regular settings screen has been removed, and the singular option from there (when to start stacking units) has been moved into the Lobby Options instead. This way this will function properly during multiplayer, since this is a global thing and not a local setting.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The settings screen now has a header of "Personal Settings," instead of "Game Settings," to be a little more clear.<br />
<br />
* In the escape menu during gameplay, you can now see two options: "Personal Settings," and "Galaxy-Wide Options."<br />
** The new Galaxy-Wide Options screen is basically just a subset of the Options tab from the Lobby screen. It's only the options that make sense for people to be able to change once the game has started.<br />
** To make any option show on this screen, the xml tag changeable_during_gameplay="true" simply must be added and it will be there.<br />
** This lets players, presently, change the contents of the Scouting and the Performance tabs. Later we may add other things, but these were the only things that didn't seem like they would be exploitable by players in some way. And the only things that aren't cached by the AI factions or whatever, and aren't just something for during mapgen like how many capturables are seeded.<br />
** This is actually a pretty powerful new tool we have, which will let us do some interesting things in the future beyond what we have right now.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Selected Units Improvements and Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding issue where if you clicked a single item in your list of selected units in the lower right corner, it wouldn't just limit down to that only.<br />
** Basically we can't call Unselect() from inside DoForSelected(), we need to return RemoveAndContinue instead or else if will skip indices.<br />
** Thanks to Jonesmz, Kahuna, and Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If you have selected some ships that are remains (turrets, whatever), then those now show up as separate line items in the list of selected ships, and show REMAINS next to themselves.<br />
** Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* In the UI, if you have selected a fleet directly, rather than selecting just all or some of the units from it, it now shows the fleet itself in the selection window.<br />
** Functionally there is no difference from before, as selecting a fleet would select the fleet as a whole plus any new ships that were inside it, and that is still the case. But now you can visually tell that.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, the only way to "select a fleet" was to right-click it in the fleets sidebar, or to use the number key assigned to that fleet. Now you can also double-click the fleet centerpiece and that will select the fleet rather than just selecting all the units inside it.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Sneaking Around AI Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the AI Behavior section of the lobby options: Guard Aggro Distance<br />
** At what distance from an enemy will a guard post release its internal ships, or will a ship standing near a guard post leave its post to attack the enemy? Default is 5000.<br />
** Note that if the guard post or one of its ships get shot, then they immediately aggro no matter what the distance. This is about them noticing someone who is being passive.<br />
** Default is 5k, min is 3k, max is 10k. Prior to this build, this was hardcoded in at an insanely-high 13k, which is half the gravity well. That made the AI just absolutely notice everything you did immediately, and made the planets feel smaller than they are.<br />
*** The ranges of ships may also be a bit too on the high side in some cases, in terms of making the gravity wells feel too small and cage-matchy, so we might make some changes there to reduce ship attack ranges, but we shall see.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting. Hopefully we can actually do some deepstriking, now!<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where AI units were being aggro'd even by cloaked ships. Ships that are cloaked no longer can cause guards to notice them at all.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a super longstanding issue with the hitboxes for planets being strange/biased on the galaxy map. This was because, as WeaponMaster discovered, the important structures icons were never disabling their colliders and thus there was a giant invisible area where hovering would select the wrong planet.<br />
** Thanks to rkfg, Mckloshiv, Draco18s, Ovalcircle, and WeaponMaster for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code that will give us better errors when there are problems linking planets up in octopus maps or various others.<br />
** This likely won't fix the actual issue, but will let us find out where the issue actually lies.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the player command station type changes at a planet, it now properly removes all of the command-station-fleet ships that are not a part of the new command station's fleet design.<br />
** It was already properly doing this in terms of making ship counts drop for types that it now had too many of, but it wasn't clearing entire ship types that were disallowed.<br />
** There was already a destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command="true" xml flag that you could put on ships in order to make them not reduce their count to match whatever the new command station is.<br />
** Now there is also a new is_auto_scrapping_skipped_when_command_station_type_changes="true" that prevents this scrapping logic from happening at all if the type isn't a match to the new command station fleet type.<br />
*** This is pretty important for things like the Zenith Power Generator, or other capturables, which are not part of the fleet design but should remain. Same for anything you might buy from the Zenith Trader.<br />
*** This has been applied to all the relevant structures and ships so that they shouldn't disappear, but that hasn't been explicitly tested, so please let us know if you see problems with those sorts of things.<br />
** Also please note that losing your command station doesn't cost you any units. It's not until you rebuild the command station as a different type (switching from economic to miltiary, for instance) that it changes what you're allowed to have.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 and AnnoyingOrange for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the fleet definition would show a zero cap, it no longer shows you that in the fleet tooltip. This is for things like command stations that were switched, or old turret types from an old command station type, etc.<br />
** Essentially it was just extra visual clutter for no reason (well, the reason was that it was an oversight).<br />
<br />
* Corrected a tooltip in the lobby to note the new default that there are three battlestations on each planet that you would capture.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of visual glitches with the Zenith Trader:<br />
** The notification at the top bar now says "Zenith Trader" rather than "Zenith ???".<br />
** Some of the items for sale on the sidebar now have sidebar abbreviations so that they can fit on one line properly.<br />
** Rather than saying "unnamed" for the fleet name, it says "Zenith Trader," so you can tell where that's coming from.<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.864 Humanity Strikes Back ==<br />
(Released June 3rd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Some minor tweaks to the Simple and Realistic map types to decrease connectivity<br />
<br />
* Dyson Antagonizers now only spawn on Intensity 8 or higher, and are less frequent<br />
<br />
* A new Instigator Base type has been added that strengthens the Warden Fleet.<br />
** Thanks to kesseleth for thinking this up and also implementing it!<br />
<br />
* Add one more Basic Quickstart, as well as three Moderate Quickstarts.<br />
** Two Moderates are returning (with some changes) and the third is new.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug causing crippled mobile factories to still be able to produce ships if engineers assist them.<br />
<br />
* Put in two separate instances of defensive coding to prevent index out of range exceptions.<br />
** One is in Inner_CheckForCollisionOrMakeEntityMove, and will simply identify the problem if we have one there, but it's unlikely we actually have on there.<br />
** The second is in the three DoForEntities methods on EntityCollection, and basically make it so that if they try to index beyond what they should (because of cross-threading competition, most likely), then it will just gracefully continue on.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in several layers of defensive code that should prevent null reference exceptions from happening in certain rare cases with the Warden fleet trying to pathfind around.<br />
** Thanks to MatthewYCR for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Hunter/Warden difficulty differentiation ===<br />
<br />
* Give the Hunter Fleet some bonus income independent of the AI for intensity >= 7<br />
<br />
* Give Hunter and Warden fleets an Overconfidence Ratio; hunter/warden fleets will overestimate their strengths at lower difficulties<br />
<br />
* Hunter and Warden fleets now choose less effective targets to shoot at lower difficulties<br />
<br />
=== Human Player Balance Shifts ===<br />
<br />
* The default number of battlestations per planet is now 3, rather than 2. This should make it so that you have an easier time defending your planets without having to capture SO darn many other planets. And there's nothing that really says you have to use every ounce of those battlestations' capacity, so if you're doing well then you can use this opportunity to be more choosy about exactly which kinds of turrets you build out of them, rather than maximizing constantly.<br />
** Generally we've been getting the sense that on difficulty 7 things have been a bit on the difficult size, mainly in terms of the AI being able to mobilize more stuff than you, and you feeling perpetually poor, which is not a good feeling to have on the "standard" difficulty. Difficulty 7 has been coming out more like between difficulty 8 and 9 from the first game is the feeling, at least recently, and that has to do with the ability you have to defend yourself instead of the AI being clever or whatever else.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the most recent report and suggestions.<br />
<br />
* Human Cryogenic Pods now give 7500 energy instead of 5000.<br />
** Rather than being forced to have 10 of these on your starting planet, it now lets you choose between 0 and 30 of them. The default is still 10.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* On your home planet, the starting positions of the cryogenic pods and the home human settlements are way closer to your actual home command station, and thus stay under your forcefield a lot longer.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Human Home Settlements now give 520 metal per second rather than 280 metal per second.<br />
** There is also now a slider on the setup for the human factions in the lobby that lets you configure if you want the default 2 of these, or as few as 0 or as many as 5.<br />
** It's worth noting that this is essentially like an economic boost slider, in a lot of respects, except that it has more to do with the early game than the entire game, AND it has potential disastrous consequences in AIP. Much more interesting than the economic multiplier in the first game.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The forcefield on the home human planets is now scale 5 instead of 4 (normal forcefields are scale 3).<br />
** This provides a much longer window before your shields are low enough that your stuff under it can be shot up (particularly the cryo pods), while still keeping the shields-shrink mechanic consistent.<br />
** Especially with how the cryo pods have moved more inward anyway, this really should keep them pretty safe against a lot of incursions.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Energy Boosts:<br />
** Military Command Stations now provide 20k energy, with an added 5k energy per mark level, rather than 2k and 2k.<br />
** Economic Command Stations now provide 100k energy, with an added 20k per mark level, rather than 10k and 10k.<br />
** Logistical Command Stations now provide 50k energy, with an added 50k per mark level, rather than 25k and 25k.<br />
** For comparison, the basic Energy Collector produces 150k energy, and the Zenith Power Generator produces 600k energy.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for reporting the energy shortages that were now likely to be common in standard play simply because of how many more units you have in play using up that energy.<br />
<br />
* Citadels:<br />
** Citadel Shields 125,000 -> 175,000.<br />
** Citadel Energy Consumption 50,000 -> 30,000.<br />
** All Citadel shots per salvo doubled, excluding Inhibitor which is only increased 50% (it was higher than the others by a fair bit already).<br />
<br />
== Version 0.863 Control of Capturables ==<br />
(Released May 31st, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== New Lobby Settings for Controlling Gameplay ===<br />
<br />
* Added new setting to the Scouting section of the lobby options: Max Planets To Scout At Once<br />
** Depending on the topography of your map, capturing a planet may cause a TON of planets to suddenly be revealed. Rather than this getting TOO crazy and showing you the whole map after you capture one planet, this lets it be more gradual. The default is 8.<br />
** Ranges from 3 to 40.<br />
** This is a good example of the new types of things we can do thanks to the Lobby Options tab, which we couldn't cleanly do before using the regular game settings (because of multiplayer sync, and the potential for abuse with mid-game changes, etc).<br />
** Note that this is so far untested, so let us know if there are bugs.<br />
** Thanks to Mckloshiv and BadgerBadger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* A new capturables section has been added to the lobby options, with 6 different options in there that you can now tune.<br />
** This is one of the first examples of an option that affects mapgen seeding but not then the gameplay after that.<br />
** These basically let you control how many of each type of fleet you'd like to have out in the galaxy, in a multiplier-like fashion.<br />
** It also explains what all the kinds of fleets are, and what their role is in the game, so that's kind of a self-teaching moment, which is nice.<br />
** As one example, it lets you turn off basically all the officer fleets (all but one of them) by setting the multiplier for that to 0x, and you could then double or triple the number of regular fleets to compensate. This would let you have a very hero-less sort of game style, if you don't like the big centerpiece flagships being there at all. Or of course you could completely reverse it, and make it very hero-centric with only two (in that case) transport-based fleets, and instead have all the rest be officer-style.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring this addition, which lets people have more the flavor of game they want.<br />
<br />
* Added a new slider setting to the capturables section of the options menu in the lobby: Basic Battlestations Per Planet<br />
** Your command stations give very few turrets for defending themselves (except the Military variant), so in order to defend yourself you'll want to capture battlestations (which come with LOADS of turrets and other defensive goodies).<br />
** Since you have to capture territory to get a battlestation for defending territory... it makes a lot of sense to have more than just one on any planets that have them. The default is 2, but you can have up to 4, or make things really hard and just have one.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and others for inspiring this new flexibility.<br />
<br />
* Added a new slider setting to the capturables section of the options menu in the lobby: Citadels Per Planet<br />
** Similar to the basic battlestations, these provide defensive goodies and turrets to help defend your planets. However, since the citadels themselves are also giant fortresses in their own right, giving only one per planet seems to make the most sense for most cases. But if you want to grant yourself more, you can!<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and others for inspiring this new flexibility.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts Return ===<br />
<br />
* Quick Starts have been added back into the game, and now function again.<br />
** However, we had to create a whole new set of them, since the old quick starts were all in the old savegame format and also didn't really have settings that make sense anymore, anyway.<br />
** The order for the categories of basic, moderate, and harder is now in the order you would naturally expect (1,2,3), and then the Fun With Factions are later on. As will any other generalized quick starts be.<br />
** We have only added in three quick starts thus far, all in the basic category. The others we'll work on soon.<br />
*** One has the classic fleet as the starting situation, with a difficulty 6 AI and 100 planets on a realistic map.<br />
*** The next has the classic fleet, with two difficulty 6 AIs and a 120 planet Octopus map.<br />
*** The last has the raid fleet, with one difficulty 7 AI, and then also the Zenith Trader wandering around. Clusters microcosm map.<br />
** Thanks<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Minor Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* A variety of changes have been made to the map generation code and interface so that the number of planets allowed per galaxy is now shown as a slider, and is properly enforced at all times.<br />
** The actual map types have also had their minimum and maximum numbers of planets brought inwards some -- up from 10 in most cases to 40 for the minimum, and down from 200+ to 120-200 on most of them. For Realistic, which is particularly slow to generate right now, it has a cap of 100.<br />
** All of this should prevent some of the long-running slowness that could be encountered previously and that would lead to strangeness if it was taking 5-10 seconds to generate the basic outline of a map.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Also put in some defensive code for cases where potentially there could be an error happening in mapgen if it was aborted partway through, and thus didn't have a parent galaxy for a planet it was trying to find the neighbors for.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The escape key now works in the lobby to close it.<br />
** For whatever reason it doesn't work to close the add factions popup, but we can deal with that another time.<br />
** Thanks to dv = i ln(w0 / wf) for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix divide by 0 in PlanWave<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code to prevent errors when trying to find out the strength or contents of a ship that has a null fleet or other similar issues.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo in the Direct Waves tooltip.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new HandlePostSavegameLoadLogic method that gets called on World_AIW2 after a savegame is loaded, giving us a chance to fix any problems in it.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the DoGameStartLogic method for galaxy settings to allow for this to be called when it's a string value that has been set.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoAfterSavegameLoadLogic method for galaxy settings to allow for these to do fixes to existing savegames that might have some issue.<br />
<br />
* When the "Ally To AI" option is on, now any allies of the AI will automatically ally with you as well. So this means AI Instigators, etc, become your friends as well.<br />
** This also retroactively fixes itself in existing savegames.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo that was causing the warden difficulty to come before the warden type in the lobby settings.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking a faction in the add faction window now adds it without you having to click it and then click ok.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the factions tab of the lobby where if you were clicking between two factions of the same type (for example, marauders), then any dropdowns used by those two factions would not be properly updated to the real values of the new faction when you click from the other faction.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Until now, if savegames in the old pre-0.850 branch were attempted to load in the new game, then it would just silently do nothing. Now it throws up a visible error telling you that the savegame is an out of date format.<br />
** Thanks to BandDrinks for the savegame that led us to finding this.<br />
<br />
* The test chamber, which was broken during the lobby upheaval, is now fully functional again.<br />
** Interestingly, for some reason you can control both your units and enemy units. Nifty, I guess?<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with clusters microcosm map types where it was trying to get a setting to display that wasn't actually used in that map type.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the list of "things in my fleet" to not include command stations and some other things like that.<br />
** Normally that already wouldn't be showing, but if you had switched the kind of command station on a planet, then in particular it would show the other types in a way that was not helpful.<br />
<br />
* The scrap units hotkey (and a variety of other hotkeys that should not have been active) no longer work in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The lobby now properly shows the human-readable text names for things in dropdowns on the factions tab. This makes them way more clear.<br />
** Additionally, the lobby now shows tooltips for individual line items in dropdowns on the factions tab if those have been set up for the table in question.<br />
*** This is super useful for the starting fleet for the player, and the AI types for the AI, etc.<br />
<br />
* The AI Difficulty table now has a description field which tries to explain what each difficulty level means. This is now shown in the lobby tooltips for those.<br />
** Note that warden and hunter fleet difficulties don't show anything yet.<br />
<br />
==== Ability To See What Command Station Fleets Consist Of Before Creating Them ====<br />
<br />
* For fleet centerpieces that you can construct from the sidebar and which have non-procedural fleet designs attached to them (for both of these categories, the command stations are the only things at the moment), you can now see what their constructed fleet will be like once they are created.<br />
** Basically, the upshot is that for command stations you can now see what their fleets would be before you create them. That's... kinda important info! And was causing people to not know that essentially they could get some extra military firepower by using the military command station, for instance.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.862 Lobby Overhaul, Knockback, Nanocaust, and the Final Battle ==<br />
(Released May 29th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add Notification for any Raid Engines that are alerted. Untested, but hopefully it works?<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it<br />
<br />
=== Complete Lobby Overhaul ===<br />
<br />
* The entire lobby has been redone from scratch, and now works much better as well as having a more visually-pleasing style, and fitting a lot more information in in a less-overwhelming way, and being more modder-friendly than before.<br />
** There are some bits that still need fixing up, please see here for the known todo list at the moment: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=20151<br />
<br />
* The map configuration now actually gets saved into your local settings file so that it's the same the next time you load back into the lobby.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" (those on/off switches on the Options tab in the lobby) have been removed, and a new system under the hood has been added which allows for us to do boolean or integer data in a much more robust fashion.<br />
<br />
* The Wave Composition, Wave Warning, Threat Waves, Cross Planet Waves, Direct Waves, Reconquest waves, and Shark A and B settings are no longer on the AI directly, but are instead under Options in the lobby.<br />
** This allows for those to be more clearly set apart as advanced options, and also makes it so that when you have multiple AIs they all share these particular pieces of behavior (which is in general desired for a variety of reasons).<br />
<br />
* For the settings for factions, and the settings in the Options tab of the lobby, EVERYTHING is no longer dropdowns. Now there are integer sliders, bool checkboxes, and so on.<br />
<br />
* Previously it wasn't possible to mod in custom fields for factions and have them display in the UI without also altering the lobby code. Yikes! Now you can directly just add stuff in the xml and it shows up, same as with the settings elsewhere.<br />
<br />
* In the faction xml, the team colors no longer have special secondary custom field entries. This was duplicative and confusing, and previously was just done in order to make the ui lobby code simpler. We have a better way now.<br />
<br />
* The AI Hunter and Warden fleets no longer show up in the lobby as distinct entries. Their small amount of data is now under the main (now singular) AI faction that they are related to.<br />
** Since we want to have multiple AIs, but not endless clutter, it's very convenient for UI purposes to have the AIs just show as one line item per AI with their hunters and wardens wrapped into one entry.<br />
** This doesn't actually change the reality of underlying gameplay, but each hunter or warden looks to the AI that is most recently preceding them in the list of factions in order to get their settings.<br />
** It's possible in some circumstances (from well before now) for a warden to be getting some donations from some AI faction that it wasn't originally tied to, and that's fine. All of that still works, even though the original settings from the lobby came from one specific AI faction.<br />
<br />
* The warden and hunter factions now inherit the central color from their preceding AI faction (that they are initially tied to), and then have their own custom trim color.<br />
** Previously, all the hunter and warden factions were showing themselves with the same colors as the first hunter or warden faction, which is no longer a thing.<br />
** This is particularly useful for civil wars with the AIs, since now you can tell whose wardens and hunters are whose, and thus why they are fighting.<br />
<br />
* Ever hit a point while working on some code where you go "how did this ever work in the first place?"<br />
** Well, things like the Starting Fleet selection for players were one of those things. Clearly it worked, and worked well, but things were so sprawling and have changed so much that the method for making it work is entirely different now (and hopefully easier to follow for anyone who wants to set up "table subsets" in the future.<br />
** This was probably another example of some custom code in the old lobby that was redirecting some values from the more generic case to a more specific case. But now that all the data is xml-driven, that old lobby code was missing and so hence likely the confusion. Now it can be just directly driven, at any rate, which is great.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the nanocaust where it would start throwing errors after you win the game.<br />
<br />
* Setting the color of the player faction now fully properly works in the lobby.<br />
** Not only is it using the nice color-picker interface for all that stuff, but it's actually updating the display and the game, versus before it was just only ever using your values from your local profile. It still defaults to that, but you can now override that.<br />
<br />
* The debug setting for setting more than one AI type up in the lobby has been removed. You can simply add more AI types directly now. Hooray!<br />
<br />
* As part of all the lobby changes, you can now have any number of factions that you wish to in a galaxy without running out of room due to the way the interface is set up.<br />
<br />
=== Nanocaust Buffs ===<br />
<br />
* Give the Nanocaust stronger defensive fleets when the Hive is under attack. <br />
* Give the Nanocaust more income.<br />
* Created ships start in Attacker_Full. <br />
* Nanocaust ships should not start patrolling until there are no enemies on the planet<br />
* The Nanocaust is not allowed to kill Command Stations until it has a significant advantage on a planet<br />
** Prompted by discussions with Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the a bunch of the Nanocaust's weapons weren't firing due to some missing XML<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
=== New Ship Mechanic ===<br />
<br />
* Knockback (translocation for AI War veterans) has been put in the game!<br />
<br />
* The knockback mechanic has two methods of functioning:<br />
** The first calculates the knockback direction based on the angle between the ship that fired the shot and the shot that hit (aka directly towards or away from your ship) and functions with all types of weapons: single target, laser, self-centered AoE (tesla ships), and enemy centered AoE (Seige frigates).<br />
** The second calculates the knockback direction only for secondary targets hit by an AoE (non-laser) weapon. Ships will be pushed or pulled towards the point where the shot hit, making enemy ships group up together to make other AoE effects more potent.<br />
<br />
* Each method works with both pulling ships towards, and pushing ships away from the target.<br />
<br />
* Knockback is currently only limited by mass. There is a maximum mass that will be able to be knocked back, and the closer a ship is to that maximum mass, the less knockback the ship will take (down to a minimum of 50% of the listed knockback). The equation for this is Effective Knockback = Knockback * ( 1 - ( Ship Mass / (2 * Mass Limit ) ) )<br />
** As an example: If a knockback had a strength of 1000 and a mass limit of 4, a fleet ship of 0.2 mass would take 975 knockback, and a guardian of 4 mass would take 500 knockback<br />
<br />
* Ships are immune to knockback if they are: Too heavy, are protected by a bubble shield, are projecting a bubble shield, are currently tractored, are immobile (turrets), or are immune to damage.<br />
<br />
==== For Modders ====<br />
<br />
* XML tags are as follows for creating ships with knockback:<br />
** knockback_to_ships_mass_tx_less_than="Mass Limit" - Needed for knockback to function at all, sets the max mass that will be affected<br />
** base_knockback_per_shot="Base Knockback" - For markless and mark 1 ships, this is the knockback that the shot will deal. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** added_knockback_per_shot_per_mark="Added Knockback" - For mark 2 ships and up, this is how much extra knockback is added to the shots. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** knockback_at_target_location="true/false" - Setting this to true means that AoE weapons will make ships be pushed or pulled away from the center of the AoE. Defaults to false. Must have a defined AoE on the weapon for this to work.<br />
<br />
* C# methods<br />
** int EntitySystem.CalculateKnockbackPowerAgainst( GameEntity_Squad Target ) - Returns 0 if the weapon has no knockback effects, or if the ship is immune. Otherwise return the knockback from the equation above.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.TakeKnockback( int KnockbackAmount, float angle ) - For custom knockback effects, this method ignores any convention of towards or away, and just pushes the ship at an angle that you want. This method has no immunity checking in it currently, so make sure the target is actually mobile, not bubble shielded, and not tractored.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.AddKnockbackSourceForFramePlan( int KnockbackAmount, EntitySystem FiringSystemOrNull, GameEntity_Shot ShotThatHitOrNull, bool KnockbackAtTarget, ArcenSimContext Context ) - If KnockbackAtTarget is false, log the source of the knockback from FiringSystemOrNull.GetWorldLocation() and power from int KnockbackAmount. If KnockbackAtTargetis true, check that the ship this is called from is not the same ship that ShotThatHitOrNull hit, then log the source from ShotThatHitOrNull.Target.Ref.WorldLocation and the power from int KnockbackAmount. Get's called by TakeDamage automatically.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Antagonized Dyson Sphere rebalance. <br />
** Every so often the Dyson Antagonizer will level up and increase the income of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere. To compensate, the initial strength of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere will be weaker<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with Democracy<br />
<br />
* Increase the Macrophage's base income<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the comments<br />
<br />
* Instigators are now allied to the player in Friendly AI mode<br />
<br />
* Tweak the anti-minor-faction wave code to make sure the waves are all at a minimum size. Also increase the anti-minor-faction waves against the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to Oval for pointing some more code paths out<br />
<br />
* Keep the Main Menu Music in the Game Lobby; don't switch to 'in-game' music till you really start the game<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the request<br />
<br />
* On difficulty >= 7, the AI will start dumping most of its budget into the Hunter Fleet when you are attacking the AI Overlord or an adjacent planet<br />
** The feeling I get is that the actual AI Overlord combat isn't as exciting as it could be, so hopefully this will be more interesting.<br />
<br />
==== Mines ====<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mine types from 1 minimum, 2 maximum, to 2 minimum, 3 maximum in "Minelayer" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mines in "Minelayer" and "OtherDefenseFocus" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Stations now have 20 Paralysis Mines instead of 10 normal Mines.<br />
** Existing Stations in save games will still have their old Mines in addition.<br />
<br />
* Area Mine damage 20,000 -> 2,000, hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Differentiates it from normal Mines.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Stops it from paralysing an absurd amount of ships.<br />
<br />
* Area and Paralysis Mine explosion radius 500 -> 1,000.<br />
** These mines had a tendency to detonate on the first target that came in range, and not hit much around that. This should hopefully let them get more out of each detonation.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine paralysis time 8s -> 12s.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Parasite damage 20 -> 60, reload time 6s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Paralysers now have the correct target evaluator and should be better at actually paralysing.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboat cost_for_ai_to_purchase increased 25%.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers should now be shot at automatically, if nothing else is really around as a target.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Doubled the health of Logistical and Military Command Stations.<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagship health increased 25%.<br />
<br />
* Guard Post metal cost increased 10x.<br />
** Solely so Metabolisation grants you more metal from them.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of "Spire Core" Tech.<br />
<br />
==== Translocation ====<br />
<br />
* Ark One now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 2000, increases by 500 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Stations now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 3000, increases by 750 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station reload time 6s -> 2s, shots per salvo 6 -> 8, damage 1,300 -> 800.<br />
** Allows it to use Translocation more effectively. Is also a damage upgrade.<br />
<br />
==== Reinforcement ====<br />
<br />
* Removed the increased turret limit that AI planets with guard posts get.<br />
<br />
* Slight increase to the bonus strike craft a planet can reinforce per guard post, 25% extra --> 30% extra<br />
** This still lets the AI build up a "wall", but strike craft are different from turrets in that there's more gameplay to them (i.e. they become threat if you outnumber the AI too much)<br />
** Thanks to the Discord for the talks, Puffin for posting on the bug tracker.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories could produce ships beyond a fleet's cap if you were fast forwarding during construction.<br />
<br />
* Put periods at the end of all the Descriptions of minor factions and map types for consistency<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Probably fixed the bug with marauder outposts causing savegames to break. Have not tested it, but found a definite bug in the code (one variable being serialized twice but deserialized only once) and fixed that, so unless there is also a second bug in this area it should be good to go now.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Hunter Fleet budget from Instigator bases wasn't being spent <br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where normal waves weren't sending<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* If you have 0 hacking points and haven't finished the hack, the hack should now fail instead of giving you negative hacking points<br />
** Thanks to x4000 for the mantis ticket, but I assume someone else originally reported the problem (on Steam?)<br />
<br />
* Paralyzing a ship with a cloaking device no longer gives it full cloaking points once it's unparalyzed again. Particularly infuriating with the Raid starter fleet, the Cursed golem stuns for just enough time to have ships recloak before the next shot fires.<br />
** Minor downside - If you manage to stun ships with an AoE effect (Nanoswarm is the only ship capable of doing this off the top of my head), it will no longer be briefly unstealthed. Very minor since this situation happening is unreliable at best.<br />
<br />
* Marauder Mark 3 Outposts once again spawn Raiders<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Avoided a bug that would temporarily break save games once the game version rolled around to 1.0<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "Singular Freaky Surprises" map generation item for real this time. Golems should be a common appearance for Golemite AI now, and rare (1 / 1001) for other AI types again.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI wasn't seeding its full compliment of Strikecraft on most planets<br />
** This is a giant buff to the AI's initial defenses<br />
<br />
== Version 0.861 Strength Of Remains==<br />
(Released May 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Added a new PlannedWaveOptions struct that is great for sending specific groups of options to the PlanWave() function without it having a million optional parameters.<br />
** This also lets us have specific static Create() methods set up that have just the parameters that we want to set, which reduces the chances of bugs via typos or misalignments.<br />
<br />
=== Gameplay Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* When "Ally to AI" mode is selected, the player gets vision of all planets at the beginning of the game<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* Ships that get unloaded from fleet centerpieces now inherit orders such as wormhole move commands and behaviors such as pursuit mode.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Turrets and ships that are remains, not claimed yet, crippled, or in the process of being built are now not shown as strength in either galaxy view or local view.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and Trillioneyes for noting that this made it hard for players to judge at a glance when the AI is outnumbering them.<br />
<br />
* Cross planet waves now display the source planet of the wave to match the other wave types.<br />
<br />
* Improved the feel of dropdowns by making it so that you can click the dropdown a second time to hide it, just as you can in most other applications in the world.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that caused things that produced multiple types of drones (certain AI guard posts, AI drone guardians) to produce only 1 drone at a time and at a reduced rate.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Anti-Player Zombies were also hostile to the AI. Note that this fix only affects newly created game, existing games will still suffer from this bug.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a probable fix to exceptions that could happen inside UpdatePositionAndSize() on the tooltips. This is almost always indicative of some worse problem, but it's worth having this not compounding the problem at least.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the most recent report of this.<br />
<br />
* If there are errors during map generation (sometimes this is "valid", in the case of things like too many factions for the available planets), it now pops up a harmless but hopefully-informative error message log and doesn't just start the game in an invalid state.<br />
** Long-term obviously we want it to not be in a position to generate an error like this, but realistically modders can do all sorts of things and we need errors to happen gracefully.<br />
** Have tested this and it works as expected. However, it requires that all errors during mapgen use a new method which is Engine_AIW2.Instance.LogErrorDuringCurrentMapGen() if it would previously have used ArcenDebugging.ArcenDebugLog( Verbosity.ShowAsError ) or equivalent. If there are any remaining cases of the latter, then those would not get caught by this new code.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting the issue.<br />
<br />
* Previously there was a bug where if you set the number of planets in the lobby, but then just hit Start Game without hitting Generate Map first, it would not actually use the correct number of planets.<br />
** This was... kinda old, kinda-new. If there isn't enough room to seed whatever factions you have selected, it's now super duper fast to change the number of planets and hit start game and see if it works, etc. Without slowing anything else down in the lobby responsiveness in general.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where if you had one faction selected and then changed the faction, the colors would not update properly for them in the lobby.<br />
** This was not a problem limited to just the colors, and it probably was display-only in terms of problems, and it doesn't solve the issue with the human player colors, but this is still nice to have fixed.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The various custom data for the individual map types (how many arms on the octopus, etc) now all do a much better job of actually retaining and showing their proper values, and never have a stale view on the interface itself.<br />
** This was another old and new problem, but is now fixed for both cases.<br />
** Thanks to hawk and BadgerBadger for the original reports.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug in the TextMeshPro dropdowns where if one was in a sub-panel and opened, then clicking another one to open the other one would not close the first one. It led to much visual confusion.<br />
** Why exactly this was happening is actually a bit of a mystery, but we just gave the dropdowns some memory of "dropdowns that think they are still open," and those all close themselves when a new dropdown is clicked. Problem solved.<br />
** Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, there was an extra custom field definition for the human player colors compared to the other faction colors, and this wasn't really needed now and probably just confused things.<br />
** So removed and consolidated that, although it didn't fix the sync issues with human player colors not being settable.<br />
<br />
* Integrated revised versions of the Steamworks .so files for linux, and the related files for OSX as well.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for chasing down what needed to change on Linux; please let us know if it still isn't showing you as logged in properly in the new builds in either of those two OSes, because that would likely mean that something didn't get copied properly in our build scripts.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.860 The Lobby Ate My Factions?? ==<br />
(Released May 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Raid Engines could trigger a null reference if set off by the Dark Spire<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the event that for some reason the game tries to queue a GameCommand with an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 (this seems to happen from time to time during the game and now once in the lobby), it will complain at the time of it trying to queue it, and give a stack trace from there, and not actually do the queuing of it.<br />
** This should help us figure out when and why these things are occasionally happening. It's probably related to a pooling error of some sort, but it's hard to be sure. If the commands are valid at this point and then later have ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 when being read back, then we know we have a different problem entirely and can approach that from another way. Either way we'll start having more info soon on this rare and elusive error.<br />
<br />
* Put in a second place where we now early-assign the ExecuteOnFrameNumber when GameCommands are created. This may then later get reassigned in OnServer_CheckForSendingServerBatchMessageToClients, which is fine, but this should hopefully prevent those rare issues where a command falls through the cracks and has an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 for some reason.<br />
<br />
* Math fixes from WeaponMaster:<br />
** Fixed claim repairing being way out of wack, causing 500,000 metal cost Arks to be built in less than a second by a single engineer.<br />
** Also fixed self construction metal flow healing, metal now heals for a ratio of hp:metal like claim and repair flows now.<br />
** Also made it so self construction metal flows (and the assist construction flows helping it) heal shield too.<br />
** Note: it's possible that things are now wildly too expensive to claim, now that you actually have to pay the metal for them to claim them. If that's the case, please let us (Puffin?) know, and we'll adjust their claim costs.<br />
<br />
=== More Lobby Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Improved the lobby error messaging when it can't find a custom field for a map type so that it now says what it was looking for. Helpful for anyone making custom map types.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the Simple map type where it was trying to look at a setting for the realistic map type (and then not even use it) and thus was throwing an error now that the settings are per-map-type rather than being stored in the global central settings file.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the "remove a faction" bit of code, it now throws a cleaner and more informative error if for some reason it's out of range. It doesn't fix the problem, but should help us fix the problem in the future if we don't find it in the meantime.<br />
** Thanks to Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The long-range planning cycles (background threads) are no longer run when you're in the lobby.<br />
** This probably makes next to no difference to anything, but might make a few things slightly faster or even avoid some potential issues in the future.<br />
<br />
* Some changes have been made to make the dropdown selection changes more synchronous (instant) rather than on a slight time delay. This allows for a few things to be controlled a bit better... in theory.<br />
<br />
* Wow, a whole heck of a lot of wrappering and rework has been done on dropdowns to make it more clear when and how data is being set.<br />
** We were actually still having the same problem with factions getting erased as soon as they were added in the prior build, along with some other known issues like dropdown stuff getting out of sync quickly that we did know about.<br />
** All of this is traceable back to how the dropdowns handle data updates to themselves, and it's another question of "how did this ever work?" This one was a Chris area, not a Keith one, just in case anyone gets the wrong idea that any of the early code problems were all from one source (far from it).<br />
** Issues fixed:<br />
*** still couldn't add more factions<br />
*** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
*** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
** Remaining known issues:<br />
*** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct.<br />
*** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby, although it's not causing errors per se.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.859 Lobby Raid ==<br />
(Released May 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
Note: We no longer plan to break savegames going forward from here. Looks like that won't be needed, and it would break a bunch of bug reports. So hooray!<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Mobile Support Flagships now show that they are building things in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the analysis of this problem<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Objectives (in the intel tab) for capturing battlestations and flagships now shows the supported units<br />
** This was annoying me<br />
<br />
* Both of the modal popup types (the OK window and the Yes/No windows) now support scrolling text, aka way more info than before. Before if the text got too long, it would just cut off.<br />
** This is useful for all sorts of things, such as if we want to have things like header items that you can click (AIP display, for instance) that would give you a readout of a bunch of new details about the state of all the AIs (salvage amounts, reprisal status, whatever else we feel like).<br />
<br />
* There is now a "tall" version of the modal "OK dialog" that is able to tell you info. This is particularly useful for info dumps versus just a quick notice regarding whatever it was going to tell you.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a variety of fonts that were too small, particularly for dropdowns, in the lobby in recent beta versions.<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Allow the Dyson Sphere to free itself if it was reconquered. Otherwise you have to babysit the Dyson Sphere once you free it<br />
** Note this may cause the AI and Dyson Sphere to fight more often, since the AI is apt to try to recapture it repeatedly. May need further tweaks<br />
<br />
* The AI will now wait until a wave is "strong enough" before sending it, rather than potentially sending very small or empty waves<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Allow the Nanocaust to kill Black Hole Machines, since they were otherwise an excessively effective counter to the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting this, including Mosrael<br />
<br />
=== New Features/Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Add a "Ally player to AI" option in the game lobby.<br />
** This prevents you from playing the game normally, and is intended for people who want to play the game in Sandbox mode, watching the AI fight various minor factions, or an AI Civil War (or both)<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines function and are in use again.<br />
<br />
* Like we have had description_appender_dll and description_appender_type for quite some time, we now also have per_second_custom_logic_dll and per_second_custom_logic_type.<br />
** The former calls void AddToDescriptionBuffer( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntityOrNull, GameEntityTypeData RelatedEntityTypeData, ArcenDoubleCharacterBuffer Buffer ) on a IGameEntityDescriptionAppender.<br />
** The new one calls void RunEntitySpecialPerSecondLogic( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntity, ArcenSimContext Context ) on a IGameEntityPerSecondSpecialLogic.<br />
** This allows us to have all sorts of crazy AI watcher units, including AI Eyes or whatever else, that run some completely custom logic once per second. It's easy for modders to define, etc, etc.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Don't allow drones to generate salvage<br />
** Suggested by Democracy<br />
<br />
* Player engineers are no longer able to repair friendly zombie ships.<br />
** A previous change to make zombies attrition every minute was effectively just a metal sink because they were still able to be repaired.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where hydra head ships (that spawn from hydras such as Stingray Hydra) weren't properly attritioning or being set to pursuit mode.<br />
** They will die faster thanks to the attrition working now, but hopefully be more useful as they'll chase enemies automatically.<br />
** For modders, this can be enabled for any ship by defining self_attritions_X_percent_per_second_if_parent_ship_not_on_planet="X" and adding the tag always_self_attritions="true" to your ship. Doing this for any ship except those spawned from another ship dying is kinda pointless though.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Factories and Support Fleets were spending less metal than intended when producing more than one type of ship at once.<br />
<br />
* Fix a logic problem with neutral planet hacking which prevented you from being able to Watch-Hack a neutral planet<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Factories will now only produce strikecraft and frigates for fleet centerpieces that are fully claimed.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a TextMesh Pro setting to "disable warnings," the builds of the game will no longer complain about missing glyphs in fonts that don't need them.<br />
<br />
* The debug output code for what a GameCommand contains now has its line breaks fixed up so that it's actually legible!<br />
** Also some options have been put in to make it output a bit more intelligently, ie only saying what it is doing and not all the empty things it isn't doing.<br />
<br />
=== Various Fixes and Changes to Zombie Fleets ===<br />
* There is now a defined minimum and maximum amount of zombie ships that get randomly sent out when zombies decide to raid another planet. This is currently set at 30 and 50 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The group of ships that get sent out when deciding to raid a planet is now randomized. Previously the ships that got selected to raid were always the first ones created on the planet, now the group that gets selected is chosen randomly.<br />
<br />
* Zombies that are in the process of going through a wormhole ("Raiding") are left out of patrol/raid logic so they don't get conflicting orders.<br />
<br />
* Planets that have less than 0.05 strength of hostile units on them (basically only a warp gate and command station) are considered not hostile and so zombies will run their patrol/raiding logic.<br />
<br />
* Zombies now correctly lose only 1% of their hp per minute. Previously, ships with high shields were losing much more hp per minute.<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Guts Revamp (Visually No Improvements Yet) ===<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the inner guts of how the lobby keeps track of changes that you're requesting, and how it then goes about updating and syncing the game and the UI, respectively.<br />
** It's a lot more responsive-feeling now, although we can get it even better than this. And it also provides a basis for us to be able to make this properly visually better soon.<br />
** This also fixes a number of problems that have existed where people in multiplayer making changes at the same time would have conflicts and lost data.<br />
** Essentially this is now doing differentials of changes rather than wholesale copies, and it keeps track of a separate "setup as per the lobby" that only the lobby can touch, and a "long term settings" that the game reads from later on.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a number of things with the map type sub-controls so that it is now fully modder-friendly, and multiplayer-safe.<br />
** You can now mod in you own map type sub controls without having to edit the central files (which of course would be overwritten next time there's a release).<br />
<br />
* Made the game way more robust when it comes to having a map set up that doesn't include any factions for whatever reason.<br />
** It's possible to make this happen in the lobby code if you mess up other things, and it's much easier to just have this be robust so that we can see the real errors.<br />
<br />
* A variety of the map types now have much easier-to-digest names for their options, and all map types now have proper spacing between the words in their names and their options.<br />
<br />
* A new settings option has been added to the Debug section: "Write Lobby Setup Changes To Log"<br />
** If something strange is going on with the lobby, in multiplayer or otherwise, this is a way for the log to have a variety of data sent about what changes are being requested, and when.<br />
<br />
* New options for writing the full contents of a GameCommand have been added, to get all the details of what's in each list being sent, etc. This is now used a variety of places that can benefit from that extra clarity (all error-reporting-related or otherwise debug stuff).<br />
<br />
* GameCommands have been expanded to allow for a third RelatedString, which is needed by some of the new lobby stuff.<br />
<br />
* Automatically-created controls (such as in dynamic interfaces like the lobby) now can have a string control code sent to them along with the two integer control codes.<br />
** This again is needed for the lobby, and makes some of the new modder-friendly map stuff possible.<br />
<br />
* Some data during mapgen was previously stored in the Factions object, and others in ConfigurationForFaction in the WorldSetup object, and still others off in settings, etc.<br />
** The game now properly stores all that data inside the WorldSetup object, so that it can be copied around and separate versions can be read at various times (for display versus for mapgen asynchronously, etc), and so that it plays nice with multiplayer.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen logging now includes a new entry for ControlledByPlayerAccounts_DuringGame, which is now split between Factions (for ingame) and the WorldSetup (for the lobby), as noted in the above note.<br />
<br />
* A ton of debugging data about the state of the WorldSetup objects, and the basic faction data as well, can now be exported via either ToString() or WriteDetailsToStringBuilder().<br />
** This lets us actually look inside and see what is happening, which is kinda relevant!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the initial fleet not being serialized properly in the WorldSetup.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section of the settings menu: "Show Debug Details Button In Lobby"<br />
** When enabled, a 'Debug Details' button appears in the lobby, which you can click to have it pop up all the relevant information about the current setup from a very low-level debugging style.<br />
<br />
* Some changes Chris has wanted to make for a VERY long time are now in under the hood in the lobby. Basically the game now only does a "partial" generation of the map whenever things change in the lobby, which means that the map generation is now vastly faster than before.<br />
** But as part of this, it has to go back and do the full generation of the map based on the final data when you actually click Start Game, and it now does that, too. This also has the benefit of being safer in terms of making sure things are ultra consistent with whatever the UI says when the game actually starts.<br />
<br />
* When you are changing things in the lobby that don't change the map topology _as it is visible in the lobby_, such as factions and conducts and faction options, it no longer causes the map to regenerate itself.<br />
** This feels more responsive by far, and in multiplayer (or if we get any super slow-to-generate maps in the future) it will have an amplified effect.<br />
** But also... this mysteriously fixes the problem we were having in the last few builds where you couldn't add factions.<br />
<br />
* The game now includes an implementation of DiffLib (https://github.com/lassevk/DiffLib), which it uses to calculate the differences between Setup states in the lobby export at the moment. Though certainly one imagines there could be other uses for this in some sort of other in-engine analysis data in the future, whether by us in some bowels of the UI for looking at enemy data, or something modders cook up.<br />
<br />
* Several lobby fixes, including to where we were setting the local player's color so that it wasn't getting out of sync. For multiplayer lobbies this will later need to be expanded further, but that's a task for later and not a huge deal right now.<br />
<br />
* '''Known lobby issues:'''<br />
** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct?<br />
** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby<br />
<br />
== Version 0.858 Hotfix: The Lobby... Ate My Galaxy? ==<br />
(Released May 9th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed the Vanguard Hydra Head benefiting from Heavy Tech instead of Light like their parent unit.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug in the prior version that threw invisible harmless errors while loading the game because it was trying to find the settings for the galaxy map before the settings had been properly loaded.<br />
<br />
* Guardians will now have a chance at spawning with waves. If maxGuardianTypes is larger than 0, a random value between 0 and maxGuardianTypes is chosen as the minGuardianTypes. Random bags of anyGuardians are chosen until the minimum is reached.<br />
** Right now guardians only get added if the strikecraft fail to completely fill numDifferentShipsToSpawn. This can be changed easily by removing the comparison ( chosenUnitTypes < numDifferentShipsToSpawn ) in both the if statement and the while loop.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug introduced in the prior build where if you changed anything in the lobby or even clicked to the factions tab of the lobby, then you'd get control of a ton of planets and be under fire on all of them and probably lose the game instantly as well. Very amusing in small doses, but that's quite enough, thanks, game. ;)<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, WeaponMaster, Gerard, Mosrael, and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.857 The AI Strikes Back... Hard ==<br />
(Released May 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* The name of the currently playing music track is now shown in the Escape menu, for people like me who can never remember the titles<br />
** Prompted by music nostalgia from Puffin and Democracy in discord<br />
<br />
* There are now Achievements for winning in Civil War mode<br />
** Untested, like most of the other Achievements<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now be less afraid of distant enemies<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now consider enemy forces when choosing how to route to a target, so they don't accidentally suicide into a heavily defended planet on the way to somewhere else<br />
<br />
* The AI now has an "overconfidence ratio", where on lower difficulties Threat will overestimate its strength when choosing whether it's strong enough to attack. This makes it more aggressive, but also more likely to lose when it attacks<br />
** Finding ways to differentiate the AI difficulties is good<br />
<br />
==== AI Civil Wars ====<br />
<br />
* An AI will only give resource to to its own Hunter and Warden Fleet(s)<br />
<br />
* The AI Civil War now includes Warden and Hunter fleets. Each AI's warden/hunter is now hostile to other AIs and other Hunter/Warden Fleets.<br />
<br />
==== AI Homeworld Battle Changes ====<br />
<br />
* If an AI homeworld is attacked:<br />
** AI Threat ships on the homeworld will fight to the death<br />
** Ships Guarding planets near to the homeworld will become Threat. The higher the difficulty the more planets will be turned to Threat.<br />
** Threat ships will converge on the homeworld. Threat already waiting against a strong target will just join the Hunter fleet<br />
** That AI's Hunter and Warden Fleets will immediately converge on the homeworld<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a number of people for noticing the AI homeworld battles could be dull, including Nameless Terror from Steam. Thanks to StarKelp for a helpful save game to let me test this.<br />
<br />
==== Changes to AI Reinforcement ====<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft were being counted as turrets when loaded in a guard post, limiting the amount of turrets the AI could rebuild<br />
* Fixed a bug where the strikecraft currently on an AI planet were calculated incorrectly, allowing the AI to infinitely reinforce strikecraft if it never built guardians<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft inside the AI Command Center were not being counted as guard strength for reinforcement<br />
** These bug fixes improve more defensive AI types like Turtle, as these two issues combined usually meant that the AI could never reinforce strikecraft or turrets<br />
<br />
* The AI can now reinforce an extra 25% strikecraft and Turrets per living guardpost on alerted planets<br />
** AI planets are alerted when there is a human command center adjacent to them<br />
** Destroying guardposts on planets next to human planets is now much more important, as they can reinforce to be much stronger than they started out as if left untouched<br />
<br />
* These are large changes that are mostly untested, let us know if this ends up making the game too hard or frustrating<br />
<br />
=== New Settings Options For Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Galaxy Camera setting: Extra Background Hexagon Intensity<br />
** If you would like the background to be more stylized hexagons, then you can turn this up.<br />
** Nobody was really asking for this, but Chris had mixed feelings about his defaults and so figured why not.<br />
<br />
* The previous amount of bloom on the galaxy map was a bit on the high side, with an intensity of 2.06. That has been reduced to a new default of 1.4.<br />
** However, a new setting allows you to configure it between 0.4 and 4, which are two fairly extreme ends of it.<br />
** New galaxy camera setting: Bloom Intensity<br />
*** How glowy would you like the galaxy map to appear? More looks more computer-screeny, but can be distracting depending on your contrast settings on your monitor.<br />
** Thanks to Badger and danny for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== New Debug Commands ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to decrease AIP<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to kill all AI units and structures on the currently viewed planet<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== When a flagship of yours gets crippled... ====<br />
<br />
* Having a Flagship crippled by the AI now gives the AI a nice burst of Salvage, enabling them to power up reprisal waves. This is intended as a penalty for losing Flagships.<br />
** Different flagship types generate different amount of salvage. Officer flagships generate more than Support or Transport, for example. The Regenerator Golem will generate much less salvage than other flagships<br />
** The AI will generate less salvage if it cripples a flagship on a neutral planet (but still some)<br />
*** All the tunables are in XML for this<br />
<br />
==== When you don't have enough energy... ====<br />
<br />
* Claimables that would cost you more energy than you have available now can't be claimed, and it shows that in their tooltip.<br />
** Previously it could just claim stuff and throw you into negative energy.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Similarly, if you don't have enough spare energy to create something out of a factory (strikecraft, frigates, whatever) then it will only build up to 100% and then will stop and not actually emerge.<br />
** Same with drone production; it won't produce the next drone, but just will stick at 100%.<br />
** In both cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Any units that are currently trying to self-construct, and you don't have enough energy for them (or negative energy in general) will completely stop constructing (unless they either don't consume energy or produce it).<br />
** In the relevant cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== AI Overlord Phase 2 ====<br />
<br />
* Now uses a Plasma Overdriver in place of the old Plasma Torpedo, affecting everything in a large radius.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Bolt damage 4,000 -> 6,000, shot count 40 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Fusion Bomb damage 30,000 -> 50,000, added 2x bonus multiplier vs targets of mass >= 5.<br />
<br />
==== Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Guardians on AI planets.<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian Fusion Bomb Bypass 0.6 -> 0.9.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian damage 350 -> 450.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian damage 1,000 -> 300, shot count 1 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Temperamental Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Fragmenting Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% for Tantruming Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tantruming Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Fragmenting Guardian Shard health increased 50%, damage 800 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian damage 1,200 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 220 -> 330.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Guardians now have a bonus multiplier vs albedo >= 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Guardian damage 3,500 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Increased health of Pike, Nucleophilic and Grenade Launcher Dire Guardians to match the others.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guardians, excluding Forcefield - still increased.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guardian shot count 5 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian explosion size 300 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Dire Pike Guardian damage 6,000 -> 4,000, shot count 3 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian shot count 3 -> 6.<br />
<br />
* Dire Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 1,300 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* AI Hunter / Killer shields 1,000,000 -> 2,000,000, Fusion Bomb shot count 25 -> 35.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for an AI Hunter / Killer to be chosen in place of a Dire Guardian.<br />
** This thing spawns as Mark 5 if it does, so be really careful.<br />
<br />
==== Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Guard Posts excluding Forcefield.<br />
<br />
* Increased health by 25% of Forcefield Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10, reload time 4s -> 3s, range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Sabot Guard Posts increase their bonus multiplier with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Guard Post damage 480 -> 240, shot count 8 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 1600 -> 2,200.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for non-Swarmer AI planets to have a Swarmer Guard Post.<br />
<br />
* Increased frequency a bit of Forcefield Guard Posts (as well as Forcefield Generators).<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Dire Sabot Guard Post damage 3,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guard Post shot count 6 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Parasite Guard Post damage 6,000 -> 3,000, shot count 12 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Spider Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 2,000, shot count 12 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 8,000 -> 10,000, shot count 3 -> 6, range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Gravity Guard Post damage 12,500 -> 2,000, reload time 1s -> 2s, shot count 1 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
==== Drones ====<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, damage 4,000 -> 8,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
==== Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Golems (Player and AI).<br />
<br />
* Increased health of all Arks.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% of all Spire Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Combat Factories.<br />
<br />
* Increased shields by 25% of all Citadels.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette shields 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Molotov explosion size 500 -> 650.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot base damage multiplier 3x -> 6x.<br />
<br />
==== Science, Tech and Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced Upgrade Costs of Battlestations and Citadels a bit.<br />
<br />
* Starting Science 20,000 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Science gained from Spire Archive Extraction 5,000 -> 8,000.<br />
<br />
* Increased secondary response strength of some AI hacks.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cap multipliers on Transport Flagships a bit.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a tooltip typo that incorrectly identified the StrikeCraft version of the Intragalactic Coordinator as increasing the turret cap.<br />
<br />
* Only explore new planets when a Player kills an command station. Otherwise the Nanocaust and Civil War were giving tons of free vision<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations can now build multiple energy collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting, and puffin and ptarth for debugging assistance<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug causing fleet centerpieces to not cost any metal to claim.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the metal cost to claim capturables, this was causing most capturable things to cost less metal than intended. <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hunter Fleet was refusing to enter defended planets<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the internal drone construction logic that was previously present in the 0.850+ branch, but which was really only rearing its head on the new internal versions. Curious.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the seeding of SingularFreakySurprises where the chance for a golem to appear was being rolled once per galaxy instead of once per planet.<br />
** No more galaxies full of golems.<br />
<br />
==== Trying and Failing To Fix The Lobby ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the lobby regenerates the galaxy map is now slightly less direct. Rather than just directly updating things every time any dropdown value changed or similar, it now queues up those changes cumulatively and then applies them all 100ms after the last change.<br />
** This is because we can have situations where one dropdown changes, causing others to change, and that was causing repeat and often incomplete commands to be sent.<br />
** This was what we thought the disappearing-factions bug from the last few builds was, and we assumed it had to do with the dropdowns handling onValueChanged differently. That may be the case, but we can't really see how that's the case from a code review.<br />
** So this does seem to help with not missing things like some of the smaller secondary data for factions for instance, but it wasn't the complete solution we had hoped it would be.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, put in some defensive code to prevent certain errors when the game is trying to show a row for a faction that is out of bounds.<br />
** We get a lot more info about what went wrong when this is happening, at least. These errors are also no longer silent, but instead pop up a good error message with a useful stack trace.<br />
<br />
* Split the internal CodeDirectiveTag int on the ArcenUI_CreateElementDirective struct into CodeDirectiveTag1 int and CodeDirectiveTag2 int.<br />
** The purpose of this is so that we no longer have to do any crazy bitshifting to get the data out of a single integer for the faction index and field index in the lobby. This approach was mathematically clever, but had legibility issues at bare minimum.<br />
** Various parts of the lobby were incorrectly reading the data back as just faction index with no bitshifting going on, and maybe that was correct for those fields (??), but we're not really sure and that lack of sureness is not worth a tiny bit smaller struct.<br />
** This may or may not fix some bugs, but at least things are clearer.<br />
<br />
* Did NOT manage to fix the lobby with all these various changes.<br />
** But have managed to make ourselves wonder how it ever functioned at all.<br />
** Simply opening the MORE options next to a faction will change what is available in there, fun fact. That broke as heck, and probably isn't completely new.<br />
** Going through all this is, on the plus side, giving us a vastly better idea of how we want to rearchitect the lobby from a technical standpoint while keeping as much of what is there as possible. It looks like the "new lobby" is going to be a feature for 0.900-era AI War 2, simply because of all this.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.856 Clever Girl ==<br />
(Released May 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Ships that are in the process of loading into the fleet centerpiece no longer collide with other ships when near the centerpiece; faster loading with less micromanaging required.<br />
<br />
* Beam weapons now optionally support maximum_number_of_targets_hit_per_shot in the XML.<br />
** If the max is defined, ships hit past the maximum split the damage of the maximum equally between all ships.<br />
*** As an example, if you had a 10,000 damage beam with a max of 2 targets and it hit 4 targets, each target would take 5,000 damage only ( 2 max / 4 hit ).<br />
<br />
* Tweak the text for some hacks to fit the text in boxes.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators now cost AIP when the AI kills them<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror on steam for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The AI is now allowed to send waves against Unowned but defended planets in Civil War mode. The AI also gets buffs to its "anti-other-AI-planet" waves in civil war mode.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy now have an Objective to destroy them<br />
<br />
* Changed the way science hacking scales to be more intuitive<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it.<br />
<br />
* When transferring units between factions, clear any previous orders and set the units to be in Attacker mode. This was causing issues when transferring units to the Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having crippled flagships on a planet could sometimes cause hacks to fail<br />
** Someone complained about this but I don't remember who it was.<br />
<br />
==== Improved AI Attack Coordination ====<br />
* When the AI chooses targets for the Threat Fleet, it has a mild preference for attacking planets with critical player structures like Zenith Power/Metal Generators and Intra-Galactic Coordinators<br />
** The tunables for how strong that preference is (as opposed to going for more poorly defended targets) is an XML tunable per AI type<br />
<br />
* The AI now takes into account incoming wave strength when considering whether it is strong enough to attack a target when a wave is < 20 seconds out<br />
** This should allow Threat/Hunter ships to coordinate attacks with incoming waves when appropriate<br />
<br />
* When calculating whether a planet is a good target, the Hunter/Warden fleets now also include allied ships on their way to the target, as well as those currently at the target. <br />
** More coordination improvement code<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboats should now actually decloak.<br />
** Thanks to Mac for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Gravity effects cannot reduce a units speed below 20%, up from 5%.<br />
** This is to stop being able to stack Gravity and effectively replicate Tractor Beams.<br />
<br />
* Target priority lowered for Tachyon Sentinels and Arrays.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY for reporting the bullet magnets these were.<br />
<br />
* Decreased the time for AI Threat to join the Hunter Fleet, from 15 minutes at all difficulties, to starting at 10 on Diff 1, lowering by 1 for each Diff higher, maxing out at 3 minutes on Diff 8, 9 and 10.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.855 Galactic Markings ==<br />
(Released April 30th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for waves. The hovertext now shows the Target planet name in the colour of the planet's owner, and the planet with the warp gate in the colour of the faction sending the wave.<br />
** Thanks to Ptarth for making sure I did this right<br />
<br />
=== Hacking Improvements And Science from Neutral Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new hacking mechanism to allow extracting Science from neutral planets. It currently costs 5 AIP as well as a few hacking points. Performing this hack will cause the AI to launch a wave at you.<br />
** The AIP is part of the "AIP for taking a planet". So if you killed the command station there's actually no AIP cost (since you paid it when killing the command station). If another faction destroyed the command station then it will cost 5 AIP, but if you eventually capture the planet it will only cost 15 AIP when you capture instead of 20.<br />
** Note that this allows for you to collect Science much more quickly than normal by killing the command station and then doing this hack before capturing the planet, at the cost of some hacking points and the AI getting a bonus attack at you.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, DD the GerbilStrangler, Nameless Terror, themouthofsauron, x4000, Puffin and Apthorpe for useful discussion<br />
<br />
* If a Flagship becomes crippled mid-hack, the hack fails. Also Crippled Flagships are no longer allowed to start hacks.<br />
<br />
=== Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map's bloom settings have been updated a huge amount, giving the entire scene a bit of a computer-screen glowy vibe.<br />
** The blue hexes in the background have been adjusted and the scanline effect is now less noticeable, as part of this, though. It was just a bit too much visual distraction.<br />
<br />
* All of the roman numerals for mark levels have been switched to a more thematic sci-fi type font.<br />
<br />
* All of the graphics for planets on the galaxy map are now more consistent in size, and generally smaller, as is the selection radius around the one you're viewing right now.<br />
<br />
* The positioning of all the font stuff on the galaxy map has been changed around a lot, to be tighter around the planets but no longer ever overlapping with the overlarge planet icons (that no longer are overlarge).<br />
** In general this keeps things more compact and hopefully also more legible.<br />
<br />
* The little icons for "important ships at planets" are also now a bit smaller and more compactly-placed under the planet on the galaxy map.<br />
** They should still be plenty legible, but no longer oversized compared to some of the planet stuff they are essentially orbiting.<br />
<br />
* As you zoom out on the galaxy map, the planets (and their text and icons) no longer stay quite as large as they previously did, instead shrinking down more.<br />
** On most screens this should remain legible, while at the same time keeping them from overlapping.<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.001" to galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.0007" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalVisualConstants\CMP_VisualConstants.xml file.<br />
<br />
* The amount of time the icons and text now stay next to planets on the galaxy map have also been changed dramatically, so that they remain around until almost the last possible amount of zoom (and it's kinda useful having a super far zoom that gets rid of that clutter, at least at first thought).<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="1500" to galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="2000" and galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1300" to galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1700" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalConstants\KDL_VanillaConstants.xml file.<br />
** Particularly with how it's easier to see at a glance what the mark levels of planets are, and if you have current intel on them, this final-decluttered stage seems particularly useful. If you disagree, there are actually sliders in the options for changing it so that it declutters sooner or later.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Add a mechanic to allow anti-AI zombies to self-attrition over time. Currently set to 1% self-attrition per minute. This isn't very fast, and your engineers will repair them, but it's something?<br />
** Done after seeing some games where HeartHunter seems to have zombified the entire Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Reduced the power of Mark 5, and greatly reduced the power of Mark 6 and 7.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels should have more Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Beam Cannons and Plasma Turrets in "Monochrome Turret" designs.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Frigates in "Frigates With Support" designs.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Mass Driver damage.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem shots per salvo 80 -> 50.<br />
<br />
* Player Botnet Golem damage 750 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Changed the scaling of most Tech Upgrade costs to somewhat match what they used to be before Fleets.<br />
** Some are cheaper, some are more expensive, and some just have the Marks evened out.<br />
** This is something that will probably always be a bit off somewhere, but hopefully this is an improvement.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Turret range 10,100 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon and Heavy Beam Guardian range 15,000 -> 12,000, reload time 4s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Allow far more Anti-AI zombies to leave their current planet whenever that event occurs.<br />
<br />
* Mugger does a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Array range 2800 -> 4200.<br />
<br />
* Doubled count of Tractor Arrays in almost every player-available source.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator shields 250,000 -> 350,000.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Generator shields 150,000 -> 500,000.<br />
** Extreme, but these are apparently tiny roadbumps currently. They're rare, so this shouldn't be obnoxious.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator size increased.<br />
<br />
* Shield Guard Post shields 90,000 -> 150,000.<br />
<br />
* Focused Gravity Generators and Gravity Guardians now only slow things below engine_gx 14, rather than 15.<br />
** There were a few units that should've been resistant to this but weren't due to a minor error.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestations will now always have Minefields as well as Engineers, instead of just Engineers.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix some issues with the science hovertext, where it was still listing planets even after you'd taken all their science.<br />
<br />
* Handle the case where a player might have Overspent building a unit. This can happen if a player was building a unit after spending X metal, saves the game, then changes the metal cost of the unit to < X via XML and reloads the game.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Updated the Steamworks integration library that we use (and the Steamworks dll/so/dylib files from Valve) to their latest versions.<br />
** More details are here: https://github.com/Facepunch/Facepunch.Steamworks<br />
** On windows, we can confirm that now it actually shows you as being logged in properly, and also lets you see the proper main menu visuals rather than a blank space background.<br />
** To check on your OS that this is working, please look in the bottom right hand corner of your screen on the main menu and it should say "Logged in as [your username]." If it says "Not logged into Steam" or similar, then achievements won't be working properly for you later on. And in general it's something we'd want to know about.<br />
** Mostly this is a compatibility thing with the newest version of Unity, so far as we can tell, but we also have some new capabilities that we might flex at some point in the future.<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators for turrets and strikecraft should now work properly.<br />
** On any ship, there is now an is_strikecraft="true" flag, and an is_turret="true" flag that you can apply in order to have them be considered strikecraft or turrets for these (and later potentially other) purposes.<br />
** We didn't use the special_type field because it's possible that these things might be strikecraft or turrets and something else at the same time, and the case of being a strikecraft or being a turret isn't "special" enough to warrant the special_type field usage.<br />
** Note that it's also possible that some of these will be both is_strikecraft="true" and also have a special_type="Drone". In those cases, it won't give the ship cap bonus regardless of the is_strikecraft="true" being there. So drones don't have to un-set that, in other words.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Invert Mouse Zoom" setting in the All Cameras section.<br />
** Normally when you spin the mouse wheel forward, you zoom closer; backwards zooms you away. This lets you flip that functionality. OR, in the case that your hardware or OS is inverted for whatever reason, this lets you correct it to work like everyone else.<br />
** There is a bug in Unity 2019.1 on linux machines that causes mouse scrolling to be inverted, so this lets us work around that: https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/linux-input-dot-mousescrolldelta-returns-reversed-values-in-linux-player<br />
** Note that this won't help with inverted scrolling with dropdowns and other scrolling areas, unfortunately.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.854 Garbage... Collected! ==<br />
(Released April 26th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Known issue: in the bottom right corner of the main menu, it says you're not logged into Steam even though you are, and also if you are logged into Steam the backdrop for the main menu might be just stars instead of the usual colorful thing with ships flying by. We'll be upgrading our Steam integration dlls next build, which should fix that. Hopefully it causes no other issues.<br />
<br />
* Known issue: the intra-galactic coordinators for turrets and strikecraft do nothing right now. We wanted to get this build out asap, since it's beta anyway.<br />
<br />
=== Quality of Life and Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Player mobile defensive ships in planetary fleets now start in FRD mode<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Hovertext for incoming wave notifications now colours the target planet name for ease of reading<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Science in the resource bar now shows the planets science is being extracted from and the amount of science remaining for each.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Ship AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to targeting logic from WeaponMaster, where the code was accidentally prioritizing the worst possible targets.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Add some new Zombifying targeting code, where ships with zombifying guns will prefer to attack things they can zombify<br />
** Thanks to Jonesmz for the suggestion and WeaponMaster for the code<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* If the top unit of a cloaking Stacked Squad dies, the next ship to spawn inherits its cloak state. So if you've decloaked it, killing the top unit doesn't allow the next unit to recloak.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix some typos in the Experimental: Civil War conduct text<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix typo on Encapsulated map type description<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Intra-Galactic Coordinators were increasing the unit cap for Energy Collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some debugging code to catch a null reference exception in the Warden Fleet Long Range Planning code<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for making us aware of a problem in this area<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Flagships that are crippled can no longer pick up units for transport. Flagships that were transporting units and become crippled now unload all their units immediately. This fixes a few ways players could abuse the Crippled mechanic.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Split Intra-Galactic Coordinators abilities. Instead of buffing all ship caps, there are now three, one for each of Turrets, Frigates and Strike Craft. Note that each Coordinator now gives a bigger buff.<br />
** Note that this doesn't work for strikecraft and turrets yet in the current build, we just didn't have time.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleet Centerpieces should now all Rebuild Remains.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting confusion in this area.<br />
<br />
* "Light" and "Heavy" Tech Upgrades cost more at higher levels.<br />
<br />
* "Disruptive" Tech Upgrade costs slightly more at all levels.<br />
<br />
* Battlestation, Citadel and Ark Tech Upgrade costs reduced.<br />
<br />
* "Spire Core" Tech Upgrade cost reduced a bit.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate reload time 9s -> 12s, damage 25,000 -> 20,000.<br />
<br />
* Tamed Macrophage metal cost increased to 2 million, energy consumption increased to 25,000.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Scrubbed Abomination metal cost increased to 350k.<br />
<br />
* Muggers and Brawlers now cost their proper amount of metal - 300k - instead of 3 million...<br />
** Muggers sure lived up to their name.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting this! <br />
<br />
=== AI Threat Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Thanks to ptarth for a great save game that led to all these changes<br />
<br />
* The AI now has a per-AI Type tunable, RatioOfFearOfRemoteEnemies, which informs how seriously the AI takes into account your forces on planets near the planet it is attacking. This reduces the AI's tendency to be terrified of nearby large player/nanocaust forces.<br />
<br />
* The AI is now capable of having Threat that it uses only against minor factions. There was a longstanding bug preventing this from working correctly. This threat is "Dumber" then general purpose (aka "anti-player") threat.<br />
** Treat threat specifically against a player as "general purpose"<br />
<br />
* Improve the way the AI handles Threat adjacent to the player home planet.<br />
** If the Threat is Waiting against your home planet (since you have fortified it too heavily to attack) and there are much easier targets, it will prefer to take your other planets out first rather than just building up a giant fleetball.<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to units keeping track of the fact that they are Threat. Failing to do this was confusing the AI's Strength Counting, leading to the AI believing it was weaker than it should have been<br />
** When Threat gets an order to attack another planet, make sure to stay in Threat behaviour.<br />
** Fix a bug where Retreating AI ships would sometimes lose track of the fact that they should have Threat behaviour.<br />
** Copy Orders when splitting a stack (via the Split GameCommand or when the top unit in the stack dies) to preserve Threat behaviour.<br />
<br />
* Also improve debug hover tooltip for squad orders/Threat behaviour and improve some code commenting/readability<br />
<br />
=== Unity Engine Upgrade (To 2019.1 - Now With Incremental Garbage Collection!) ===<br />
<br />
* Upgraded the game to Unity 2019.1.0f2! The prior version was on 2018.2.0 or something along those lines, so this is a big jump.<br />
** The really big improvement is time-sliced garbage collection: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-incremental-garbage-collection/<br />
*** Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhfzzLyG7_w<br />
** This also has numerous bugfixes, and lets us upgrade from a VERY old version of TextMeshPro to the newest version, which in turn fixes a variety of bugs relating to text, blurry text, textboxes, etc.<br />
*** That said, as part of this, we knew this was going to happen, but it breaks ALL the references to any sort of text-based thing inside of any of our unity projects.<br />
*** But we kind of needed to go ahead and have this done before we started in on a bunch more UI updates or else it was just going to be creating even more work for ourselves in the future.<br />
** There are also a variety of stability improvements to the unity engine in general, and a few performance improvements. I think that Linux machines will see the biggest boost.<br />
*** There are some new capabilities that we can in theory use in the future, too, and nested prefabs are an amazing thing for sure. But we're not really needing those bits in this specific project right at the moment.<br />
** Oh and this does upgrade us to the latest version of the post processing stack v2, as well, which means probably better performance and some edge bugfixes for some folks in that area, too.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so we've been using the mcs.exe compiler for the last two years, and it turns out that doesn't support the newer versions of C#. It would have been nice if that had been more clear.<br />
** Instead, when we were updating our TextMeshPro component or a few other things -- or trying to, anyway -- we would instead get mysterious "System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: "Void System.Array.Reverse(!!0[])" compilation errors. Good luck googling that, almost nobody has that.<br />
** The solution is to STOP USING MCS.EXE, and instead use csc.exe. That's the new Roslyn compiler that Micrsoft created and unity is using for the newer C# 6.0+ features.<br />
*** The !fun! part about that is that all the syntax is different, and also it requires references to... a whole bunch of dlls that are the "reference dlls" instead of the "runtime ones."<br />
*** If you ever find yourself referencing a dll called System.Private.CoreLib.dll, or anything like that, STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING and try a different dll.<br />
**** Even though the compiler just told you that what you need is in that dll, it's actually lying.<br />
**** Actually what you need is in... good luck figuring that out!... but probably it's in the REFERENCE version of System.Core.dll or similar. It has nothing to do with "netcoreapp" or "netstandard," unlike the few non-unity-related references to this on the internet would have you believe. That's unrelated to unity, and is just a fun thing on some web servers and various other software.<br />
**** What the heck is a "reference dll" in terms of what the compiler needs? Well, it's a fuller version than is used at runtime, I suppose. I haven't explicitly seen that said anywhere, but that seems to be the general feeling I'm getting. Why they needed this split I'm not sure, but I'm guessing different compiler flags or perhaps the ability to have different per-platform versions. Something like that.<br />
**** Where do you find those reference dlls?? Ha! Good luck with that. Some of them seem to be in the Roslyn compiler folder... except not really, some of them have way too small of sizes. Others are almost certainly in your [UnityInstallLocation]\Editor\Data\Managed\UnityEngine folder, but there again it's not perfect.<br />
***** Generally you're going to find yourself searching around inside the unity install folder, and you might even find yourself (if you're on windows) searching around inside C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.6.1\ or whatever your equivalent is. Nicely packaged for you? NO.<br />
** So that explains one of the big mysteries that Keith and I have been scratching our heads on for a couple of years now.<br />
*** But even with that "solved," I couldn't get all of the aspects of LINQ working, and some of our third-party networking code uses LINQ, so I moved that into an external dll that will get loaded at runtime. That's more efficient anyway, but annoyingly indirect.<br />
*** All of the network code has been open-sourced by the original authors anyhow, so that actually will work out extra well for us when we get to that point. But in the short term it's another pain in the rear we didn't need.<br />
<br />
* One bonus of all this upgrading of unity-stuff is that the editor is no longer complaining about our external dlls being something that will crash the editor and so something they refuse to load. That's... always a plus. And is related to the whole compiler saga.<br />
<br />
* Okay, nested prefabs from the latest versions of unity are actually indeed insanely useful and we're starting to use those more than we otherwise might have.<br />
<br />
==== Complete Overhaul Of All Fonts ====<br />
<br />
* ALL of the fonts in the game have been reworked (in terms of how they are imported into TextMeshPro and thus how they look in general).<br />
** And a bunch of new fonts have been added to the game as options for us to use in various contexts.<br />
** And we've completely redone what fonts we are using in almost all contexts as it is.<br />
** There was a lot of complaining about the fonts not feeling properly militaristic, or otherwise being non-thematic, and hopefully this helps.<br />
<br />
* The background story is again its own window and scrolls rather than is paginated, but this time is a lot more condensed, uses an improved version of the more-recent rewritten version, and uses strategic coloration to make it easier to read quickly.<br />
<br />
* The little notification icon/panels at the top of the screen now show up with a new font (as with most other parts of the game), but this is a particularly good font for condensed/confined places. It should let you read more things without them trailing off too ellipses, while it also not looking tacky in terms of how it's crammed in.<br />
** Also, the TextMeshPro upgrade itself seems to do a better job of choosing when to go to ellipsis instead of just drawing the raw text of whatever it is. So some of the planet names that were drawing ellipses very much too soon now won't.<br />
<br />
* As an aside, it's quite possible that the following issues are present somewhere in the game now, and we'd love to know about it:<br />
** Some sort of text not wrapping properly or being outright invisible, or cut off.<br />
** Some sort of text section making it impossible to click something near it, or picking up clicks from way further away than it should have.<br />
** Some sort of text section having the wrong font, or being misaligned in a subtle or not-subtle way.<br />
** We tried to correct all these that we could find, but bear in mind that this was a couple of dozen interfaces that we had to edit BY HAND for this version, so we probably missed something.<br />
** Honestly this was another reason we did this now, during the beta period, versus during a non-beta time. Thanks for being our guinea pigs to all the testers helping on this!<br />
<br />
* Given that we're changing so many of the fonts, and may choose to do so even more as feedback rolls in, we've now codified the in-code font-sizing a bit in a new FontSizes class.<br />
** Essentially size 12pt in font A might be waaaay larger or smaller than 12pt in font B. So we needed a way to normalize the offsets from the defaults of whatever we decide makes sense with a given font.<br />
<br />
==== Various Changes to our Post Processing Stack ====<br />
<br />
* Oh, I'm sorry, did we say we were going to be using the new unity Post Processing Stack V2? Blah, that really doesn't play nice with what we wanted to do.<br />
** Instead we're now using Beautify again, stripped down into performance mode but using it for vingnetting and tonemapping. We continue to use amplify bloom for the bloom effects, because messing with that again would be... insanely time consuming.<br />
** Overall this does mean there's a subtle shift to the look of the game yet again -- and, wait, no we're not using that now, either. Sigh. We'll figure out the tonemapping at some point, but frankly our general lighting is doing the heavy lifting on its own.<br />
<br />
==== Splitting Some Network Code Off Into Its Own Area ====<br />
<br />
* A bunch of the networking code has been offloaded into its own dll now, which we're able to more easily update as needed.<br />
** This actually makes our iteration time on that sort of code faster in the future.<br />
** In the process of getting this working, we managed to waste about two hours trying to figure out why the entire game was broken (and it was a one-liner typo). Fun!<br />
<br />
== Version 0.853 An Officer And A Bunch Of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 22nd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Only the offensive (strike and officer) type of fleets are now auto-assigned numbered hotkeys.<br />
** If people want to manually assign hotkeys differently in the future, they can (when that interface is in place), but this really is the most likely use case most of the time.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Command stations can once again die to remains.<br />
** This means that if you have a battlestation or a citadel on the planet, then they can rebuild the command station for you automatically just like remains rebuilders would have done once upon a time. Yay automation!<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes, Badger, and Nameless Terror for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Ability To Scout With Nanites Properly Works (And Related Visual Effects) ===<br />
<br />
* Unlike all the other versions since 0.850, you can now click over to planets that you have never explored.<br />
** This lets you actually use the Explore With Nanites hack, which is kiiiinda important, honestly. Or at least it's important to a lot of people, depending on playstyle.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and others for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The visual effect for viewing a planet where you have stale intel (but have seen it before) was before a bit confusing and a bit much.<br />
** Much as Chris liked the matrix-y effect, that has been ditched and things are a lot more Factorio-like in terms of just being darkened and grainy.<br />
** The effect is subtle enough not to be irritating, but to be definitely noticeable. Given the sidebar notes Stale Intel, and things don't look super duper crazy in terms of the visual distortions, hopefully we don't need any bigger onscreen messages to explain what is happening to players.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, Nameless Terror, and RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* There is a NEW visual effect for viewing a planet where you have never even explored before.<br />
** Through the distortion here you can barely even read the wormhole names, and all you can see are the planet graphics and wormhole graphics (not even metal spots, etc).<br />
** This one is heavily stylized, but is so TV-like and the sidebar is utterly empty and saying "you have never explored here" and similar that hopefully it's really clear what is going on.<br />
** This is needed simply because we're allowing players to click into planets that are unexplored so that they can do the nanites hack against them to explore them.<br />
<br />
=== New Background Story ===<br />
<br />
* A new and brief, paginated story has replaced the longwinded scrolling-based "background story" section of the main menu.<br />
** The old story was complicated and no longer really accurate to the game. This does mean all those character portraits that Chris created are now completely gone from the game, but such is life. The initial pre-game story is super simple and that's kind of how it always has been. We want the rest of the story, what there is, to be based on what happens during your gameplay.<br />
** The new story reads:<br />
*** After an 800-year civil war between humans fighting amongst the stars, they finally birthed a force that would end all human wars forever: Artificial Intelligence.<br />
*** Quickly eclipsing the humans in power and taking control of most of their automated forces, the AI nearly wiped the human race from the face of the galaxy. Only scattered pockets remain, hiding amidst the scattered wreckage from the civil war and the AI-led extermination that followed.<br />
*** You are in command of the last substantial remaining human military force. It is so small that the AI is either unaware of it, or just doesn't care.<br />
*** Potentially coincidentally, something outside the galaxy seems to have distracted the AI far more than humans ever did.<br />
*** You must grow your forces, capturing and reactivating fleets from the old wars... but you must be careful not to grow so strong that the eye of the AI turns back toward you.<br />
*** Gain just enough power, capture just enough fleets, take back just enough planets, that you can destroy the massive structures known as 'AI Overlords' and end this new war before the AI is even fully aware it has begun.<br />
*** If you are too greedy, if you make yourself too threatening, if you let the AI realize you might be a true threat... expect us all to lose everything.<br />
*** You must use discretion, avoid distraction and temptation, and wield your forces like a scalpel. Take risks, be bold, but don't try to be a conquerer.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Removed the "build remains rebuilders" intel tab entry, since that is outdated.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The strength of waves that are incoming should now be correctly stated, whereas before it was not since we switched the AI costs and strengths to be two different things.<br />
** Some internal variables have also been renamed to be more clear.<br />
** This has not been tested, so it might still be wrong.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new capturable_can_seed_at_all="false" flag, which is now applied to the Cloaked Ark One and the Agile Cursed Golem.<br />
** These two entities should no longer seed at all in the galaxy, since they were only ever supposed to be granted via the starting fleet choices anyhow. This won't fix existing savegames, but if you see them in new savegames as something you can capture, please do let us know.<br />
** Thanks to vinco and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases should now seed at more appropriate distances from you.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding and fixing, and reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where you could not select the starting fleet without it always just defaulting back to classic.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for the fix, and HeartHunter7 and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes so that if you have invalid/mismatched options (custom or otherwise) in the lobby, it will now complain about them properly and let you know that things are failing.<br />
** With this we found that the team colors for Instigators and the AntagonizedDysonSphere were not working properly, for instance.<br />
<br />
* Attack warnings in the top bar should now properly show stacked ship counts when you hover over them.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Some complicated code fixes from WeaponMaster have been put in place to hopefully solve the "multi-shot doesn't function when there's an enemy fortress or other super important item present" issue. Please let us know if this doesn't fix it, or any other strange cases wind up happening, but things seem okay from some limited testing so far.<br />
** Big thanks to WeaponMaster for the fix, and to KMan_Gladiator for the initial report!<br />
<br />
* Fixed some internal bugs with "last second we saw a planet" that was causing some oddities in the local tab's reporting of what you could see of enemy strength, etc.<br />
<br />
* The local tab summaries now include strength and ships that are inside other ships, aka drones and reinforcements not yet deployed, etc. It's way more accurate now.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips in the local tab were showing the strength values as being 1000x what we show them elsewhere in the UI. Oops, fixed.<br />
** This bug is old as the game itself, more or less. Wow.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting this right as we also discovered it!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where in the post-0.850 builds you could get too much intel about various other planets if you clicked to them in the first 2 seconds of gameplay. This wasn't as big a deal until we changed it so you can click to unexplored planets.<br />
<br />
* The little "battle at a planet" notification cards at the top of the screen now properly show all the ships that are inside other ships, making it so that their ship counts now match that of the sidebar (which is itself only newly correct in this version).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the incoming wave notifications had strength values that were laughably tiny and wrong. It was only tallying the strength of the first ship of each type, which meant that if there were 1000 ships in a wave, it was 1/1000th the value it should have been.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Strike Fleets vs Officer Fleets ===<br />
<br />
* There was previously a general "mobile combat" (MobileCombatFleetFlagship) category for fleets. This has now been split in two:<br />
** MobileOfficerCombatFleetFlagship - this is the style that we had before, where the centerpieces are either an Ark or a Golem. These are big centerpiece fleets that have small and medium craft but also something big and scary at the center.<br />
** MobileStrikeCombatFleetFlagship - this is new, and is just basically a transport with a "super meh" fusion bomb weapon at the center. Basically this is meant to be the big groups of your ships that are moving around doing the most of the fighting, and the transports are there for... transport! And for ships to pop out of during construction.<br />
<br />
* There are now EVEN MORE fleets seeded around the galaxy for you to find, although many more of them are the "strike" kind of combat fleets instead of the "officer" sort.<br />
** This gets back to the main playstyle for most people from earlier version of this game and from the base game; having big centerpiece units is great, but let's not overdo it. And for those who don't prefer that kind of gameplay, they can entirely skip it.<br />
<br />
* The number of certain types of Arks and Golems that can be seeded has been drastically reduced from what they were before (those that are part of fleets, not lone ones).<br />
** You should still see almost as many of these types of fleets as before, but a greater diversity of them. And in general way fewer armored golems, for instance.<br />
** On really large maps, you will find that you're maybe not getting quite as many of these as you once were, though.<br />
** The ultimate goal is for these to feel more rare and powerful over time, and a lot of them are seeded a bit further away, now.<br />
<br />
* The "Drone" specialtype has been split into DroneGeneral and DroneFrigate.<br />
** This lets us better use the multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_drones and multiplied_nonfrigate_ship_cap_for_drones xml entries when relevant.<br />
** Most stuff is just DroneGeneral, though, as it is.<br />
<br />
* We now have two new entries, multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_mobile and multiplied_strikecraft_ship_cap_for_mobile.<br />
** These let us make fleets larger or smaller based on what the centerpiece is, separate from the fleet design itself. This is intended specifically for the officer and strike fleet types, to let us have them share the types of fleets but to let the non-officer fleets be larger in general.<br />
** Note that officer fleets and non-officer fleets are NOT intended to be balanced with one another (officer fleets are more powerful, naturally), but the officer fleets are more rare and more powerful as well as more expensive in general.<br />
<br />
* There are several variants of tranport flagships, which all look the same and have the same name, but which seed at different frequencies and have much larger frigate, strikecraft, or some mix of the two caps.<br />
** The idea is that if you want really huge fleets of smaller ships, then these are where they come from.<br />
** The balance of all this new stuff is very untested, but the seeding of them seems to work at the very least.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring these various changes.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Overloader Combat Factory speed boost increased from 20% to 40%.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels that roll the OtherDefenseFocus design (i.e Tractors, Tachyon, etc) now have Turrets as intended.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation shields increased from 350k to 500k.<br />
<br />
* Shifted Strength values around (mainly Guardians are lower).<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleets should now always have at least two unit types.<br />
** Finding a Fleet with just one unit type was rather bad, and kind of doomed that Fleet to being relatively useless.<br />
** This was especially bad if it happened to the one adjacent to your Homeworld.<br />
<br />
* Most units for the AI now cost twice as much for it to purchase.<br />
** Guardians and Turrets cost 50% more, Frigates cost 33% more.<br />
** At the same time, the starting AI defenses are increased to make them roughly the same, as that seemed mostly okay, it was mainly the sheer wave sizes people were getting.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Armored Golem hull into shields.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the inspiration.<br />
<br />
* Economic and Military Command Stations store 300k metal instead of 100k, Home Command stores 2.5 million instead of 2 million.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for mentioning a problem here.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate durability upgraded a fair bit, the "Railcannon" variant has a 50% damage increase on the Railcannons, and the "Laser" variant loses the damage bonus in place of simply firing a lot more shots.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes and ptarth for bringing the issues up.<br />
<br />
* Citadels have some weapon boosts.<br />
<br />
==== Speedier Flagships! ====<br />
<br />
* Player Golem Arks speed doubled.<br />
<br />
* Ark speed increased to 1400.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Player Arks and Spire Frigates move 50% faster after entering a planet for 5 seconds.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Decloaking Capabilities For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories now spawn with Combat Sentry Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Engineers For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new category of ship_cap_group for fleet memberships, this one called Civilian.<br />
** Turns out that we just completely forgot to add in the ability to generate more engineers via battlestations and citadels, that that was most definitely supposed to be a thing.<br />
** This won't affect existing savegames, but you should be finding caches of engineers that you can construct along with your battlestations all over the place now in new games.<br />
** The idea isn't to increase the ship cap for engineers on a given planet by adjusting the planet itself (unless you want to change command station type), but rather by which types of stations you put there, and what engineering caps they have. That was always the plan with fleets, but was just a complete oversight.<br />
** The reason for the new Civilian category is so that we can have caps of engineers (and later maybe a mix of something else) that is separate from the OtherDefenses, turrets, and whatever else. Basically to let them not compete with other types of defenses while still being added new.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== No More Mysterious Metal Increases As Marks Go Up ====<br />
<br />
* There is no longer any added metal cost to having higher-mark units.<br />
** Some may lament this, but this was the only downside to increasing the mark of units, which is otherwise an all-positive thing to do. It was such a sharp negative that you could actually tank your economy without warning.<br />
** The first game made good use of this because you could choose to build cheaper low-mark units at any time, and then more expensive high-mark units later, and the higher metal and energy costs, as well as lower ship cap, were all deterrents to the higher marks being overly relied-upon. That was an interesting system, but we moved away from that well over a year ago, if not more, when we combined all the ships of yours into being the highest mark of whatever their line is.<br />
** This new system is one that does stress your metal reserves less, probably, but you're gaining so many more ships over time (by capturing more fleets) that you're still going to need more metal later in the game than what you start with. It's just due to increased ship counts in this game, not due to your units suddenly and unexpectedly costing more.<br />
** Thanks to Karhax for reporting the root issue here.<br />
<br />
==== No More AIP Increases From "Too Many Fleets" In A System ====<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the "too many fleets at a planet" logic entirely, at least the current version.<br />
** It simply felt punitive and un-fun, and there was no version of that style which was likely to be fun. Nonetheless, we still just commented it out for now so someone can build something on that if desired in the future. We are also going to be working on some things to prevent players going absolutely nuts with how they stack things, but they won't be so opaque or so likely to unexpectedly bite you.<br />
** Thanks to basically everyone playing the betas for complaining about this. Honestly that didn't hugely surprise any of us, but the discussion it sparked was interesting. In particular thanks to Nameless Terror, Ecthelon, themouthofsauron, Karhax, and probably some folks we missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.852 Directness Is Better==<br />
(Released April 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Rather than being markless, Sentry Frigates are now mark 1 but only get upgraded by the fleet itself upgrading (which isn't a working mechanic yet, it's coming!)<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for noticing this.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Tooltips setting option: "Show Weapon Activity Details"<br />
** If enabled, then each weapon in your tooltips shows you a bunch of info about how long until it reloads, why it didn't fire most recently, and other such info.<br />
** Previously this info was just always shown, but now it's off by default.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips -- for player ships or anything on the build sidebar -- now tell you if the ship is unable to be upgraded, or what techs upgrade it if any do, or if they are of the sort that only upgrade when their fleet itself upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reminding us just how important this is, although we were already going to do it.<br />
<br />
* One crippled mobile fleet flagship among several functional ones could previously erroneously prevent you from building command stations. Fixed.<br />
** Additionally, now battlestations/citadels are able to build command stations, not just mobile fleet flagships.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== AI Reconquest Command Stations ===<br />
<br />
* There once was a specialtype of "NormalAICommandStation." This has been removed, and split into:<br />
** AICommandStationOriginal, which is used in the majority of cases.<br />
** AICommandStationReconquest, which is used for cases where the AI reconquered a planet.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "AI Reconquest Command Station," which is now what the AI will seed after taking back a planet during a reconquest wave.<br />
** This acts just like the original command stations of the AI, with the following exceptions:<br />
*** It has twice as much health and shielding.<br />
*** It doesn't have any confusing messages about AIP going up if you destroy it (that already wasn't the case, but the interface made it sound like it did).<br />
*** It can't be hacked for science extraction. Go build your own command station there if you want that science, sonny.<br />
*** It doesn't grant any scouting intel when destroyed, so you can't use any exploity type of behavior to let the AI take a planet back and then destroy the reconquest station in order to get more scouting intel AIP-free.<br />
** Note that in existing savegames, any existing command stations the AI put there because of reconquest will still be of the original sort. So you won't see this until the AI does a reconquest wave in this version or newer.<br />
** Fun fact, the humans-don't-autotarget-this rules are still the same here, for now at least, but this can be changed in xml if we really want to. We left this not because of an AIP cost (which is why the original has it), but because there might be a very valid reason you want to let the AI keep the planet (aka them wasting reinforcements on a planet that has been neutered). So having your ships go into auto-kill mode would probably break some valid advanced strategies.<br />
** Thanks to BadgerBadger, TechSY730, and Exlium for suggesting and reporting various issues that led to this.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Rallying Out, Direct Orders Inheritance And Position In ===<br />
<br />
* All concept of ships rallying to... anything... is now gone. It was annoying and full of edge cases that would cause players to have their fleets not behave how they wanted them to as refleeting was in progress.<br />
** Now all ships that are created for a fleet by a factory now pop straight out of the fleet centerpiece, with all the orders from the fleet centerpiece (including stance).<br />
** This gets around some of the most annoying logistical issues, and because the centerpieces of the fleets are so large it makes enough logical sense to not cause huge amounts of cognitive dissonance. Putting gameplay first, this is the only thing that really solves our age-old (literally like a decade old) problem.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 and others for reporting, although here again we were already leaning in this direction because of our own frustration.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.851 Drones And Economies==<br />
(Released April 19th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Player Command Station Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the economic command station description:<br />
** Economic variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variant gives greatly improved metal and energy output, but lacks the ability to directly defend itself very well. It doesn't even have any means of decloaking enemies directly. Planets with these should either be protected by a powerful citadel or battlestation, or so far back from the front lines that they are safe.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The matter converters and energy collectors were higher on the logistical command stations, and now that has been swapped with the economic command stations.<br />
<br />
* Logistical command stations now come with 20 mines built in, and also two focused gravity generators. More stuff to help them be more tricky and dangerous directly.<br />
** They also now get 2 forcefields while the military variants only get 1 instead, swapping those two.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the logistical command station description:<br />
* Logistical variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at finding cloaked enemies, tractoring enemies, and even laying traps (mines!) for enemies. Beyond that it's kind of a halfway point between the military and economic drives of its peers. They also get two forcefields where their peers only get one, and way more engineers.<br />
<br />
* Military command stations now get 5 beam cannons and 15 ambush turrets, making them by far the most able to defend themselves without the help of a battlestation or citadel.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the military command station description:<br />
** Military variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at defending itself, and perfect for dangerous border planets. It also gets the most factories, making it probably the best way to resupply your fleets near the front lines.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The lost spire frigate faction has now been properly removed from the game.<br />
** We had already folded the functionality from that into the main game itself, so the faction was pointless and just broke things if you enabled it. If you enabled it in your savegames, then those savegames are probably now broken.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding issue where if we removed game settings from the game, then old settings files that were loaded in would complain about UnrequestedXMLAttributes.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that are owned by no faction (aka not claimed yet) should no longer have their cloaking devices function until they are claimed. Tested and works as expected.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The seeding logic for NormalPlanetNastyPicks, SpireArchives, and CivilWarTriggers was... nonsensical? The code did some kind of strange things.<br />
** It should now work properly and not do things like putting spire archives on AI homeworlds.<br />
** It also now logs what it is doing to the mapgen logger if you have that turned on and want to see what it is doing.<br />
** We've not tested this at all.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with beam cannons where they were being upgraded by the Melee tech instead of Splash.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where it would register a double-click if you were clicking too rapidly between different parts of the screen. Mice are fast! Now if you've moved the mouse more than 10px, it doesn't consider it a double-click. Probably. We need to test that.<br />
** Fully fixed (and verified the fix) to the double-clicking stuff.<br />
** Thanks to Bobtree, Talkar, Kaleopan, and Exlium for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "MISSING LOCALIZATION: AIPChangeReason_FleetConcentration" bug.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* It is now possible to explicitly set up in the xml that units cannot be stacked. Use the tag cannot_be_stacked="true".<br />
** This also now automatically happens on all AI guardians (dire and regular), drones (that got exploity), lone golems, and NPC centerpieces.<br />
** All of the marauder raiders and similar can no longer be stacked because of the tag, to prevent issues with them.<br />
** Astro Trains also can no longer be stacked, since that's just odd.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where drones were never being set up properly on drone controllers at all (hive golem, etc).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories would help with drone production.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that was preventing drones from ever being deployed even if they were internally created. Fun with boolean inversions!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a whole nest of bugs where drones that were a part of non-drone-specific fleet types could never be spawned by their spawner.<br />
** Aka this was breaking things like hive golems, but drone producer guard posts would have been fine (though that bit is untested).<br />
<br />
* Fixed some issues with the drone caps getting higher when the mark level of the drone controllers was higher. It should be the same ship cap for those drones regardless of cap, unlike with regular non-drone ships.<br />
<br />
* The data and tooltip info for AIs unlocking new ship types has been removed, as that mechanic actually isn't a thing anymore.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Irritation Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* AI guard posts that are no longer on AI-controlled planets now lose their cloaking. This also just seemed like a needed thing to avoid an annoying bit of cleanup you otherwise have to do. Typically they would be sitting around doing nothing, since all their defenders fled. Tested and works as expected.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking fleet leaders (centerpieces, flagships, command stations, whatever) now selects or deselects all the stuff in their fleet, rather than all the things of their same type.<br />
** For individual ship types, like fighters or whatever, it works like it always has.<br />
*** HOWEVER, when it comes to individual ship types, it no longer considers spinoff units (Daggers, etc) something to select along with the main unit type that you might have clicked. Sharing a common ancestor is no longer good enough for the selection stuff to work that way, particularly given the ludicrous number of variants we now have.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 for suggesting the change to double-clicking on centerpieces.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips now specify how many undeployed drones there are inside an entity.<br />
** Additionally, you can see the construction percentage on each drone that is getting created inside.<br />
<br />
* In preparation for some upcoming changes, the Ships tab has been renamed to the Local tab, and says "At Local Planet" instead of Ships up at the top.<br />
<br />
* On the fleets tab, it now has a new piece where it will show the hotkey assigned to that fleet, if there is one assigned.<br />
<br />
* You still can't manually assign hotkeys to fleets, but hotkeys are now automatically assigned to fleets as you acquire them early on in.<br />
** This is something we want to have happen so that the use of these hotkeys is encouraged by the large numbers of people (including some of us on staff) who never bothered to use them in the past.<br />
** But obviously prior to 0.900 we want it to be something you can control directly, too.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Dire Guard Posts no longer increase AIP on death.<br />
** Was intended to mimic the AIP Floor increase from Classic, but didn't play well with the random Post count and multiple AIs.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlords Tachyon system is a bit shorter range and decloaks at half the speed.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where this was a major roadblock - more than intended.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida and Shredder Guard Posts fire every 3 seconds instead of 1.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where a Tethuida was actually far scarier with the gun than intended - it's meant to use the drones, mainly.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation and Rorqual Hegira Ark have much larger forcefield radius now.<br />
** Things are bigger in general, so you weren't able to fit as much as you used to under these.<br />
<br />
* All Citadels except Interceptors now have a weapon range of 10,100.<br />
<br />
* AI requires higher AIP before increasing its tech level.<br />
** Used to be, starting from Mark 2: 150, 300, 450, 600, 800, 1200.<br />
** Now is, starting from Mark 2: 225, 450, 675, 900, 1125, 1350.<br />
*** The AI no longer pays more for higher Mark units, and so it was having very large power spikes relatively early on.<br />
*** Although, Mark 7 is actually triggered not much slower than what it used to, so really annoying the AI is still going to hurt a lot.<br />
<br />
* All Battlestations shield points increased to 350,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.850 The Arrival of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
''We are breaking '''all''' the savegames again, sorry about that. This series of updates leading up to 0.900 should collectively be the last time '''for real''' for real, although we've said that before. It's not our practice to do this sort of thing at all, typically, but this game has been going through a lot more pre-release evolution than most of our titles have. The old savegames won't even make sense in the new version, really.''<br />
<br />
* This got super long and we wanted to show what we were working on as we went, so we wound up also having this: [[AI War 2: 0.850 Raw Chris Changelog]]<br />
<br />
* And in general if you're not clear why we're doing all this, then here's a really long document that explains it: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/16dJvDOWckK4vfnW2Mwut7wv2OF_bCn17XuspBlPBymQ/edit#heading=h.wkf7np25ov5 AI War 2 - Unit Construction / Fleets Rework].<br />
** Although we went much further than the document laid out, moving into territory like making the AI planets more unique from one another, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Misc ===<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres will remain antagonized much longer after hacks.<br />
** More hacks against a Dyson Sphere will increase the antagonization time.<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI to spawn Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy. Only Dyson factions with high enough intensity can spawn antagonizers.<br />
** Antagonizers affect all Dyson Factions, so if you've enabled 3 dyson factions, the AI will spawn antagonizers for each dyson faction, and you have to kill all the antagonizers before they will become friendly again.<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers follow similar spawning rules to Instigator Bases; they need to spawn close to the player at lower AIPs, and at high AIP can spawn anywhere.<br />
** To compensate for this, the Dyson's income has been slightly buffed.<br />
<br />
* Gives some units unused voice lines, and the Dyson ships the Zenith voice.<br />
** Engineers and other similar civilian ships now actually talk!<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map now has more of a "military screen" style look to it again, although this doesn't yet apply to the actual icons and lines and so on. But it has that same sort of scanline effect and whatnot as in the first game, though more involved now and fancier with some hexagons, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts and Tutorials Gone for Now ===<br />
<br />
* The old quickstarts have all been moved to QuickStartsOld, since they no longer function with the new system in general.<br />
** Because of the way Steam updates work, the QuickStarts from now on will be loaded from QuickStarts2 instead, which is presently empty and needs to be for the next little while. But at least it won't be throwing errors when players try to start quickstarts in the new build.<br />
<br />
* The pre-existing tutorial has been completely disabled, since it is probably nonfunctional in general and tries to teach you a lot of things that are no longer relevant. We're going to be majorly redoing that in the future, but for now we don't want people accidentally going in there.<br />
<br />
=== Fleets Added ===<br />
<br />
* Fleets are a new concept in the game, which are basically collections of ships in one of a few different categories. The AIs and NPCs don't really use these, per se, although there's nothing stopping them from doing so. But on the player side, this basically is now the central grouping of units for your stuff, and you use these offensively and defensively. You can get waaay larger ship caps than before, but each group is... well, automated as well as being a distinct flavor unto itself.<br />
<br />
* The concepts of destruction points and Ark Upgrade Points are both gone, and replaced by Fleet EXP instead. This works similarly to both of those other things, in that if your fleet centerpiece is on a planet with an enemy ship that dies to your forces, then that fleet gains some EXP. More for big-ticket items.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of logic for how fleets are selected and moved around, which was previously related to control groups, is now in place.<br />
** The logic for how to assign fleets to keybind indices (fleet groups, essentially) for now is going to be clicking-the-interface-only, since that's really confusing in keybinds. We may wind up reintroducing keybinds for this at some point in the future, but more likely would be a better interface for organizing fleets into the keybinds directly, since this would avoid the confusion factor for players.<br />
** The big sticky spot for confusion is people thinking they're making a control group of ships, when really it is of fleets, in essence. Even this explanation is confusing. ;)<br />
<br />
* The various things that you can purchase from the Zenith Trader are all now planet-bound, even if they are normally mobile. They go into the fleet of that planet, and are on permanent station-keeping there.<br />
** In theory we could later have something that can let you purchase new ships for mobile fleets from the Zenith Trader or otherwise, but that would need a new UI and new general mechanics. That would be fun, but in terms of replicating the experience of the Zenith Trader thus far, here's how it needs to work for this part.<br />
<br />
* The various kinds of command stations now each come with their own hand-designed fleet styles, which are of the type that just use the max cap of each type they can have inside of their categories. That way they are always predictable per type, but you get more forcefields with a military command compared to economic, etc.<br />
** Things like minefields and the gravity generators don't go with any of these, but rather have to be gotten via Battlestations.<br />
** When it comes to factories, some of the command station types grant more factories per planet than others.<br />
<br />
* The Battlestations in general are set up, although most of them just seed randomized template-based fleets. The Ensnarer one has an example instead of a specific type of fleet that it uses in place of a template.<br />
** Bear in mind that there are several different ways to set up how a fleet leader (Battlestation or mobile) might have its fleet design created, and if none of them are set up then you'll have a lonely empty fleet. Right now the game doesn't warn the designers about that.<br />
** In general there is a looooot more that could be done here in terms of making new and unique things, but right now the procedural fleets themselves are enough that probably that's not a big priority.<br />
<br />
* The general strikecraft and frigates are all now set up so that they'll populate some interesting different procedural fleet designs in (currently) 9 different overall flavors. But even within those 9 flavors, there's a huge amount of variety likely to be found.<br />
<br />
* The game now actually seeds the Battlestations and fleet flagships, and makes sure that they have their fleet designs populated right from mapgen start.<br />
** First it tries to seed 1 item with tag "MobileCombatFleetArkOrGolem" on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed 1 more two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least eight more, but up to 1 per 25 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** It's possible that it won't have enough types or will run into blockages, and that's A-OK to happen.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 Battlestation (based on the SpecialEntityType directly) on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least five more, but up to 1 per 50 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** In both cases, if it couldn't seed a thing closer in, then it will retry with it further out. This is mostly only relevant for snake maps and other things with very few direct and secondary connections from planets.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 item with tag "MobileSupportFleetFlagship" on a planet two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least two more, but up to 1 per 150 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** The reason it uses the SpecialEntityType directly for Battlestations is because that's the most direct thing. For the other two categories, those both have a MobileFleetFlagship type, and so those tags help specify a bit more if they are regular (and thus more common), or are "support" (and thus less common and further out).<br />
<br />
* The Battlestation special entity type has been split into two: BattlestationBasic and BattlestationCitadel.<br />
<br />
* The MobileFleetFlagships special entity type has been split into three: MobileCombatFleetFlagship, MobileSupportFleetFlagship, and MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship.<br />
** The third in this category is for the things that don't have a fleet with them, namely right now the spire frigates.<br />
<br />
* The seeding for battlestations and mobile fleet flagships has been updated, as you might guess.<br />
** The existing logic for mobile fleet flagships now applies to MobileCombatFleetFlagships, and MobileSupportFleetFlagships still also work the same.<br />
** The existing logic for battlestations now applies to BattlestationBasic.<br />
** MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship is now seeded "kinda wherever" and is both rarer but also no longer counts against the normal combat fleet flagships.<br />
** BattlestationCitadel is following the general pattern of the basic battlestations, but with the following differences:<br />
*** It only ever seeds one on a planet, not two at a time.<br />
*** It seeds one within 2 hops of a player starting planet if possible.<br />
*** It then seeds a smaller number of citadels out in the galaxy, mixed between the middle-distance and far out. These are in addition to the basic battlestations, not in place of them.<br />
** With all this, there's a better sense of control of what exactly the player can look forward to out there, but also in general there are yet more capturables out there, and they can continue to be balanced in their niches: we can add more lone wolf stuff without swamping the main mobile flagships, and we can add more citadels or regular battlestations without affecting their relative mixes.<br />
<br />
* The various MobileSupportFleet flagships now are able to get upgraded from Mark1 to higher marks based on their fleets being upgraded. They have no techs that benefit them directly.<br />
** This fixes an issue with them referencing an Engineer tech that was nonexistent.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each faction as their "loose" fleet.<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just used for all their ships, more or less, and doesn't really get used for much. Drones don't go in there, but that's it. Actual useful fleets can be created as-desired in the future, but for anything not using something specific, it uses this.<br />
** For the players, there is a PlayerLoose fleet, which is basically "remainder units" that are not in a fleet. Odds are that this won't be used, but it's an overflow valve in case we have a truly odd case or potentially even a bug that we want to fail more gracefully.<br />
*** Oh! Actually, we are using this now for ships that are being captured via zombification. So there you go, a use for it already.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each PlanetFaction as their "fleet of that planet."<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just a reference to their parent loose fleet from the faction itself.<br />
** For the players, these are unique fleets that are what the command stations go into and put their stuff into.<br />
*** It's entirely possible for a command station of a player to die, but in those cases the fleet must live on.<br />
<br />
* When the game creates a new ship/structure, it now REQUIRES that the appropriate Fleet.Membership be passed into it.<br />
** This solves all sorts of bugs where fleet membership was never being set previously.<br />
** In the case of fleet leaders or ships that create drones, it ignores this membership, however, and creates and populates its own fleet.<br />
<br />
* Added a whole bunch of ways to calculate the strength and health percentages of fleets based on their type, which is more complicated than you might think.<br />
** For command station fleets, or the battlestation ones, it's based around the total power out of what you've DECIDED to build (and what has died to remains or is hurt or whatever).<br />
** For drones and mobile fleets, it's out of the total things that would be auto-built, since you get no decision-making in whether to fully stock those fleets or not (aside from keeping them away from docks).<br />
** This is surprisingly complex when it comes to things like the ships being transported in fleets, or undeployed drones, etc, etc.<br />
<br />
* A new destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command xml tag has been added.<br />
** This is used only in a really narrow set of circumstances: it was a planet that a human player controlled with one kind of command station, and they now have a different kind of command station there.<br />
** Basically, different types of command stations give you different numbers of engineers, basic turrets, energy collectors, etc. This prevents you from having too many left over after you switch from a military to an economic command station, for instance; there were all sorts of games you could play with that to exploit things.<br />
** What this does NOT do is destroy units after your command station has died on a planet; in those circumstances, whatever is there continues to live on until you build a new command station. Presuming you rebuild as the same type, nothing gets destroyed.<br />
** This flag is also explicitly NOT on certain units like the human home forcefields and the various things you get from the Zenith Trader. They will frequently be over-cap (since their command station type doesn't always include it but you might have bought it separately), and so these are always assumed to be valid.<br />
** Confusing? Basically this just shuts down an exploit and doesn't affect much else.<br />
<br />
==== Docks Sidebar Tab Gone, Fleets Tab Added ====<br />
<br />
* The docks tab is gone, and a new fleets tab has taken its place.<br />
** The fleets tab has a bunch of sections which show first your fleets at the current planet, and then all of your fleets in the entire galaxy, by category, after that.<br />
** The categories, in order, are:<br />
*** Current Planet<br />
**** A quick view of all your fleets at the current planet.<br />
*** Mobile Combat<br />
**** The most versatile of your fighting forces: generally intended for offense, but quite able to come and defend your own planets as need be.<br />
*** Mobile Support<br />
**** Unusual supporting fleets that are able to either act as a force multiplier for your offensive or defensive fleets, provide remote supply on deep strikes, or perform surprising other secondary duties.<br />
*** Lone<br />
**** Unusual single 'lone wolf' massive ships that forego having attending ships in exchange for a simply awe-inspiring amount of direct power. Use them offensively or defensively, as you see fit.<br />
*** Battlestations<br />
**** General battlestations that are useful for either defending your planets or for setting up offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Citadels<br />
**** Citadels that are much stronger versions of your general battlestations, packing a huge punch in their own right as well as providing access to defenses for your planets or for offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Planet Cmd Stations<br />
**** Each command station you have on a planet has a small force of mostly basic, utility, or economic nature. However, if you've made purchases from the Zenith Trader or found other unique capturables throughout the galaxy, you might have some fixed-position weapons of surprising power here, too.<br />
** For the time being, the tooltips over the actual fleets just shows the tooltip for their centerpiece. This won't always be the case; they'll later have their own unique tooltips that are more informative.<br />
** For the time being as well, clicking these does nothing but show you a message saying that the fleet management interface is coming soon.<br />
** The individual fleet entries show the name of the fleets, their health percentage, their total ships out of their EFFECTIVE ship cap (for the stationary things, that's out of what you've deployed), their planet name, and their total effective strength if they were fully powered at the level that is chosen for them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new specific tooltip for the fleets in the fleet sidebar.<br />
** This gives a lot of the same info you could already see on the centerpiece's tooltip, but in a slightly more focused and condensed format.<br />
** You can also now right-click to center your view on the centerpiece and select the entire fleet. The tooltip now tells you this. You can also hold shift to select multiple fleets quickly by doing this, as you would have with selecting control groups previously.<br />
<br />
* Given that the fleets in the fleet sidebar can be shown twice -- once for their current planet, and once for their other category -- we decided to add some color to the ones for the current planet to set them apart. This helps to keep it clearer visually what is happening.<br />
<br />
==== Hand-Designed Fleet Capabilities ====<br />
<br />
* Normally it's nice to only have... one way to do things when setting up the XML, right? I mean, that's the most clear thing, eh?<br />
** However, in a few cases it is sometimes nice to be able to have parents talk about their children, rather than children always being the ones talking about their parents.<br />
** This is most notable for hand-designed fleet templates, where we don't want auto-modded stuff to be added in a bunch.<br />
** Thankfully, we can do both things, with both coexisting and neither acting in exclusion of the other.<br />
*** Basically, NORMALLY, you should definitely still use the fleet_membership nodes on ships in order to get them into fleets. This is more modder friendly and more flexible in general.<br />
*** THAT said, now you can also define ship_membership nodes in the fleets themselves, which basically are just the inverse of a fleet_membership node. They say all the same things, but say "a specific ship is being added to my fleet," versus the other way around with a ship adding itself to a specific fleet.<br />
*** This is now in use in a new CMP_StartingFleetDesigns.xml file, which uses a new design_logic of InitialPlayerFleet.<br />
**** Basically: we want to have 5-7 starting player fleets that are hand-designed including what their centerpiece is as well as what their ship compositions are. This lets players start off the game with something they are excited about, and move forward with whatever they find procedurally generated after that.<br />
<br />
==== "Control Groups" Are Gone ====<br />
<br />
* Fleets basically handle the same thing. But better. Some of the interface for this won't be until an upcoming build, though.<br />
<br />
==== "Supply" From Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new IsConsideredOutOfSupplyOfParentFleetCenterpiece bool, which is calculated based on ships within a human mobile or defensive fleet not being on the planet of their centerpiece.<br />
** This is done separately because that way it can only be calculated once per second, which is a lot more efficient.<br />
** This then gets used by things that are checking to see if ship systems are disabled -- aka guns, engineers, etc. These ships can still move, but they're neutered on purpose.<br />
** If the centerpiece is itself kind of hobbling along half-dead, it's okay because the ships are still able to draw supply.<br />
** For the stuff that is either considered "loose" or part of a command station's fleet, these things don't have the concept of supply at all, because their fleet leaders can legitimately be destroyed permanently and they need to still function. Or the loose ones don't even have a fleet leader.<br />
** The goal of the fleet leaders thing is to keep the mobile fleets, and the Battlestation stuff, remotely in the same area as one another. You can't start segmenting your fleets and sending them off to fight WAY off, only raiding neighboring planets. This is for balance purposes more than anything else, and is similar in reasoning to the old Supply concept from AIWC. Funny how things like that come back around!<br />
<br />
==== Squads Removed ====<br />
<br />
* Intra-Squad Formations have been removed, as have the concept of squads, the counts of "visual things per subsquad," and so on.<br />
** The whole "squads" idea was mainly to have more ships without having more ships, and that just wasn't working out for a variety of reasons. Now it's just ships instead.<br />
* large_ship_scale_multiplier has been removed, so that all marks of a starship or whatever are now the same size. This lets us define them in ways that are best for being able to see them without them getting too stupidly huge.<br />
<br />
* Various parts of the game referred to "squads" and "ships" as separate things, and there were internal mechanics for repairing lost ships in a squad, etc.<br />
** That's all gone now, but there are some code remnants (to say the least) that still refer to squads. If you run into anything in the front-end (aka actually in the game) that mentions squads, we'd appreciate a heads up so that we can correct that.<br />
** There ARE still visual groups of many of the smaller ships (V-Wings, etc), which is because those are just a single "3d model" made out of several smaller 3d models at this point. We can go back and correct that later, or we can leave it; we're kind of on the fence.<br />
<br />
==== Rallying Ships From Factories to Fleet Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* IF a mobile fleet of yours is on a planet with a factory, or on an adjacent planet, then the factory now produces ships for it as fast as it can.<br />
** In the interest of fairness, a given factory divides up its resources evenly between every possible ship that it can build for every fleet in range, and works on them all at once. So there are no queues, there is no order to set, there's just whether or not you accelerate the factories with engineers or not.<br />
<br />
* The various types of "ships rally to X location after construction" are now gone, with instead all the ships from docks rallying to their fleet centerpiece, whereever that may be.<br />
** This is highly automated and much more the default thing we want to have happen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of bugs with ships rallying to their fleet centerpiece (which is the only type of rally that now exists).<br />
** They should rally to where the centerpiece either is or is heading, and they'll stop rallying once they get very close to where the centerpiece is.<br />
** They stay in rally mode, continually updating their destination, until they reach the target. Initially the target can only be on the planet they are on or an adjacent planet, but it's possible that the target will move even further away while they are chasing it, and they should adjust to follow. That has been tested except when moving more than one planet away while they chase.<br />
** Note that you can't set the rallying directly at all, unlike prior versions of the games. Factories just make whatever is needed in order to bring a local fleet up to full fighting force, and those things automatically rally to their respective fleets. "Local" means on this or an adjacent planet.<br />
** On arrival, the rallying ships should take up the disposition of the ships that are at the other end, but that remains to be seen if that works as the interface for that bit isn't there yet. If you see problems with us, please do let us know.<br />
<br />
==== Procedural Fleet Names ====<br />
<br />
* The fleets for most fleets now have default names that are pulled from folders [FleetNames_Mobile_P1]+[FleetNames_Mobile_P2]. If anyone reading wants to add to these after this build is out, that's certainly welcome.<br />
** This wasn't a high priority item, but Chris needed a small mental break when starting the morning. ;)<br />
** These can be renamed later by players.<br />
<br />
==== AIP Penalties for Fleet Clustering ====<br />
<br />
* If you put too many ships from too many fleets on one planet, basically the AI notices, gets scared and angry, and the AIP starts increasing over time. It warns you about this.<br />
** You're allowed to have WAY more units in this version of the game compared to any prior one, but if you go putting them all one one or two planets the AI is going to kick back... hard. That whole "guerrilla warfare" bit goes out the window if you advertise your presence like that.<br />
<br />
* The fleet concentration AIP penalties will now only kick in at 3 fleets on an AI planet, and 5 on a player planet, rather than 2 and 4 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "too many fleets on a planet" code works has been reworked a fair bit, but not tested:<br />
** It now looks at all the human ships that are part of a mobile (flagship) fleet or a battlestation/citadel fleet. Before it was just looking at the fleet centerpieces, meaning you could have your centerpiece hide on an adjacent planet and send its ships in and the AI wouldn't notice.<br />
** It also now only looks at the ships that are actually on the planet, and not the total strength of the fleet. The strength must be at least 2 in order for it to care at all about it for these purposes. If you send in 10 fleets of strength 1 -- or a slice of them that is strength 1 -- then it won't care.<br />
*** This latter thing will probably encourage all sorts of bad behavior, but we'll figure that out in the future. For now it should feel more natural in general, but it will likely need further iterating.<br />
<br />
=== AI Behaviour Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The AI will now be less worried about distant mobile enemy forces.<br />
* The AI will no longer mistakenly count Guard units as Threat in some code paths<br />
* Make some improvements to hunter/warden fleet routing logic<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the Hunter/Warden save game<br />
<br />
* Each AI faction now has its own Hunter/Warden fleets. The units of each Hunter/Warden will just show as "Hunter Fleet" or "Warden Fleet", but there will now be multiple fleets acting independently. The goal of this is to make those fleets much more flexible in how they deal with enemies.<br />
** Only one Hunter and one Warden are visible in the game lobby. The other hunter/wardens will copy the colours but not the settings of the visible Hunter/Warden.<br />
<br />
* Add a new gameplay mechanic, "AI Civil War". At the beginning of the game, Communication Nodes are seeded near all the AI homeworlds. Destroying all of them will trigger the AI Civil War by making the AIs unable to communicate with eachother. This will make all of the AI factions hostile to eachother; they will send waves at eachother, use Threat on eachother, etc, just like they do against the player.<br />
** This will significantly strengthen all the AIs.<br />
** The Warden and Hunter Fleets will remain friendly with all the AIs. They are unaffected by the Communication breakdown and are quite confused. <br />
** If there is only one AI in the game then the Communication Node will not be in the game.<br />
** "AI Civil War" mode is also available as an option to the Game Lobby, which will start the game with AI's in Civil War mode. This is for testing and sandbox purposes.<br />
<br />
* The targeting code now treats XML-based importances as more important than 'amount of damage I can do'; this makes it less likely for units to ignore Command Stations and other high-value targets in favour of fleetships<br />
<br />
* Change how overkill is calculated; only count units that are actually in range of the target<br />
** This makes ships less likely to dance between multiple targets, unable to pick which one to attack.<br />
<br />
* Don't throw away Distance to Target information when choosing a target<br />
** This also makes ships much less likely to do the "can't decide on a target" dance<br />
<br />
* AIs no longer have any concept of "unlock points," and they don't unlock new ship types over the course of the game.<br />
** This was a neat concept in AI War Classic, kinda-sorta, but in a long campaign it just meant more chaos, honestly.<br />
** The original intent was to make it so that there was a feeling of progression and the AI doing new things with new tools as you go through the game, and that is now handled far better via the ship groups instead, and the planets being more unique, etc.<br />
<br />
* When the budget for a wave is over 3k, the AI no longer randomly gets guardians added in as a thing they can buy for the wave. Instead things are more hand-designed than that.<br />
<br />
=== Map Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Several map types have been improved by Draco.<br />
** Thanks Draco!<br />
<br />
* Make the Simple and Realistic map types more interesting by fixing a dumb bug in them.<br />
<br />
* The Max/Min number of planets in the galaxy is now defined on a per-map type basis rather than a global (since some maps scale up to larger galaxies better than others)<br />
** Some map types go up as high as 500 planets, others are capped at an AIWC-like 120 planets<br />
<br />
* The previous methods for some of the map seeding of AI things are also being... phased out in some ways, and made a lot more centralized and thus flexible.<br />
** This in turn lets us make the various AI planets a lot more unique, and lets modders add to things without replacing them.<br />
<br />
* The warden special forces hideouts were previously always seeding 4, but now it's sometimes more based on the size of the galaxy being larger.<br />
<br />
* The game is now able to seed multiple entities on certain planets if we so desire, during mapgen.<br />
** As the sole use of this so far, we're now seeding two battlestations/citadels on any planets that have those, to make those a lot more attractive as targets and also thus provide more firepower for defensive purposes for players without them having to capture QUITE so many planets for each of these that they get.<br />
<br />
* Did a fair bit of rework on some of the mapgen logic where it is trying to seed things close to the player homeworlds.<br />
** A while back we had some problems where things were frequently seeding too close, so we put in code to counter that. That was in turn preventing us from intentionally putting stuff there more recently.<br />
** Now there's a healthy balance between us being able to do that while still avoiding the old bug, and in general things seem to be working well.<br />
<br />
* There was some other funkiness with it being really unlikely to seed certain things very near to you.<br />
** That has been fixed, to start with, but then beyond that it also now tries to seed half the flagships and battlestations kind of in the middle-distance for you on the map.<br />
** In general this now gives you way more options for middle-game goals for making yourself stronger.<br />
<br />
==== Limited Ship Types For Each AI Planet ====<br />
<br />
* Essentially it's super boring when there are too many types of ships all over the place on every planet for the AI. So now it does this really interesting thing where it chooses a subset/theme for each planet, and some themes are harder than others, rarer than others, etc. Now you can actually see what is there, formulate a strategy of which of your fleets is best to send, and... well, send them.<br />
<br />
* Planets now remember what specific ShipGroup out of a ShipGroupCategory they are using for a given faction. This is where the theming comes in for these planets.<br />
** For the wormhole sentinels, it's actually only seeded at the start of the game, and each wormhole is unique rather than being homogeneous per planet. So those don't get remembered.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that AIs choose their "draw bags" for how to populate a planet's guard posts, strikecraft, turrets, or whatever, has been redone; but also the same is redone for waves and CPAs and the like. It's all using the new AIShipGroups and AIShipGroupCategories.<br />
<br />
* In the tooltips, you can now see how many ships and what strength is contained inside a guard post, as you used to be pre-fleets. HOWEVER, you can also now see exactly how many of each type of ship is inside there, to see what mix the AI is using at that planet without having to go aggro a guard post.<br />
<br />
* Basic definitions for ai ship groups and ai ship categories have been implemented. These are based around the excellent document that Puffin set up on the subject, but with some changes and additions here and there.<br />
** Note that this is ai_ship_groups_i_am_part_of, and it refers exclusively to how the AI uses ships. This isn't meaningful at all to fleet design stuff for players, which is a separate topic.<br />
** This also doesn't affect minor factions, although there's nothing stopping minor factions from adopting this new pattern in the future.<br />
** At the moment this also only describes strikecraft and frigates, and not turrets or other things of that nature. Those are coming soon. Puffin, if you want to set up the other categories and groups based on this starting template, probably ignoring the "singular freaky surprises" stuff, then please feel free as it would save me some time.<br />
** The overall rule with this usage of ships in groups is that anything that is a variant of something else shouldn't be in the same group with it. This is just a design thought, not a technical restriction. Warden and Hunter fleets will wind up having all sorts of strange mixing and matching, but by keeping to this rule we will ensure that planets and waves otherwise don't have that sort of strange mixing.<br />
** You'll also notice that for the ship group categories that are specific to certain AI types, like Turtle or Cloaking-Heavy or whatever, those also include some sub-groups that are unrelated to their type, but which will provide some... well, variety. Aka sometimes instead of being a cloaking-heavy wave, it will by an anti-structures wave. Sneaky! There's nothing worse than a predictable AI type, so having some variety in what they do, even if they are thematically heavy, is good.<br />
** It's also worth noting how the "draw bags" work, in this context. Essentially the number after the things that are included say "how many raffle tickets do I put into the draw bag?" And depending on how many other total raffle tickets have been put in, that's how likely it is to come out.<br />
*** In order to allow for granularity in definitions, our default number of tickets to add is 100. That way we can say "only do this 1% as often as most stuff" by putting in 1 ticket instead of 100.<br />
*** But even there, the odds of it coming out are not 1%, because it depends on what else is put into the bag. And by very definition, what is put into the bag is something that is meant to be unknowable at design time, since it can be modded, and expanded in the future. So we simply use something like "100" to mean "regular frequency, whatever that is," and then the other numbers like "25" to mean "about a quarter as often as usual, whatever that is."<br />
*** It is worth noting that not putting too many types inside a single draw bag is probably good in MOST cases, because it means that players will be facing a planet or a wave that has some sort of coherency to it that they can plan around. I'd say that 3 types is a sweet spot for waves, but sometimes having many more or fewer types is okay. Variety being the spice of life, it's okay that many of the things drift off the "normal" design parameters.<br />
*** Overall we'll find some situations where people go "wow there's way too many xyz unit in this circumstance," and we'll deal with that as need be. But most of these groups are intended for things that are not strictly numbers-bound (aka more than a handful of forcefields on a planet is terrible, so using them in these groups would be a Very Bad Idea since it would lead to occasional bouts of player dismay).<br />
**** Most of the time, we are likely to wind up with something like "holy cow that one planet is a nest of sniper like I've never seen in my life," and we just kind of sit back and go "yep! That will happen, in extremely rare cases. Either deal with it or go around, but that's the fun of this." The prior system was leading to a feeling of samey-ness on all the various planets, and so this is meant to break things up more into various thematic niches, some of which are more rare than others due to being either annoying or scary or hard or whatever. But we still want those rare outliers to happen, because those are either the places where good stories happen during AARs, or where the player's eyebrows can shoot up as they go "I'm glad I don't have to go THERE." Or sometimes it's just going to be the Wave From Hell that surprises players before going away again.<br />
** This whole thing is going to take a lot more defining and redefining over time, but it's really well set up for having lots of ship variants and strange outliers. In a lot of ways, this is intentionally pushing planets and waves a bit more in the direction of a RogueLite, where you never quite know what you're going to find. Chris was really missing some of the sense of exploration, and this is his way of trying to capture that again.<br />
*** And note that this is completely parallel to the player fleet waves and such, so the nice thing is that the AI, other factions, and players can all be thought of using completely separate structures and in completely different terms. As it should be.<br />
<br />
* Each planet belonging to an AI now seeds a single entity from SingularFreakySurprisesAIShipGroup on each of their planets at the start.<br />
** Note that this includes a fair bit of blank space, and that if it chooses blank space that is considered A-OK. So it won't really be every planet, and the frequency is actually determined in the xml rather than the code.<br />
** This lets things like the Golemite be set up a lot more directly, and without using tags.<br />
** The ONE downside of this is that the frequency can no longer be based around things like what the AI difficulty level is. But frankly, that's something that makes the AIs feel less unique and not just easier; if the game is meant to be easier, the player should still be facing the unique foes of that AI nonetheless.<br />
*** As part of this, the explicit seeding code for the Golemite to seed its golems has been removed, and it now uses the new central xml-based function.<br />
*** Note that, if we want to, there's nothing stopping us from using both the old method and the new one at the same time. The new one is mainly a convenience that makes for some powerful new xml-only modding capabilities that don't need to touch C# to add cool stuff to an AI.<br />
<br />
* Guardians now have their own AI ship groups, like Strikecraft, and are similar to them. Did the same for Royal, and it uses those for the wave and reinforcement ones as well, so interestingly it can vary what Guardians it has, or roll the same thing in Reinforcements and Guardians separately and really focus on one thing, or even have almost every kind, with an emphasis on this set, etc.<br />
** Just didn't like how planets were always a mess of Guardians. Sometimes they still will be, but that's a rare "Oh dear" thing.<br />
<br />
===== How The AI Guards Wormholes Is Way Cooler =====<br />
<br />
* The Stealth Wormhole Sentinels have been set up as something that only show up rarely, now that scouting is going to be working differently. This is useful for making planets feel a lot more varied, and not all planets so hard to sneak your stealth ships into.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Basic Minefield Wormhole Sentinels, possibly against our better judgement, to let a tiny minority of wormholes actually have mines around them that players can stumble into.<br />
** Since these should only really show up once, with the AI not rebuilding them, this should be an interesting thing for the player to run into well under 1% of the time. Thanks to Puffin for suggesting this; this should provide for some interesting traps without being too frustratingly common.<br />
<br />
* Actually jacked up the default NobodyHereWormholeSentinels draw bag count to 1000, and the StealthWormholeSentinels to 50, so that the 1 of BasicMinefieldWormholeSentinels is EVEN MORE RARE. Hopefully players run into one or zero minefields during a given campaign, thus making it more exciting.<br />
** Of course, if someone wants to make a minefield-heavy AI type, that is straightforward to do, now.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, there are now 5 different kinds of wormhole sentinel setups that are based around using tractor arrays and turrets, tesla turrets, gravity weapons and pike turrets, and whatever else.<br />
** These are also in the minority in terms of how frequently they will seed, but are way more common than the minefields and should make it so that some of the wormholes are a lot more interesting to face, now.<br />
** This gets back a bit more back to the original design of the original game, which is only possible now because of how some of the scouting changes will interact with the game here. We had had to move away from this because of tedium of automated scouting in other circumstnaces.<br />
** There are still quite a few wormholes that won't be directly defended at all, and it's possible for us to set up way more wormhole defensive types as desired in the future; these are mostly a proof of concept.<br />
** Note that with the sentinels at wormholes, the idea is that these will exist from the start of the game and never get upgraded or reinforced, unlike what happens at guard posts.<br />
<br />
==== Revamped AI Types Based On New Seeding Styles ====<br />
<br />
* Set up new "singular freaky surprises" that includes how golems are seeded for the Golemite now, and actually gives a very rare chance that some regular planets will sometimes have an AI golem.<br />
<br />
* The Vanilla AI type has been renamed to "Full Ensemble," referening the fact how it is basically the most well-rounded AI type that presently exists. It has the most varied surprises up its sleeves.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Simple Ensemble AI variant: Like the full ensemble in most respects, but minus some of the more esoteric ship variants. There's plenty going on here, but not quite so much craziness to discover as you explore.<br />
<br />
* The Starfleet Commander AI type has been removed, as now all the AIs kind of do what it was doing before. It no longer stands out as unique.<br />
<br />
* The Everything AI type has been removed, as it was kind of redundant now, and wouldn't have made for coherent gameplay anyhow.<br />
<br />
* Added in a completely untested new Thief AI type that was kinda-sorta defined previously but seemed to be missing, nonetheless.<br />
<br />
* Also added a completely untested new Zombifier AI type that uses a bunch of zombifying ships and other nasty things. It was kinda-sorta previously defined but again still seemed to be missing.<br />
<br />
* In general there were very few AI types removed, and instead they are all just a whole heck of a lot more vibrant, and we actually added a few.<br />
<br />
=== Hacking changes ===<br />
<br />
* Science Extraction hacking will now show the total cost for the remaining science on the planet in the tooltip<br />
** Requested by Ecthelon on Steam<br />
* Hacking has been feeling a bit too easy these days, so include AIP when calculating how strong the hacking response should be for hacks against the AI.<br />
** The formula is now NewHackingResponse = oldHacking Response + (oldHackingResponse * AIPMultiplier * CurrentAIP)<br />
<br />
* Add the Sabotage hack<br />
** This will kill a random NormalPlanetNastyPick structure on a planet. Many people have asked for this. <br />
<br />
* Allow hacks to be done against planets, not just structures<br />
* Allow hacks to be done without a local hacker on the planet<br />
* Allow the AI to launch an attack against the player after hacking is completed<br />
** These can be set on any hack with an XML tag. So all the previous hacking mechanics can continue to function as usual, but new options are now available.<br />
<br />
* Mercenary Beacons can be done without a local hacker on the planet. They are also nearly instant to complete.<br />
<br />
* Hacking the dyson sphere in order to download a ship design SHOULD now actually work, although it works differently from before.<br />
** Rather than unlocking a new ship line in general (type Dyson Defender), it now adds a permanent cap of 2 more dyson defenders to whatever the hacking fleet is that just did the hack. So it's a way to buff up the particular fleet doing the hack with some sweet new dyson tech that you get to keep forever.<br />
** In general this can now serve as a model for other types of the same thing that we can do, although there's a question mark of course as to whether this actually works since we've not tested it. But it's neat and should be useful in general for the future.<br />
<br />
* The hacking for the dark spire wraiths now works like the dyson hacking.<br />
<br />
=== Bug Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the entity hovering ui where it was incorrectly identifying energy overdrive as an attack penalty<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Zenith Trader (Traitor!) was allowing the AI to buy way too many goodies<br />
** Thanks to lots of people for reporting this, including Jannik2099 and Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when handling GameCommands<br />
** Thanks to jannik for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where v-wings were having damage multipliers based on buildings lack of engines<br />
** Thanks to weaponmaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Correctly flag the "Download Dyson Sphere Ship" hack as unavailable after that hack has been completed<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where vengeance generators were warping in already vulnerable to damage<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and zeusalmighty for the reports<br />
<br />
* Add an Objective for hacking the Spire Archive<br />
** Thanks to settemio for the reminder<br />
<br />
* Only seed one spire archive per AI<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the report<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive isn't invulnerable to all damage, meaning it properly dies after being hacked.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Spire Archives now show on the galaxy map.<br />
<br />
* The Superterminal now explodes after the hack finishes, instead of using a kludgy and bug prone mechanism to prevent it from being hacked multiple times<br />
** Thanks to Lifestrider and zeusalmighty for bug reports<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the settings menu for multiple AI types<br />
** Thanks to coldrage101 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug where the HRF Raiders were never spawning because of a typo in their tag.<br />
<br />
* Fixed that issue with the fullscreen resolution not being settable in recent internal builds.<br />
** Note that there is still some issue that may make you need to alt-f4 the program after changing between fullscreen resolutions or fullscreen to not-fullscreen, but it then shows up properly after that. I expect an upgrade to the unity engine, due in the next month or so, will probably fix that one part. And that one part probably isn't new. But the new part that was broken is now fixed.<br />
<br />
* The game now properly unpauses itself after you close the escape menu, if it paused itself going into there.<br />
<br />
* Units that are stacked, or units that are in transports, now cost energy the same as they do when they are outside of their hosts.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Renaming And Visual Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Cleaned up all entity names, from in the past when they changed function (i.e LaserTurret to NucleophilicTurret).<br />
* Also cleaned up and standardised all the entity system names, and cleaned out a few that were redundant.<br />
** This should make it a bit cleaner to work with in future, as there's no weird cases of there being a WidowGuardian, which is really the Paralysis Guardian, but it shows up as the Widow in all the internal files!<br />
<br />
* The Widow Mine is now the Paralysis Mine, and the Grenade Launcher fleetship is now Grenade Launcher Corvette - seeing as it has the Corvette icon and all.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Frigates are now Sentinel Gunboats.<br />
** Anything in future, like Lightning Torpedo Frigate will use the term Gunboat instead.<br />
<br />
* Fleetships are now called Strikecraft, and Starships are now called Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Space Docks are now simply called Factories, Mobile Space Dock is Mobile Factory, and the Starship Constructor doesn't exist at all now.<br />
** Both Strikecraft and Frigates come out of the same building.<br />
<br />
* Not a rename, but a recolour. Human Resistance Fighters and Marauders have a primary green that shows up better in game, and matches what it is in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Advanced Factory is now the Intra-Galactic Coordinator.<br />
** It's just a thing that increases your ship caps, essentially.<br />
** The ship_cap_multiplier actually works now in the new system. It won't increase the caps for anything with a cap of 1, though, just FYI. It also can't be used to reduce the cap.<br />
<br />
* Mentions of Shields such as the Shield Frigate, Shield Generator etc are all Forcefield now.<br />
** Apparently we were using both in kind of random places?<br />
<br />
* As Squads are removed, all the Strikecraft models are much bigger, with a single one taking up the same space the full squad used to!<br />
** In addition, things like Frigates, Command Stations, Turrets, etc are all bigger. Almost everything, really.<br />
<br />
* All icons in the game are displayed a bit higher above their entity. This gets them out of the way a bit, hopefully not too far that it's difficult to know what they're for.<br />
** With this and the above change, you can actually see the models a bit!<br />
<br />
=== Ship Variants ===<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Harasser" variant of the MLRS Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Porcupine" variant of the Pike Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ablative Troll" variant of the Ablative Gatling.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Dagger" variant of the Raider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Gunbot" variant of the Autocannon Minipod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Velociraptor" variant of the Raptor.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Stalker" variant of the Eyebot.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Tripper" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Railpod" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Pulsar Punk" variant of the Pulsar Tank.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Aggressor" variant of the Agravic Pod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Mirage" variant of the Space Plane.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Hydra" variant of the Vanguard.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Zapper" variant of the Inhibiting Tesla Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Terrier" variant of the Spider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Molotov" variant of the Grenade Launcher Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ranger" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Medic Gunboat" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Absorber" variant of the Vampire Claw.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Thief" variant of the Etherjet.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Paralyser" variant of the Stingray.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Cluster" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Nanoswarm" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Persuader" variant of the Parasite.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ripper" variant of the Warbird Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Brawler" variant of the Assault Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Devastator" variant of the Siege Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Siphoner" variant of the Shield Frigate.<br />
<br />
* The Hydra is now the Vanguard Hydra, and there's a new Stringray Hydra type to keep it company.<br />
** The Stingray version is markedly more strong in the sense that it subdivides but doesn't have worse stats. It's a quick bit of variance for planets or waves that are replicant-heavy.<br />
<br />
* Also added a Parasite Hydra to round it out even more, although made them thankfully lexss frequent.<br />
<br />
* Added Ghost Grenade Launcher Corvette and Ghost Concussion Corvettes, to round out the ghost strikecraft category a bit.<br />
<br />
* A new Station-Keeping Assault Frigate has been added to the loadout of military and home command stations (2x each), and logistical command stations (1x each).<br />
** As with the pike turrets that all the command stations now have, this gives you some more defensive options without having a fleet or a battlestation around.<br />
** Unlike the turrets, these don't require any placement planning, since they are mobile and able to roam around and hit enemies. Seemed like this would get around a variety of frustrating situations that even having turrets would not solve.<br />
<br />
==== New Variants For Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Cloaked Ark One variant, and this one is ONLY available via a new "Cloaked Fleet" (CloakedStartingFleet) that players can get in the lobby at the start of the game.<br />
** This offensive fleet is one of the first that players can choose from, and it's powerful and invisible and likely to make them feel quite powerful.<br />
** Led by the Cloaked Ark One, this has Raptors, Agravic Pods, Gunbots, and then Warbird Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Mugger variant of the Assault Frigate that gets parasitism (this needs to be tested).<br />
** This is ONLY available via the new "Parasitic Fleet" that players can choose at the start of the game.<br />
** The parasitic fleet in general is weak and small by comparison to others when it comes to direct firepower... but of course they create a bunch of zombies to work for them. Uh, and yeah there's a Botnet Golem at the center. So weaker might not be accurate after all.<br />
** Led by the Botnet Golem, these have 60 Parasites and 2 Muggers. This is by far the smallest ship cap fleet you can start with... until you start creating zombies.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Classic Fleet that players can start with.<br />
** This classic mix isn't good at any one particular thing, but is well-rounded against any foe. The forcefields just make things even better.<br />
** It's V-Wings, Fusion Bombers, Concussion Corvettes, and then a Forcefield Frigate, with the centerpiece being an Armored Golem.<br />
** This is a nod both to the first game as well as the classic starting loadout of ships in this game itself, which is now absent.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Raid Fleet for the starting player options, which also has a new "Agile Cursed Golem Ark" that is the Cursed Golem but with way faster engines.<br />
** The whole purpose of this fleet is being able to rapidly move around faster than any other purely offensive fleet in the game.<br />
** It also includes a new "Turbo Stingray" ship that is a faster version of regular Stringrays, and then Velociraptors and Daggers, which are normally already super fast.<br />
** All of these things share the same base (very high) speed except for the last and obligatory part of the fleet, Raid Frigates. These are able to move EVEN FASTER, and so can go off on their own away from the main body if you so desire.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Doorkicker Fleet" as another starting fleet option.<br />
** Mostly focused on crowd control, but with siege frigates along to punch giant holes in large targets when required.<br />
** Basically this is the taking the idea of the Attritioner archetype, but giving one bit of counterbalance to it. Led by a black widow golem, this has MLRS Corvettes, Grenade Launcher Corvettes, Inhibiting Tesla Corvettes, and then Siege Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== New Battlestation Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Revealer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tachyon Array.<br />
<br />
* Gravitic Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Gravity Generator.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has greatly improved shields that extend out around itself.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has very powerful engineering capabilities.<br />
<br />
* Ensnarer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tractor Array.<br />
<br />
==== New Citadel Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Metabolic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing many weak shots that turn targets into resources on death.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of high power Agravic Bombs.<br />
<br />
* Inhibitor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of shots that reduce enemy weapon output.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires multiple paralysis shots.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing small bursts of bolts that zombify victims.<br />
<br />
* Interceptor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, packing multiple railcannons that shred fast moving targets.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Tesla-class structures (Guardians, turrets, etc) now reduce incoming damage from far away by 99% instead of 100%. This allows the targeting code to identify Tesla units as potential targets (instead of ignoring them as if they were Invulnerable). Units in FRD (and minor factions) should now be able to actually attack Tesla turrets.<br />
** Many people have complained about this, including TechSY730 and Democracy.<br />
<br />
* Ark Energy Overdrive is removed for now. Find another place for it (likely in a changed form).<br />
<br />
* Sniper damage bonus requirement reduced from speed 1200 to 1000.<br />
<br />
* Sniper: Starting bonus multiplier 5x -> 8x.<br />
<br />
* Space Plane gets the damage resistance to anything beyond range 4600 instead of 5600 now.<br />
** Basically you have to be closer to it to do full damage. Also means that when using Pursuit, they try to stay beyond that.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units have half the shots per salvo, but reload in half the time.<br />
** Helps them retarget more often.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units get their damage bonus at 30% enemy hull remaining, instead of only 20%.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette, Grenade Launcher Corvette: Mass 0.21x -> 0.3x.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard: EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Raptors, Autocannon Minipods, Space Planes, Agravic Pods, Vampire Claw, Raid Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Eyebot, Stealth Guardian: Albedeo increased to 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette, Sentinel Gunboats, Snipers, Siege Frigate, Tritium Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Tritium Guardian, Concussion Guardian, Plasma Guardian: Armour reduced to 40.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette: Shields 2,800 -> 1,800, EngineGx 8 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Claw: Armour 40 -> 70, Life Leech reduced from 1.5x to 1x.<br />
<br />
* Raptor: EngineGx 7 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Raptor Hull: 2900 -> 1900.<br />
<br />
* Stingray, Etherjet, Metabolizing Gangsaw: EngineGx 7 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette only applies reload penalty to armour below 60.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate: Damage 2500 -> 25,000, spreads it among targets instead of hitting 10 for full damage, range 10,100 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard, Pulsar Tank (main gun only): Range changed to 4200.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard: Speed reduced to 400.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette: Hull 1,000 -> 1,400, shields 1,000 -> 1,600, EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Armour increased to 110.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Shields 2,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
* Etherjet: Damage 30 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Turrets have a similar damage bonus to Ablative Gatlings now.<br />
** Makes them a bit more interesting, and also some room for other changes.<br />
<br />
* V-Wing: Hull/Shields changed from 500/3500 to 2000/2000.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette: Armour 50 -> 70, range 8,000 -> 6,000, shields 200 -> 800, speed 700 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot: Hull/Shields 1,000/1,000 -> 800/800, armour 50 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod: Armour 50 -> 70.<br />
<br />
* Dark Spire get a bit less energy if they're the ones that killed something.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian: Armour 90 -> 50, albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian: Hull/Shields changed from 20,000/20,000 to 10,000/30,000, EngineGx 12 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian, Paralysis Guardian: Speed 1,400 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian: Range 15,000 -> 8,000, Armour 90 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Guardian: EngineGx 13 -> 7, Armour 90 -> 110, range 8,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian: Albedo 0.4 -> 0.3, EngineGx 14 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guardian: Armour 50 -> 70, EngineGx 14 -> 7, range 8,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Guardians now have Cloaking, but attack half as fast.<br />
** Stealth Guardian now has a friend that it shares a group with.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Plasma Turret.<br />
** Closer to Heavy Beams than the rest.<br />
<br />
* All Turrets except Beam and Plasma have 10% lower health, but 15% greater damage in exchange.<br />
** Turrets felt like they slap the enemy to death slowly while outlasting everything. This is minor, but speeds it up a tad.<br />
<br />
* Slow the increase in cost for Science hacking multiple planets<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Minefields are now all one use. Damage increased for normal and Area mines to compensate, Paralysis mines have a longer effect as well.<br />
** This fixes numerous problems with them, including somehow surviving and the AI being confused, being repaired mid-combat, overkill or Military Command Station boosts having weird effects, etc.<br />
** Also lets us put damage bonuses on more cleanly without worsening any of those previous problems.<br />
<br />
* Marauders have a per-outpost cap on the Raiders they can produce. Unfortunately, stacking causes raiders to lose information about their spawning outpost. As a backup, also introduce a global cap on the number of raiders that the marauders can have.<br />
** This should dramatically tamp down the power of high intensity Marauders late game, especially in sandbox games.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Hunter/Killer.<br />
<br />
* AI Co-Processors reduce AIP by 20 more when all destroyed.<br />
<br />
* Player Golems are much weaker now, but can be upgraded alongside Arks. AI Golems have minor upgrades.<br />
** With enough upgrades, the player ones will match then surpass their previous forms.<br />
** Initial testing of Golems as Flagships was...amusing.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos starts with the zombifying weapon already usable.<br />
<br />
* Arks are a bit faster, have a bit less health and a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate can be upgraded as well, has some weapon and health changes and has three versions of itself now.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Guard Posts and Forcefield Generators are now actually in use again, as rather rare finds.<br />
** Connected to this, AI Turrets are in a tighter spread around whatever they defend, so they actually sit in the forcefield instead of uselessly outside.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord Phase 2 should actually come after you on that planet now.<br />
<br />
* Mercenaries spawn at Mark 1 now, and level up with the players tech level.<br />
** They're also a bit weaker to compensate for that.<br />
<br />
* Carrier Frigates are, unfortunately, gone. For the player, Drone producers must be a Fleet Leader, instead of a random Frigate or whatever in it, to avoid having nested fleets.<br />
** Potentially it can return in a fashion as a Fleet Leader in future.<br />
<br />
==== Crippled Status ====<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Mobile Fleet Flagships are now automatically something that cannot ever die, per se -- instead they become "crippled" when their health is less than 10% of its maximum value.<br />
** This solves a whole heck of a lot of problems that we otherwise have, such as where ships should rally to, and it also avoids the "corpse run" problem. <br />
*** If there are lone golems that players are capturing that die to remains, or other similar things that are not fleet leaders in that way, then those can still be a source of corpse runs, so it's not like that mechanic went away. It's simply not being a major focus for these types of ships.<br />
*** For a while, we were having things like Arks (which fall into this new category) automatically warp back away to some sort of safe space, but that's no longer a thing, which is good.<br />
** Their weapons and other systems all go offline when they have less than 10% health now, which is actually a pretty new limiter on them since it gives them only 90% of their health in which to work, although there's no longer the risk of them dying if you're not paying attention. But for balance purposes it's worth noting that we may wind up needing to beef these out slightly.<br />
** Enemy ships will consider them an uninteresting target if they are already crippled. It's possible that actually shots won't do any more damage when hitting them and they are crippled, which if so is a bug I need to fix later. But them not bothering to target the enemy seemed to be the most important thing for now. If you have a savegame with shots not damaging these ships, then please let us know.<br />
** It's also possible that there will be some edge cases where these things actually DO die rather than being crippled, in which cases repro saves will be very welcome.<br />
** Mobile fleets with a crippled centerpiece now have an effective remaining cap of 0 for all the ships that factories might be sending to them.<br />
*** This makes it so that factories won't supply new things for them anymore until there is an un-crippling of the centerpiece. Otherwise there's no reason to bring said centerpiece home for repairs, it's just this strange invincible vessel to which lots of ships rally.<br />
*** The metal spent on partial construction of ships is not refunded, but rather is stored at the fleet and as soon as the centerpiece is un-crippled things will come back online and resume wherever they were.<br />
** Note that if any ships are set to reverts_to_neutral_on_death="true" in xml while being of one of these two types, that really won't matter because they should never die. So those should probably be removed.<br />
<br />
==== Costs of Repair vs Construction ====<br />
<br />
* We recently (in this giant build group) redid how the repair costs were working for ships, and it's unclear how that changed things cost-wise compared to what the costs used to be (the costs as they used to be were super unclear).<br />
** What IS clear is that we changed it to just be the equivalent to rebuilding the unit, aka repairing it 50% is the same as building half a new unit. This was by design and we didn't think much about it, but it is definitely something that was eating through metal prodigiously.<br />
** What's also clear is that we were charging this FULL amount for repairing shields, health, and engine health -- ouch. So really if you were at half engine health, half shield health, and half hull health, you'd spend 150% of what it would cost to just build a new unit. Not good! We'd much rather encourage repair in general.<br />
** We now have a variety of dials in the xml external constants to affect the percentage of the full metal cost that it will cost for various repair types:<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_hull_points: 50% cost for repairing hulls.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_personal_shields: 20% cost for repairing personal shields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_bubble_forcefields: 75% cost for repairing bubble forcefields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_engines: 10% cost for repairing engine damage.<br />
** This should make things quite a bit less constrained on the player income-wise (it was feeling pretty tight at certain points in the early game because of your much larger forces), and also encourages reuse rather than just refleeting.<br />
<br />
==== Costs For AIs Purchasing Things ====<br />
<br />
<br />
* There is a new field, cost_for_ai_to_purchase, which is an integer that replaces the old_strength values.<br />
** This is now what AIs use to purchase units, and it is separate from how strong the unit is seen as.<br />
** This is problably way out of balance for now, but it at least is something we can tune directly from now on.<br />
** "Strength" in the game is now properly only used for evaluating, well, how strong something is. Aka how the AI acts, or as information for the player.<br />
** This is NOT something that goes up by mark level anymore, unlike before, and that's by design as well. The AI should be able to afford equal numbers of ship type X on a mark 1 or a mark 4 planet. That's how things were in AIWC, but it was oddly not at all like that here.<br />
<br />
* There are a bunch of other related changes to making the game use the CostForAIToPurchase field instead of the Strength field -- and remember that this is on the TypeData rather than the ForMark data, and that this is by design.<br />
** This is probably buggy as eff. There's a ton of code in this area, written by a bunch of people over a long period of time. So AIs will probably wind up making some pretty strange purchases for a little while, until we find and fix whatever bugs there are, aside from the inherent data issues.<br />
** Nonetheless, now was the time to go ahead and make this change, because it was a fundamental deterrent to us being able to balance what the AI builds separately from how strong the AIs and players view a unit as being. And that was one primary driver behind all things being a very similar cost-to-benefit ratio, at least on paper... and ongoing headache for Puffin, with that. The headaches won't end because of this change alone, but they will shift to a new sort: balancing each of those two things independently of one another ("does the strength stated for that unit seem to match how scary the AI and players should think it is?" and "does that cost an appropriate amount for the AI in most contexts, or is it too cheap or too expensive for them?").<br />
** But in the short term, this will be extra complicated by the fact that the math probably has some bugs in it because probably some things that should be using the new AI budget stuff are still using the strength data. I would be shocked if that's not the case, despite looking at it very carefully until I was cross-eyed.<br />
** And then the other question of "how much should this cost" is now out of date compared to what the strength values were, so even if the math is all perfect we're going to have bonkers data for a bit. That part I do leave to Puffin for the most part, sorry about that. ;)<br />
** As a general design note, both the players and the AIs have been having fewer ships than I would prefer, thus far. For players it was because of the way the ship caps were -- pre-fleets. For the AIs, it was because of the way they were being "charged more" for higher-mark stuff when looking at their own budgets. At the start of the game, a mark 3 planet and a mark 4 planet should have the same relative amount of budget spent, but one gets better stuff from it. Previously, unlike AIWC, the mark 4 planet was getting charged a premium and so felt anemic by comparison to the mark 3 planet.<br />
*** This may in turn wind up with the AI having waaaay too many ships for a while, but if we pack those into the guard posts as contents that are not deployed yet, that should have zero performance impact. And it will be good for the humans who suddenly have a lot more firepower at their disposal. Overall the goal coming up is for everyone to have a whole heck of a lot more shooty things, but having them more spread out so that the mega-battles aren't individually any larger than they are now. It will take us a little while to get that part perfect, so please bear with us.<br />
<br />
* TryToSpendBudget_CPA has had some updates to how it deploys ships from itself, since the way it stores ships is different from the start. This may or may not cause demonic fumes to erupt, so let us know.<br />
<br />
* UnlockShipLineForAI() has been removed, as AIs don't work that way anymore, either.<br />
<br />
=== Achievements ===<br />
<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with each AI type enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with some of the Minor factions enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with various galaxy sizes<br />
* Add Achievements for controlling a given number of planets in a game<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have > X Metal/Energy/Hacking points"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Kill > X units", "Lose > X units" and "Kill > X && Lose > Y units"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have a campaign X hours long"<br />
** Note that the above types of Achievements can be added to the game with only XML changes<br />
** TODO: Add a UI to show the player which Achievements have been earned<br />
<br />
=== Science/Tech Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete rework of how techs function. They are no longer tied to individual ships like before, but rather there are actual technologies that are named and that benefit a variety of ships.<br />
<br />
* Ark Upgrade Points and Destruction Points are both confusing and have been removed from the game as a concept.<br />
** But never fear, something very similar with a clearer name and purpose is being added back: Fleet Experience Points.<br />
<br />
* The initial techs have been added, and applied to ships and turrets and whatnot.<br />
** This is, at best, a first pass for now. However, there are are present 14 distinct techs that you can upgrade that are more ship-abilities-focused, and which are generally shared between strikecraft, frigates, and turrets. This is the general intended design, even if exact matchings aren't correct or ideal right now.<br />
** The costs here are also potentially bonkers for real-world use. Additionally, there is a maximum number of times a given tech can be researched, and that is usually set at 4 right now, kind of arbitrarily. That does NOT mean that the max tech level of a ship is 4, however.<br />
*** Ship tech levels are a combination of all the techs that benefit them (some have more than one), as well as any upgrades to the tech level of their specific fleet. So some are much easier to get to a VERY high mark now, whereas others are almost impossible to do.<br />
** There is now a new UpgradeMeFromFleetOnly tech that isn't shown on the menu, but which we use in cases where we want to denote that this IS something we can upgrade, but only at the fleet level rather than the ship level.<br />
*** This is used for things like command stations, engineers, economic production units, and forcefields. That makes these things a lot more location-dependent in terms of how high quality your ships of those sorts are. This should be pretty interesting, actually, and it takes them out of contention for the main science upgrade costs more.<br />
** Overall the goal here is fewer science upgrades happening, but each one having a much larger impact. We may have gone too far in that direction with this first setup of the data, but at this point it's all an xml-based issue.<br />
** Note that all of these techs are based around upgrading all the ships that you have that subscribe to this tech via tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and that crosses fleets.<br />
*** This should benefit mercenaries, although that hasn't been tested.<br />
*** We did base this loosely around Puffin's classes/roles document, but this is meant to be... slightly both more and less granular than that document, and to be multi-categorized in many cases. So your document is still relevant (mainly for fleet design), but it's just semi-related to this specific use.<br />
** It's also worth noting here that some ships/turrets/whatever have multiple tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and those are going to go up in tech quality FAST by comparison to their peers. Assuming that players unlock techs synergistically. So some of the ones like the Light, Heavy, etc, might need to be a lot more expensive than they are right now.<br />
*** As noted already, the balance here is a bananas basic proof of concept right now, and I'm sure broken in a thousand ways. The only purpose of me throwing this together at the moment was to give a proof of concept unified design philosophy to look at, even if details are really wrong. This gives Puffin and others a chance to actually make it make a lot more sense while I move on to work on other things.<br />
** Note that the EXP concept doesn't come into play at ALL with these sorts of techs. These are purely science costs. The EXP is fleet-based stuff instead, and may not cost any science at all (fleets that auto-upgrade would be nice). But also spending some science on a specific fleet's upgrading would be nice, so that's something that will likely be possible. How that works at the planet level is still TBD, I have two different possible models for that and haven't been able to choose between them yet.<br />
** Also please note that for an individual ship/turret/whatever type, there's no risk of it going above its max mark level, which is either 7 or is explicitly defined as something lower, or is markless. If it subscribes to 2 techs that each have 1 upgrade, it would naturally be mark 3, unless it's capped at mark 2 in which case it will sit at mark 2. And if its fleet is also upgraded 3x, then it would be mark 6, unless it was capped lower.<br />
** A general note: This overall tech system has way fewer decision points than the old one, which is good because that makes them actually something that you can contemplate. However, as a byproduct of that, you'll often get some secondary stuff upgraded that you cared less about, and that actually provides opportunities for you to make new use of them in interesting ways if you so choose. Also also, you're a lot more likely to have really wide mark level disparities between parts of your empire (different planets and fleets), which is more in keeping with the first game albeit from a completely new angle. This is exciting.<br />
** Another general note: the overall ship caps per fleet will only be whatever they are, but the idea is to have larger effective ship caps for players by the late game because of a proliferation of fleets. In some cases in the late game you'll also have some fleets that are incredibly technologically superior to the AI, and other fleets that are incredibly behind the times. How this exactly plays out will be interesting to see from players, but in a theoretical sense there's nothing wrong with that; we may just have to adjust some balance dials over time to keep things from being TOO extra weak or strong, and/or to make the AI really reactive to overly-advanced forces if those exist. Here again this is an opportunity for more gameplay, rather than a real challenge in a negative sense.<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for science has been improved to be more accurate and also more descriptive:<br />
** Spend Science to unlock higher-level units and structures. It is gained primarily by claiming new planets and holding them for a while.<br />
** There is a limited amount that scientists can learn from what they find in each system, so you'll need to keep finding new research targets for them.<br />
** A single ship type can be upgraded by multiple tech upgrades as well as from its parent fleet gaining experience, so be sure to consider your options carefully.<br />
** More techs will appear in the tech sidebar as you capture fleets with ships that can benefit from them.<br />
<br />
* The tech sidebar is once again functional, and allows for you to unlock techs that benefits various ships that you have.<br />
** It looks and works a lot more like the hacking sidebar instead of the build sidebar, now, since the type of data it needs to show is very different. This makes it a lot more text-heavy and showing related costs and the mark levels of ships in a really clear and concise fashion. Yay! It does mean no real icons on here, though.<br />
** The tooltips for techs that you can upgrade are also now completely redone, and it shows you which ships will benefit as well as how many of them you have. It doesn't show you the mark level of the ships, because you might have several different mark levels of each ship type since they may be upgraded by fleet upgrades.<br />
** This was certainly needed in order to make the game all that playable in 0.850, but in terms of why we did it right now versus after the build menu, it's mainly because this was simpler and was therefore a nice dry run for the more complicated menus.<br />
<br />
* Ok! So we've already learned quite a bit about techs and how people will wind up using them. Clearly the new system works well, but is going to need refinement; chief among that is just how many upgrades a given line can grant.<br />
** One of the other things that was immediately most clear was that "Ark" as a technology was really not cutting it. This was way too broadly useful, and "Battlestation" was almost as bad.<br />
** First of all, these need to be more pricey, but some Arks should cost more than others, and some Arks should share techs, but not ALL Arks.<br />
** With that in mind, there's a new schema in place for various Arks and Battlestations broken out as follows:<br />
*** Ark Spirit (most basic stuff), Ark Heart (happy helpful stuff, less dangerous), Ark Armor (beefcakes you need to really pay for), Ark Fist (holy smokes these things are powerful, and thus expensive, and only have 3 marks rather than 4).<br />
*** Battlestation Shelter (protection-oriented), Battlestation Hand (grabbing or slowing enemies), Battlestation Architect (engineering or construction).<br />
** And it's worth noting that Battlestations are really oriented into those as well as the previously-were-fortresses Citadels that are way more combat-oriented, so splitting those also matters:<br />
*** Citadel Executioner (kill a lot of things), Citadel Protector (yeah, hurt them, but protect other stuff as the primary), Citadel Consumer (eat or steal the enemies).<br />
** And then there's the Spire Frigates, which really don't need to be lumped in with Arks or Battlestations or Citadels. I'm sure these will expand in the future, but for now we just have the new "Spire Core" (for all three types of Spire Frigate), and they're super expensive but can be upgraded 4 times.<br />
** The overall lesson here is that we CAN have more techs than we maybe were once thinking, particularly since they only show up conditionally. This also makes the Arks and Golems and so on a lot more unique in terms of how well they are upgraded (or not).<br />
*** This will get more crowded in the tech tab with time, unfortunately, as you unlock a lot of ships. For that reason they are now down at the end of the list below all the actual main ship lines.<br />
*** This may also hint that we want more tech lines in general for the other ships, and/or that they need some changes to their science costs, but we'll cross those bridges when we come to them.<br />
<br />
* The science intel message is now more brief in the sidebar, and more informative in the tooltip. Now everything fits.<br />
<br />
* On factions, there is now a InheritsTechUpgradesFromPlayerFactions serialized bool that should be set to true for any factions that the designer wishes to recieve all of the upgrades for the player techs.<br />
** Aka, if two players each have upgrades to Tech A, then the faction will get the largest of the two, not the combined value of them.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the (very elegant, sadly) "tech view" version of tooltips that showed all the ways a ship would be upgraded by gaining a mark level.<br />
** That was overwhelming as an amount of information, but also there's just no place where we'd actually be asking you to see that anymore. Now you upgrade techs that hit a bunch of ships at once, and so this per-ship-type comparison stuff just has no place in there anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Vision Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete vision rework. Planets are all now either<br />
** Unexplored: You have no vision of what is on this planet. You also cannot send ships to or through Unexplored planets.<br />
** Explored: You can't see exactly what's on the planet, but you can see who owns it and the sidebar works. Chris has a TODO to figure out how to show stale data/interesting visuals when you try to look at an Explored planet.<br />
** Watched: This state means "Explored and you have ships there". You can see what's on the planet, but when you no longer have ships there the planet will go back to Explored.<br />
** Permanently Watched: you always have vision here<br />
<br />
* At the beginning of the game, all Player Homeworlds and adjacent planets are Permanently Watched, and all planets 2 hops from a player homeworld are Explored.<br />
<br />
* Capturing a planet or killing an AI command station automatically Explores all adjacent planets<br />
<br />
* You can also Explore a planet by hacking an unexplored planet, as long as you have an adjacent Explored or Watched planet (otherwise you could just explore random planets around the map which seems less interesting to me)<br />
<br />
* You can Permanently Watch a previously Explored planet by hacking (but the AI will launch a small counterattack at you when you do so).<br />
<br />
* The game now tracks the specific gamesecond that entities were created, and when they entered planets, versus "how long ago."<br />
** There are helper methods for getting the familiar "how long ago" data, however.<br />
<br />
* Now that we know the last gamesecond we had vision of a planet, and the gamesecond that ships entered planets, on planets where we do not have current intel we are instead showing the effective last-known data on the sidebar, as well as actually showing the ships visually (through the distortion), even moving around if they are. <br />
** This won't show any ships that have been more newly added to that planet, though, and the sidebar notes that. So there might be a huge hunter fleet moving through there and you'd have no idea, for instance.<br />
<br />
* For planets that are completely unexplored, you cannot directly send ships there anymore, nor can you select it on the galaxy map or send your view there.<br />
** It IS still possible for your ships to path through completely-unexplored planets, for the time being, however.<br />
<br />
* Trying to make it so that player ships are completely unable to pathfind through unexplored planets is rather more than a bit of a nightmare. With that in mind, they are now simply disabled if they wind up going into unexplored space for whatever reason.<br />
** We can make this more sophisticated in the future, but for now that should handle anything exploity.<br />
** Players can use various tricks on the sidebar to click to the fleet leader heading through unexplored space to see such a planet, but they'll wind up seeing nothing there, so they gain very little. And meanwhile, the ships of the player are unable to shoot but still able to move, and enemies are able to shoot and are completely invisible to them, so that's... quite a bit of "fun."<br />
** Main thing we probably want to do at some point is get player ships to try to prefer not going into unexplored territory if at all possible.<br />
** Edit: nevermind, player ships should not be able to path through them at all. So yay! But if they do, they'll be disabled.<br />
<br />
* The "explored" status for planets has been split into "explored by natural means" and "explored by distant hacking."<br />
** This mostly doesn't matter and isn't something we're making a big deal about in most places. But using spy nanites basically is no longer a way you can expand how much your empire gains in vision every time you capture a planet.<br />
** The "explore next to explored" logic basically ignores stuff that was spy nanites. Maybe there should be a conduct later that makes it not ignore that, since that ALSO would provide some interesting strategic options, but frankly for now that seems like overkill. We shall see.<br />
<br />
* When you don't have vision of a planet, there is now a fancy distortion effect that is part grainy-tv and part slow-matrixy-refraction.<br />
** There's not a way to disable this effect, because it shouldn't be fast enough to make anyone nauseous, and there's no real point in looking at planets that you can't see anything at, anyway. This just makes it clear why you can't see those planets (the sidebar says no vision, but why did all the ships just disappear?)<br />
<br />
==== "Hard Mode" For Scouting ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Scout Adjacent Only" conduct, with the following description:<br />
** TLDR: This is harder and will make you take a lot of planets. For advanced players only.<br />
** Details: Normally when you capture a planet, all planets adjacent to ANY explored planets become explored. Unless the map is very narrow, this causes you to get exponentially more planets you can see as the game goes on. Even further than that, there is a minimum number of planets it will explore for you when you take a planet, depending on the number of planets in your galaxy, so that snake maps and other really narrow maps aren't unplayably hard.<br />
** With 'Scout Adjacent Only' enabled, it tosses all that out the window. Instead it just explores any planets adjacent to the planet you just captured. This will make snake maps almost impossible to play (so that's a bad combo), but on maps with more cross-connections it can lead to... a certain added strategic challenge. This still seems masochistic even in the best case, but have fun with that if you want.<br />
<br />
=== Removed/Revamped Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Science Labs, Hackers and Scouts are removed. Scout functions of the Sentinel Frigate and Sentry Starship are removed.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Starships are now per-planet cap, cannot use wormholes, are built directly (like turrets) and die to remains.<br />
** They're effectively Decloakers from Classic, but far more convenient.<br />
<br />
* Engineers are per-planet cap, cap reduced significantly and can't use Wormholes.<br />
** The new Combat Engineers are able to use Wormholes and are a type of Strikecraft instead.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Space Dock and Mobile Builder are not unlockable or buildable, and are instead capturables.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Builder is now the Basic Battlestation, and is capturable.<br />
** And now there are actually like 5 variants of this, thanks to Puffin.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Factory is now the CombatFactory, and is capturable.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Fortress is now a form of Battlestation called Citadels.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Remains Rebuilder has been removed, and the RebuildingRemains metal_flow has now been granted to all of the player command stations and the player mobile builders. It's no longer something that is assist-line-distance-based, nor is it something that requires a dedicated unit to run around doing things with.<br />
** This is one of those streamlining bits that people have requested for a while, but Chris in particular was noting that engineers and rebuilders need to be two separate functions (and they do). But making this instead essentially work like claimables and "just happen" solves the issue that people were complaining about without getting into territory of making the AI for the engineers likely to be bonkers.<br />
** Later we will need for all of our Battlestation types to have this, most likely, or things will get funky at times. This last is a note for Puffin.<br />
<br />
* Colony ships have been removed from the game, since that was a level of indirection that was not needed.<br />
** Similarly, hackers are gone, as are mobile builders in the classic sense.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers in the codebase are now gone. The concept of warheads, in the codebase, is now gone.<br />
<br />
* Starships are now called Frigates, including in the codebase itself. Docks are now called Factories in the codebase.<br />
<br />
* Golems as a standalone thing (for players) are now gone, as are Arks. They are now combined into being the Mobile Fleet Flagships. They are still called golems and Arks, but they're the centerpieces of your fleets at any rate.<br />
<br />
* Really key new limitation for drones, for the sake of sanity and not having nested fleets. This really only applies to player ships, in the main:<br />
** The drone producer must also be the fleet leader. So if we're talking about a player ship, it needs to be the Battlestation or Flagship of a fleet, and not something like a random Frigate as part of it.<br />
** On the AI and NPC sides, they don't really use fleets the same way normally, so anything that is a drone generator just becomes in charge of a new Drone fleet type.<br />
** This is probably going to be the source of some "fun" bugs. It will start spewing errors like crazy when this happens (once per second per ship that has this issue during gameplay), if it happens. It's possible to set this up with bad xml, basically.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for automatically building remains rebuilders and setting them to auto-FRD are both now gone, since so are remains rebuilders.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for "brave scouts" is also now gone, since scouts are also being removed and rejiggered.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers have been removed. They were not exactly exciting, and they don't make sense in the new method of AIs working with unlocked ships.<br />
<br />
* Schematic Servers (formerly ARSes) have been removed. Those also no longer make sense in the brave new world that is the new setup for fleets, etc.<br />
<br />
* The idea of CorruptedAIDesigns has been removed, as that was something that people weren't really using and it doesn't fit well with the new approach to AIs and fleets.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of stuff relating to Golems the way they used to be, including the entire Broken Golems faction, has been removed.<br />
** Golems are now another form of Ark, basically, and are capturable in that fashion.<br />
<br />
* Metal harvesters are now markless, rather than being upgradeable. This solves an issue with them being funky upgrade levels on enemy planets, and in general the ability to upgrade them is something that I was iffy about in the current system anyway. It was likely to be too powerful.<br />
<br />
* The home forcefield generator, which has existed since the first game as a last-ditch tool that you have until you lose it, is now something that you can rebuild.<br />
** It's also now markless and has its stats more directly set, so that you definitely never get more than one. It was kinda funky having it be mark 2 in this game from the start, and it also led you to having a cap of 2 instead of 1.<br />
** The whole purpose of this is so that you can rebuild it if it dies, since you don't otherwise inherently have access to any forcefield generators on your home planet at all, now. You have to put a battlestation or a citadel there in order to get a forcefield beyond the first, and depending on your playstyle you might choose not to do that.<br />
<br />
=== Capturing Planets ===<br />
<br />
* So long as you have a mobile fleet leader on a planet with no command station (enemy or otherwise), you can now capture it like you would have previously done with a colony ship.<br />
** Aka, just take any of your golems or Arks over to the enemy planet and destroy their command station and you're immediately ready to set up your own. Boom, simpler.<br />
<br />
=== UI Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Player profile stuff relating to choosing a default Ark type is now removed under the hood. It hasn't been on the front-end for quite some time now.<br />
** Note that a lot of the stuff with Arks having a story and a portrait image are thus now gone, although again this isn't new on the front-end. Arks simply have a new role now.<br />
<br />
* You are no longer asked to pick a Chief Adviser at the start of the game for your profile. That was a lot of confusion an un-needed choice on something rather trivial, and got in the way of getting you to the actual game.<br />
** Now it just has a screen for profiles that asks for a name and your default colors and that's it.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, you can no longer select a starting bonus ship type OR a starting Ark for your faction as a player. Neither of those make any sense anymore. Now there's something new:<br />
** The game now lets you choose from special starting fleets, of which at the moment there are 5 handcrafted ones. The player can choose which one they want in the game lobby, just like they could with Arks.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" are now able to, and in fact required to have, a description.<br />
** They also now have tooltips in the lobby, which show these descriptions, thus explaining what the heck they do.<br />
<br />
* The conduct for "start with planets explored" has been removed, as that's really cutting out a core part of the game now.<br />
** The scouting being so much more automated now kind of makes it a bit different from other games where you can turn off fog of war. Despite the first game having the option to turn off fog of war, that really takes out the entire flow of the game when it comes to this game.<br />
** Scouting isn't some hassle thing "that you have to do but might want to skip" anymore, but now is part of the reward structure for capturing planets, and so turning that off just would have... a lot of balance issues, among other things.<br />
<br />
* Added the following description to the Experimental: AI Civil War conduct, which is the only pre-existing conduct currently remaining. This may or may not be fully accurate:<br />
** If there are multiple AI factions, they all hate each other and will fight each other. They still hate YOU, too, but all this chaos and infighting is assumedly to your beneit. Then again, you might just find yourself in the crossfire of AIs who are getting more powerful more rapidly due to aggroing each other... so it's anyones's guess as to how long you'll last.<br />
<br />
* Working on making the tooltips for ships substantially more brief while still conveying the important information. Some of them are getting ridiculous for sure.<br />
<br />
* Added a new type of control for our settings menu, which is an integer slider. This is preferable to the textbox or dropdown for some cases.<br />
** We're now using that for the auto-build engineers, which also defaults to 2 now instead of 0.<br />
** We're also now using that for the various volume controls, which were inexplicably textboxes before.<br />
** We're also now using this for the minimum autosaves to keep, and the autosaves interval.<br />
<br />
* When planets are explored via you having just capturing a planet or whatever, it now shows a message log entry saying what planets were discovered and how many of them there were. This way it's clear that scouting is even happening!<br />
<br />
* display_name_for_sidebar has been added for entities, as it lets us give a more brief name to appear on the sidebar while still having a fuller name in tooltips.<br />
** This is optional and will just use the full name if it needs to. But if the sidebar is having bad wrapping of some text, then this should be filled with something shorter. Case in point is the home forcefield generator.<br />
<br />
* There used to be some logic about automatically opening certain windows when you selected certain kinds of ships (build menu when selecting command station, science menu when selecting science lab, etc), but since so much of that is all centralized or otherwise non-ship-related now, or all related to centerpieces, this just led to the UI kind of oddly seeming to do its own thing at times now. This has been removed.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for factories now show which fleets they are supporting, and what the status is of all the individual line items they are building for that fleet. This is super satisfying to just watch, turns out.<br />
<br />
==== Intel Tab ====<br />
<br />
* Something I talked about on the podcast is an new form of objectives, which is an idea that I've been refining since then (and had already been prior to then).<br />
** However, the "objectives" on the sidebar as they stand right now are not something I want to get rid of at all (most of them), given that they are kind of a "todo list of things you might want to do," and that's a pretty important tool to have.<br />
** With that in mind, the Objectives sidebar has instead been renamed to Intel, and over time we'll probably take out some things like the beginner tips and the primary objectives and so on. For the primary objectives we'll likely just recontextualize the same thing, but the beginner tips we'll probably fold into the new objectives (actual objectives system, separate from this intel system).<br />
** All of the really time-consuming-to-add and detailed "objectives" stuff about where we found things to capture and hack and kill, and where we should be scouting, etc, is all going to stay. It's just under the name "intel" instead, now. Really, that's what it is: information that lets you make decisions yourself, be that diverging from your main objectives or defying them or whatever else.<br />
<br />
==== Build Tab ====<br />
<br />
* The "Direct Build" sidebar has been completely reworked from scratch.<br />
** It's no longer based on icons and tiny buttons, but instead has much larger buttons in categories. This may lead to more scrolling in some cases, but it also should be way more legible AND in general the player should have fewer things that they can build at any given planet unless they've stacked a lot of battlestations and citadels there.<br />
** Each line item not only shows what type it is, but also has to include what fleet it goes with -- so if that's the planet fleet, or one of the battlestations or citadels, that is relevant.<br />
*** Why is this relevant? Well, those things can be upgraded independently, for one. And for another note, it's possible that you might choose to move a battlestation or citadel to a new planet, thus making all of their units on this planet stop functioning. So it does play into the strategy if you plan on moving around your battlestations and/or citadels (as you likely will).<br />
** These also now show the cap directly in a 0/3 fashion or similar, with it showing how many have been built out of how many are possible. It's possible that you might have more built than are possible to build, which it will show properly, but with a red warning.<br />
** It also more directly shows the cost for construction -- super useful -- and grays out the text of any entities that you have already built to the full cap so that they are not so noticeable.<br />
** This whole setup is really geared around having many fewer TYPES of things that you can directly build at a given planet, and that's the intention for the long term. We don't really want dozens of options here, but rather a smaller and more interesting selection that you can build from contextually depending on the planet.<br />
** At this point you can actually construct new direct-placement units!<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch of changes have been made to the way the tooltips look in build mode for entities, and also to how things are hovered-over in the build menu and galaxy in terms of what highlights, when.<br />
** It's stuff we'll refine further with time, but if something seems off, please let us know.<br />
<br />
* When a Zenith Trader is visiting, you'll see a bunch of stuff on the sidebar under various categories, noted in pink as being from the Zenith Trader.<br />
** This is different from past versions of the game where there was a specific category for all the Zenith Trader stuff regardless of what its function was. This actually makes it a lot easier to find things by function, particularly if the amount of wares on offer goes up a lot in the future.<br />
** For things like the Station-Keepers (Chained Dark Spire Eidolon), there is now a per-planet cap higher than 1 for these. That's pretty nifty, and it works!<br />
** Note that even if you don't have the metal for these projects NOW, while the trader is visiting, you can start the projects and pay for them over time. This is as before and is by design. The UI might be a bit confusing on this, not sure.<br />
<br />
* In the build sidebar, turrets and "other defenses" have now been properly split out. Before they were all kind of mixed together in "defenses," which got confusing.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Frigates are now part of the Station Keepers sidebar instead of Other Defenses.<br />
** This is meant to be the case for anything that is mobile, essentially.<br />
<br />
==== Hotkeys ====<br />
<br />
* The hotkey for opening the tech tab now only opens that, versus opening that or the hacking tab contextually.<br />
** Given that the docks tab is gone, the build hotkey now only opens the build sidebar directly as well, kind of implicitly.<br />
<br />
* There are now separate hotkeys for opening the hacking (H) and fleet (R) tabs.<br />
<br />
* The "split selection" keybind that was previously L in this game and the original is now semicolon.<br />
<br />
* The "Unload Transports" (U) hotkey has had its description reworked as follows:<br />
** Any mobile fleet flagships that you have selected will immediately unload any ships they are presently transporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new hotkey (L): Load Transports<br />
** Any ships that you have selected which are part of a mobile fleet will immediately get inside their flagship for transport if their flagship is on the same planet.<br />
** Note that the need for this to be separate for unload is that it will be common to have partially-loaded transports and you don't want to get into funky toggle situations with ships getting in and out when you really meant "keep getting in" or "keep getting out."<br />
<br />
* The keybind for "select all scouts" has been removed, since scouts are removed.<br />
<br />
* SelectNextUnitType and SelectPreviousUnitType have both been removed, as they were buggy like crazy in general, and also don't really make all that much sense in the new workflow of things.<br />
<br />
* Trigger Current Master Menu Action 1-12 are now gone as hotkeys, as they only worked in the escape menu (since the rest of the master menu was gone as of over a year ago) and it was using up a lot of hotkeys for something not all that useful anymore. Once upon a time this was brilliant, it just doesn't fit anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Savegame Format Revamp ===<br />
<br />
* The default serialization style for things the game saves is now Byte arrays rather than the char arrays. This will make savegames vastly smaller than before, although not as legible (as if they were before) to edit by hand.<br />
** This is great for a variety of practical reasons, but among them it causes fewer transient garbage collector allocations. And it also makes it so that large integer numbers are no longer something that make the savegame larger. Rather than one char's worth of bytes per digit in the number (1-6 bits, per UTF-8 specs), it now just has a fixed 4 bytes for the number regardless of how many digits it has.<br />
** This breaks all the previous savegames, but they were already broken anyway.<br />
** Player profiles and settings are still using char arrays so that they can be edited by hand as desired.<br />
<br />
* There was previously a "too smart for our own good" method for "compacting" integers down that were used as primary keys. This could cause all sorts of bugs when used incorrectly, and aside from known bugs that this fixes, we happened to see a few other bugs in passing as we were removing it.<br />
** Note that this was needed almost exclusively because of the char arrays serialization that we were using. Now that we're using byte arrays, this compacting is not just bug-prone it's actually not any more efficient in the first place. So it's really good to have that out of there in general.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting a particular bug caused by this.<br />
<br />
* Items that are truly deprecated, but that we still want some record of for whatever reason, are presently moved into a new GameData/Pre900Deprecated folder.<br />
** This way we still have the xml, but the game never looks at it. Normally the purpose of deprecating something is to make sure that savegames that are older can still be read in. With 0.900 we're breaking the savegames anyway, so clearing out the deprecated stuff is only natural.<br />
<br />
* As part of this release, we had switched to writing our savegames in a binary format. However, this wasn't really working fully properly because it was trying to transcode that into unicode, which in turn would sometimes complain with the "Unable to translate Unicode character XXX at index YYY" error.<br />
** This was also notably less efficient in terms of GC usage. Now we're just directly writing the binary file.<br />
** In fact, now we're writing a BuzzsawBinaryByteArray, which is 449kb where even the binary array was 3.2mb, and the char buffer was even larger.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "external data" (aka modder-type data or data that was being saved into the external projects) is saved used to be based on using a sub-serializer that then itself got written as a string back into the main serialization stream.<br />
** This was probably done as a way to isolate freaky bugs introduced into savegames by modders, but with our new serialization logging that's really no longer a worry. As it stands, the sub-serialization may have instead been preventing us from properly saving sub-data and getting it back reliably. Also it was vastly less efficient in the new context.<br />
** Anyway, given that the new context is such that doing the data saving of external data just fully inline without any wrappering is more efficient, that's now what we're doing. Based on the serialization logs, this seems to work great.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging Additions ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Savegame Serialization Logs" setting into the debug section of the game settings.<br />
** When saving a game, write WorldSerialization.txt, and when loading it write WorldDeserialization.txt -- both in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if a savegame won't load for some reason; this lets us do a diff of the two files and figure out where they are diverging.<br />
** Note that this won't help with an existing broken savegame. This will only help if you have it turned on prior to creating a savegame you expect to be broken. This is basically a way for us to test the savegame creation and load process, which otherwise can be incredibly opaque and take a lot of time to hunt down.<br />
** It's hard to understate just how big a deal this tool is. This is an area that could have us searching for hours or days for a problem, and now we can find it in minutes, potentially.<br />
*** The specific genesis of the feature was in fact Chris spending hours searching for something and not finding a solution, and finally thinking there had to be a better way. We should have thought of this 10 years ago, honestly.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Mapgen Log" field in the debug part of the settings.<br />
** When generating a new map in the lobby, write MapGen.txt in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if mapgen isn't really doing what you expect for some reason, or you just want some detailed insight into what is happening and in what order.<br />
** To hook into this as a modder for your own purposes, you simply write to MapgenLogger.Log(). If you're doing anything CPU-expensive or that involves string concatenation or similar, then you can wrap that inside an "if ( MapgenLogger.IsActive )" statement. This simply avoids slowing down mapgen at all when logging is not active.<br />
** There is some serious funkiness going on with some data being null when it should not be, and this is how we're going about figuring out when and why that is happening. But this also lets us see the results of maps that are generated without having to scan with our eyeballs all over a big map so much. Given how much has just changed in mapgen and elsewhere, this is handy, even if we didn't have an immediate bug issue.<br />
<br />
* The fleet centerpiece "repairs" no longer get dumped to the log unless a new debug setting is enabled. This was essentially just spamming the log for no good reason at the moment, but it's useful to be able to see it in some limited cases, hence the new option.<br />
<br />
* Put in a buuuunch of debugging code for figuring out where excess notifications that hang out at the top of your screen are coming from.<br />
** The tooltips for the excess notifications should now explain what the problem is.<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Early Access Starts!]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Arrival_of_Fleets&diff=35760AI War 2:The Arrival of Fleets2019-06-22T02:35:10Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Version 0.870 How To Play And Tip Of The Day */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* The old-style tutorials are gone, and we're still in progress with replacing that with [[AI_War_2:_The_Arrival_of_Fleets#Tutorials_Are_Out.2C_How_To_Play_Is_In|three different styles of other help/onboarding in-game mechanisms]].<br />
<br />
* Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is temporarily disabled''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.<br />
<br />
* There are a variety of ships/units that don't have final graphics at the moment, though they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
* We're in progress with a major revamp of some systems based on cumulative feedback in order to push the game even more towards the feel of the original game... despite further divergence from it at a mechanical level.<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After 3 months of Early Access and 2+ years of development, we've reached a point where we know what we want the 1.0 version of the game to look like. SO very much about this game already works well, but there are some major deficits coming into this phase when comparing this sequel to the original game. The aim of this phase is to close those gaps and make this clearly the superior product in terms of playability, fun factor, the amount of fun thinking-about-interesting-challenges you do during gameplay, and so on. <br />
<br />
There's also of course still more polish and bugfixing that we want to get done, and the lobby redo is still scheduled of course (but quick starts are an awesome alternative, and have helped us to defer a final design for the lobby as we formed up some other bits of the game first), but we're feeling really good about this final sprint toward 1.0. We still do need to also finish some graphics for the existing ships, but they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
There is some more content coming as part of this phase, kind of by definition -- fleets as a concept Change Everything in a good way -- but the focus is on taking what is a pretty awesome game with a lot of depth and pushing it to a level that we hope beats the pants off the original, finally. Stay tuned.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.870 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
== Version 0.869 How To Play And Tip Of The Day==<br />
(Released June 21st, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The sliders in the options and factions tab of the lobby now only send their commands to sync things up 0.2 seconds after you stop making any changes, making them not flood the network with commands as you drag them around.<br />
** This is not super duper important in the short term, but in MP will be. And it's very relevant for the upcoming fleet management screen, so we needed to go ahead and get this in.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the credits getting funky offset the further down you scrolled.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could cause corrupted savegames to sometimes try to allocate huge amounts of memory (and potentially run out).<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the prior build where savegames were broken because it was saving the names of fleets twice and only reading them once.<br />
<br />
=== Tutorials Are Out, How To Play Is In ===<br />
<br />
* The tutorials button has been removed from the single player section of the main menu.<br />
** We're going to rely on two other kinds of tutorializing, instead of the older method that we used in this game and the original AI War.<br />
*** Firstly, we're going to have more integrated suggestions on what to do next, as little missions that probably grant EXP or similar, which is along the lines of what we did with The Last Federation. This is coming soon.<br />
*** Secondly, we have a huge Intel tab in the game, plus really rich tooltips, that make discovering how new mechanics work pretty much something that is... well, something you can find for yourself.<br />
*** Thirdly, we've got the new How To Play section, which is more like an embedded wiki plus tip of the day, and this should help people much better with advanced questions they have on whatever subject (the wiki itself was considered basically a requirement for playing the original game).<br />
<br />
* There is a new "tip of the day" on the main menu, with one of currently 16 tips that can show up there.<br />
** If you have tips that you'd like to suggest, please feel free to write them up and let us know! We used a lot of player-based tips of the day in the first game, which had about 50ish tips of the day, and that was really successful.<br />
** In fact, some of these tips of the day are adapted from the tips in the first game!<br />
<br />
* There is also a new How To Play menu, which has tips and strategies divided into a number of categories, with longer-form information in it.<br />
** The tips of the day are shown in a Quick Tips section at the bottom of this, for anyone who wants to manually brows those.<br />
** The first section, which is fairly robust at the moment but certainly not all-inclusive, is called "Getting Started."<br />
*** Anyone who wants to contribute ideas for what to put in these sections is also more than welcome to, as things that you wish you'd known or that you feel compelled to look up in release notes or whatever are things that we want to get into here.<br />
** The other sections are all empty at the moment, but are "For Returning Players," basically to talk about the differences from this game and AIWC for people who are coming back from that game; and then Fleet Management, Economic Management, Offensive Strategies, Defensive Strategies, Other Factions, and Modding.<br />
*** We'll be working on filling this stuff out over the coming months, but as noted anyone who has ideas for subjects they'd like us to address, or items they'd like to write themselves, are very welcome to lend a hand.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.868 Fleet EXP Level-Ups and Starting Battlestations ==<br />
(Released June 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add 3 Harder Quickstarts, 5 Fun With Faction Quickstarts, and 2 Civil War Quickstarts.<br />
** Thanks to Mac for providing one of the Civil Wars.<br />
<br />
* The mark level colors have been completely redone, except for mark 1. They now go through a more gradual progression to the original purple that was once mark 5 but is now mark 7, and so now the galaxy map is vastly easier to read in terms of what is where.<br />
** This also helps with telling high-level marks apart in general, too.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Reduced ai_salvage_multiplier from 3 to 0.8.<br />
** The bug fix and calculation change to reprisals in the last release meant that this outdated value was causing you to get really strong reprisals early. Unfortunately, the bad cases only showed up after the release - bah.<br />
*** Thanks to Badger and Ecthelon on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Increased cost_for_ai_to_purchase on Royal Guardians by 50%.<br />
** It still has quite a good deal, but it's not as absurd.<br />
<br />
* Macrophage albedo increased to 0.7.<br />
<br />
==== Boons To Player Energy ====<br />
<br />
* Player homeworlds now include the ability construct up to 10 matter converters, rather than 0.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, the player home planet can now build 3 energy collectors rather than 0.<br />
** Economic command stations can now build 3 rather than 2, and logistical command can now build 2 rather than 1.<br />
** In general, player energy needs are higher now than they used to be, so let's also give more differentiation here. The military command stations still only give 1.<br />
<br />
* In a recent build, we made it so that lower-mark units would cost you less metal to build (depending on how much lower-mark they are compared to their fleet as a whole), as a way to make those units more viable. <br />
** Now this is also applied to energy usage for ships, although the scaling down of energy usage is somewhat less severe.<br />
** For each mark below the max in that fleet, it goes:<br />
*** 1 down: 90%<br />
*** 2: 75%<br />
*** 3: 60%<br />
*** 4: 45%<br />
*** 5: 30%<br />
*** 6+: 20%<br />
** This should help further the goal of the low-mark ships not feeling like a liability unless you simply haven't upgraded their fleet in any way for whatever reason (an entire mark 1 fleet is still going to be costly, so maybe at least upgrade something that will jack up part of the fleet).<br />
<br />
* It is now impossible for drones to ever cost the player any energy. Since you can't control drone production (and really the point is not to do so), them costing energy or metal was always going to be a raw deal. They haven't cost metal for quite some time, either.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in wave spawning where we weren't getting exactly the right number of units in a wave when the wave actually arrived<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where battlestations and citadels could show up in the build sidebar menu.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The debug menu no longer shows (F1), etc, next to options inside it since those hotkeys are no longer bound to that anyhow.<br />
<br />
==== Unity Upgrade To 2019.1.7 ====<br />
<br />
* Upgraded unity from 2019.1.0 to 2019.1.7.<br />
** This has a number of bugfixes, most of which aren't relevant to us, but if you were getting double keystrokes on linux that should now be fixed.<br />
** Additionally, this issue that was fixedin 2019.1.5: UI: removing sprite mesh caching optimization as it was causing too many issues.<br />
*** This is, best guess, going to fix the sidebar issue with the icons going crazy for no good reason. Things like certain icons drawing too large, etc, was probably this. If you see that again, please let us know!<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin, AnnoyingOrange, and Ovalcircle for reporting the icon sidebar issue.<br />
<br />
* TextMeshPro has been upgraded to 2.0.1 from 2.0.0.<br />
<br />
=== Starting Battlestation Options For Players ===<br />
<br />
* Major new feature for player homeworlds! Rather than just starting out with a starting offensive fleet at the start of the game (that you get to pick out of a list of 5), you ALSO now get a starting defensive battlestation fleet (that you also get to pick out of a list of 5).<br />
** The idea here is that this gives you even more customization in terms of how the early game will go, and gives you a significant early-game boost in general.<br />
** This also removes any possibility that your offensive fleet will need to do defensive babysitting of your homeworld, and gives you slightly more choice in just how soon you want to go capture more battlestations (that's still important very early on, but no longer needs to be your first thing in all cases).<br />
** This also, right from the start of the game, makes sure that it's clear that battlestations/citadels are a thing, so that players know to look for more of them and see their mechanics from the start. Otherwise they might just assume that their defensive options are super duper limited in general now (not at all the case!).<br />
** We implemented this as battlestations rather than home command station variants because this does also give you the flexibility to move the battlestation to another planet other than your homeworld if you so desire, which is one of the big nice things about battlestations in general. But also it... as noted... introduces the idea of battlestations well.<br />
** The starting options are:<br />
*** Classic Defenses<br />
**** This classic mix is good at stopping or slowing things as they come through your wormholes, and has good firepower against midsized foes.<br />
**** Gravitic Battlestation, Ambush Turret x30, Grenade Launcher Turret x30, Concussion Turret x30, Tractor Array x7.<br />
*** Shield Defenses<br />
**** Start with an extra forcefield on your home planet, and some very powerful turrets in small quantities. Also snipers.<br />
**** Shieldwall Battlestation, Plasma Turret x7, Beam Cannon x7, Tritium Sniper Turret x30, Tractor Array x7.<br />
*** Eclectic Defenses<br />
**** Wow this is all over the place. Engineering boosts, some regular turrets, minefields, extra tractor beams, and some mobile sentry frigates. Be prepared for anything!<br />
**** Engineering Battlestation, Concussion Turret x30, Plasma Turret x7, Minefield x60, Tractor Array x10, Sentry Frigate x2.<br />
*** Minelayer Defenses<br />
**** Large numbers of all the kinds of minefields, plus area-of-effect type turrets, for when you really want to booby-trap the heck out of your homeworld.<br />
**** Ensnarer Battlestation, Grenade Launcher Turret x30, Fortified Tesla Turret x30, Minefield x60, Area Minefield x60, Paralysis Minefield x60<br />
*** Webbed Defenses<br />
**** This mix is great against cloaking ships, ships with weak engines, groups of small ships, and ships with high energy operation costs.<br />
**** Revealer Battlestation, Spider Turret x40, MLRS Turret x40, Nucleophilic Turret x40, Tractor Array x7.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty and TechSY730 for inspiring this addition.<br />
<br />
* If a quick start is loaded that doesn't have a starting battlestation defined inside it, it now chooses one at random for you rather than throwing an error.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Fleet EXP Now Turns Into Mark Levels For Your Ships! ===<br />
<br />
* Planetary fleets now gain experience points like the mobile offensive and defensive fleets do.<br />
** Old savegames won't have any EXP for those planetary fleets, though, sadly.<br />
<br />
* Something that has been bugging Chris for a while has been the need to manually upgrade fleets when they gain enough EXP. That was always going to be a hassle.<br />
** However, there was still a desire to have flexibility in what sort of bonuses you get as your fleets do well, so there didn't seem to be an "out" on that.<br />
** Instead, however, now we're auto-upgrading fleets as they gain enough EXP, but also granting a "perk point" to the fleet that you can then go back and spend as you wish (once that interface is in).<br />
*** This way, the automation of fleets getting better as they fight better is there -- which is great -- but the flexibility remains for you to be able to upgrade your fleets in various ways using EXP indirectly as a currency. Best of both worlds!<br />
<br />
* Fleets now actually level up as they gain EXP, at EXP levels 4000, 12000, 36000, 108000, 324000, and finally 972000.<br />
** Are these reasonable numbers? It's really really hard to say. Perhaps folks can help us look at this in real world scenarios.<br />
*** The goal of the first level up is that you hit it after having a bit of combat with the fleet, so it's not too hard to get to mark 2 for the fleet.<br />
*** The goal of the second one is that you really have to fight for a while with it before your fleet gains that big bonus.<br />
*** The goal of the third one is that you have a very veteran fleet on your hands that has slain many many foes before you get this one.<br />
*** And then beyond that, these are mostly just for early fleets in ultra long-running games. It's really expected that most of the other upgrades for fleets, most of the time, would come from science and that you're getting a buff of 1-3 marks on average at most in typical games.<br />
** It's entirely likely that our actual numbers are hilariously wrong, so hopefully with feedback we can make some changes in the external constants xml fleet_level_up_exp_cost_1 and similar to get those better.<br />
<br />
* Hovering over the fleet in the sidebar now shows how much EXP that fleet has, and how much more is needed to get to the next level, and what the next level of the fleet is. Note that this is only presently on the fleet tooltip itself, not the tooltip for the fleet centerpiece.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.867 Smarter AI, Better Mark Level Spread, Player Economic Boom ==<br />
(Released June 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Zombies should not be counted as Threat; they can be Hostile to the player, but aren't part of the AI's coordinated attack force<br />
<br />
* Warden Secret Ninja Hideouts are now valid reinforcement points.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for pointing out this oversight.<br />
<br />
* Previously, if ships couldn't shoot at something for whatever reason, they would wait for 0.8t o 1.6 seconds before trying to fire again. This made ship shots more offset, and prevented hammering a fairly CPU-intensive method, but also caused issues with them seeming really sluggish to respond to things or retarget.<br />
** Now they will wait between 0 seconds and 0.2 seconds instead, which should be vastly more tolerable. It will still make the shots firing slightly offset, and will reduce load a bit, but should be imperceptible to players that there's ever a delay of any note going on here.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting and identifying the issue.<br />
<br />
* Put in a fix for the issue with the same music track playing over and over again if you didn't have the classic AI War music enabled.<br />
** Thanks to B and Drinks for reporting, and Badger for hunting it down.<br />
<br />
* The Objective for destroying Coprocessors now tells you how many are left in the galaxy.<br />
<br />
* When importing partial fleet names, or planet names, it no longer trims the whitespace off the edges of them.<br />
** This makes it so that you can make two-word fleet names, for example.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* If a player kills a reconquest AI command station after a minor faction killed the original (so the player is incurring AIP by killing the reconquest AI command station) then allow scouting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a very strange bug that could lead to error messages not popping up because mysteriously the modal popup data was null.<br />
** This will now remove the offending popup message and silently log an error to the log since trying to put another popup in there when the popup just failed is probably not the best idea.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* More debug info has been put into the tooltips for ships when that toggle is turned on in the personal settings debug section. This is revealing to us at the moment how often the targetPriorityList is empty (for some reason!) when ships are trying to pursue enemies. Not sure yet why that is the case, but this is the cause of the "movement stutters" reported by Ecthelon and RocketAssistedPuffin relating to units in pursuit mode. Thanks to Puffin for the repro save.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the strength counting for the side bar and galaxy view, reconstructed turrets should properly contribute to a planet's strength again.<br />
<br />
* Give the player more Dyson Defenders when they hack the Dyson Sphere.<br />
<br />
* Improve the BigCircle code for Simple/Realistic map types to hopefully have it work now.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for the initial bug report and weapon master for some research<br />
<br />
* Only display the 'not enough energy to claim' message in the hovertext for units that haven't been claimed yet<br />
** Otherwise all units would start displaying 'can't claim due to low energy' if you ran out of energy<br />
<br />
* Put in some logic that should prevent things that die to remains from being in a funky state after being rebuilt or re-captured.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI was getting double the income it should. Since we were balancing around this bug, fix the bug but double the underlying income. No net change to the game balance.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engine Notifier tooltips now show the faction the Raid Engine will send a wave at<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines will no longer be triggered by Dark Spire, Macrophage, Devourer or Zombies<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* When hovering a planet in the galaxy map with Verbose mode, if the planet is under the influence of a minor faction it will list that faction.<br />
<br />
* Warden, Hunter and Anti-Player zombies which zombify units will create Anti-Player zombies, not anti-everyone zombies<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Neutral world science extraction hacking now correctly costs AIP if the player would accrue AIP from capturing the planet (ie if a minor faction took out the AI command station).<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The nanocaust will now wait to more thoroughly defeat a planet's defenses before building a construction center<br />
** Reported by Ecthelon on steam<br />
<br />
* Give the AI a bit of bonus hunter income at AIP > 400. Make stacked units do a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines and other nasty things that can interfere with the Dyson Sphere now blow up immediately after game spawn<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust units shouldn't count as Threat anymore<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for reporting very high threat values<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust and Marauders are allowed to kill Raid Engines<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Marauder Outposts were allowed to exceed the raider limit by 1.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Player controlled Nanocaust ships (Abominations/Aberrations) now produce Anti-AI Zombies instead of player-controlled units that aren't in a Fleet.<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Wave modifications ===<br />
<br />
* On higher difficulty the AI will now not send waves against planets that are 'too heavily defended'. It will either pick weaker targets or roll the wave budget over into the next wave. <br />
** This gives the AI a bit better of a chance against a well-defended or turtling player. I was finding that most of the time waves barely tickled my defenses.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI could sometimes send normal waves against neutral planets<br />
<br />
* Add Wave specific traces for improved debugging<br />
<br />
* Rewrote chunks of the wave target finding logic for improved clarity<br />
<br />
* Reprisal waves buffs to match AIWC behaviour. Instead of having strength = Reprisal Level * Base Wave Strength, it's now strength = Base Wave Strength * baseMultiplier * 2^ reprisal level. baseMultiplier ranges from 1.1 (difficulty 1) to 1.8 (difficulty 10).<br />
** If you have a 4x reprisal level wave at difficulty 7 then it is Base Wave Strength * 1.5 * 2^4 = Base Wave Strength * 12, instead of Base Wave Strength * 4.<br />
** Badger found that the AI was not adequately punishing fleet-wipes. This should make it more interesting. Prompted due to some discord griping with Kesseleth and Puffin<br />
<br />
* Shortened some of the autogenerated fleet names.<br />
** Thanks to Viss Valdyr for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Better Handling Of Reinforcements Being Released ===<br />
<br />
* There was a strange thing where units were often being transferred from guard posts to other places, sometimes ones that could not be reinforcement points at all.<br />
** Likely this was an artifact of how we changed reinforcements over time in the design, and the intent of the transfer isn't super duper clear as it is. But the transfer is being kept for now, but now those transferred units are simply not transferred unless the target is also a reinforcement point. We can revisit the transfer itself later if it turns out to be a problem.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this issue in a code review.<br />
<br />
*The game now checks all units (just once per second) to see if they are aggro'd and have any units stored in them to set free, not just the "reinforcement points" that are preordained.<br />
** That way if there are any reinforcements hiding in a unit that was not initially supposed to have them, but that got transferred them by whatever arcane methods (it's okay, really), they will behave properly. There are some cases where this might be desirable behavior, and having the extra flexibility here doesn't cost us much in terms of the CPU usage, so that's good.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting, as well as finding the issues in a code review.<br />
<br />
* Now when a unit dies, if it has reinforcements inside it for whatever reason, it should dump them all out immediately. Previously if you managed to kill a guard post full of reinforcements in under 1 second, then the guards would all die in the fire of their parent. Now they go free and attack you, as was always intended.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting, as well as finding the issues in a code review.<br />
<br />
=== Planet Naming Styles ===<br />
<br />
* As in the first game, the first planet added to the map is now always named "Murdoch." This tends to be a significant planet, and the interest of this happening and frequently being an important planet was not lost on people and kind of became part of AI War lore.<br />
<br />
* There are now multiple planet naming styles that you can choose from:<br />
** Standard (what it has been until now)<br />
*** Inspired by famous scientists, along with real and fictional named planets and locations from other works. Created by Chris and Keith.<br />
** No Gravitas<br />
*** Inspired by phrases and spaceship names in a pretty humorous sci fi series. Created by Draco18s for AIWC (edited by Chris).<br />
** Fantasy Monsters<br />
*** Inspired by the names of monsters in several fantasy games. Created by Zoutzakje for AIWC (edited by Chris).<br />
** Kahuna's Real Stars<br />
*** Absolutely enormous list of actual star names, including codenames for them. Plus a few easter eggs in there. Created by Kahuna for AIWC.<br />
** Kahuna's No-Codename Stars<br />
*** Absolutely enormous list of actual star names, but minus the codename-y sort. Plus a few easter eggs in there. Created by Kahuna for AIWC.<br />
** Cities (DE)<br />
*** Most cities in Germany show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr, and was the original inspiration for this change to the game.<br />
** Cities (UK)<br />
*** Most cities in the UK show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
** Cities (US)<br />
*** Most cities in the US show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
** Cities (RUS)<br />
*** Most cities in Russia show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
** Cities (FR/SPA)<br />
*** Most cities in France and Spain show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. It's a shorter (and combined) list because most of their city names are quite long! Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
<br />
* When using the Real Stars lists, which are tens of thousands of entries long, we discovered that map generation would take several seconds to part of a minute.<br />
** Due to this discovery, we made a big improvement to the speed of name choosing for planets, and as a result all of the lists now generate in approximately the same amount of time (and much faster than before), making the lobby more responsive-feeling.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Marauder Bases now have a bit more health<br />
** Prompted by Ecthelon on Steam<br />
<br />
* Marauders have a bit more income<br />
** Thanks to puffin for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Usurpers can now have higher Marks.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of Concussion Guard Posts, Guardians and Turrets by 3,000.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of MLRS Guard Posts and Turrets by 3,000.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Corvette, Turret, Guard Post reload time 3s -> 4s, damage multiplier 2x -> 4x.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette, Turret, Guardian, Guard Post high hull health damage multiplier 2x -> 4x.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking ====<br />
* Nerf hacking responses, especially the superterminal hacking response<br />
** Thanks to MajorDomo for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Nerf spire archive hacks. Make science extraction hacks a bit harder<br />
** Thanks to ulu for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Sabotage hacks now will blow up the legal target closest to the hacking unit, rather than a random legal target.<br />
** This matches AIWC behaviour.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* AutoBomb damage radius 600 -> 1,200, speed 2,200 -> 2,900.<br />
<br />
* Cluster Bomb speed 1,000 -> 1,800.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard damage resistance upon entering a planet 0.5x -> 0.25x.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette damage 20 -> 30, reload time 4s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
==== Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* Transport shields 500,000 -> 750,000, damage resistance upon entering a planet 0.5x -> 0.25x.<br />
<br />
* Transport range 5,600 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Transport damage 1,500 -> 500.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting a much further range on these, to avoid them being suicidal in combat. To avoid it being a weird fusion sniper, damage is lowered as well. It's pretty much just a weapon so it counts as a combatant.<br />
<br />
* Lost Spire Frigate shield points 750,000 -> 1,750,000.<br />
<br />
* Orchid shield bypass 70% -> 100%, speed 1,400 -> 1,800.<br />
<br />
* Gryn build speed increased 50%.<br />
<br />
==== Tech Upgrades ====<br />
<br />
* Ark Spirit:<br />
** Was: "3500,5500,7500,9500", now: "3000,4500,6000,7500".<br />
<br />
* Ark Heart:<br />
** Was: "3500,5500,7500,9500", now: "3000,4500,6000,7500".<br />
<br />
* Ark Armor:<br />
** Was: "6000,8000,10000,12000", now: "5000,6500,8000,9500".<br />
<br />
* Ark Fist:<br />
** Was: "7000,10000,12000", now: "6000,7500,9000".<br />
<br />
* Citadel Executioner:<br />
** Was: "4500,6750,9000", now: "3500,5000,6500".<br />
<br />
* Citadel Protector:<br />
** Was: "4000,6000,8000", now: "3000,4500,6000".<br />
<br />
* Citadel Consumer:<br />
** Was: "5000,7500", now: "4000,5500".<br />
<br />
* Spire Core:<br />
** Was: "6000,8000,10000,12000", now: "5000,6500,8000,9500".<br />
<br />
==== Marauders ====<br />
<br />
* All Marauder Raider weapon ranges are now at least 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Marauder Raider speed 200 -> 400.<br />
<br />
==== Dyson ====<br />
<br />
* Dyson Defender shield bypass 70% -> 100%.<br />
<br />
* Dyson Sentinel shields 200 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
==== Nanocaust ====<br />
<br />
* Deviant engine_gx 13 -> 14, range 3,800 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Anomaly base shield bypass 60% -> 90%.<br />
<br />
* Mutation range 1,250 -> 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Aberration Prion Beam range 1,250 -> 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Abomination Prion Beam and Nematode range 1,250 -> 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Aberration and Abomination engine_gx 15 -> 18.<br />
<br />
* Deviant, Anomaly and Mutation speed 250 -> 400.<br />
** They now match Aberration and Abomination speed.<br />
<br />
=== Mark Level Balance Overhaul ===<br />
<br />
* The way that AI planets are allocated, mark-level-wise, is now revised very heavily.<br />
** The AI home planets are now Mark 7 instead of 5, and are surrounded by a mix of 7s and 6s rather than 5s and 4s like before.<br />
** Then in the main parts of the galaxy, there's way fewer mark 2 and 3 planets, and a whole lot more that ranges between 3-5 out there.<br />
** There were also previously some random strange mark 1 planets that really should not have existed (those should only be next to player homeworlds!). Now those are randomly tossed between marks 2 and 3.<br />
** This is... a REALLY substantial buff to the power of the AIs, which kind of goes without saying. But it was very strange-feeling that players were able to use mark 7 stuff and AIs were never really doing that. Now the AIs also use the full range of mark levels that are in this game, versus the player being technologically overpowering for them.<br />
** This will probably make a number of other factions need buffs, so please let us know.<br />
** We'll probably need to recolor some of these to make the map easier to read, now that there's more of this stuff out there.<br />
** The ratios might also not be ideal yet, we'll have to see.<br />
** Note that this won't affect existing savegames, but they will be affected by the OTHER changes below, so now older savegames from the fleets period are going to be a tad on the easy side, potentially.<br />
<br />
* The differences between mark levels is now a lot lower than before, so going up in mark levels doesn't make the older mark levels so darn useless.<br />
** This is pretty critical, given how unevenly you're upgrading your forces. And with 7 mark levels now instead of 5, we can afford to be more granular in general.<br />
** This helps to prevent some of the crazy overpowered fleets that people could get super early in the game, and also makes it so that the endgame mark levels is more of something to strive for and actually achieve. It also prevents some fleets from being absolutely useless, or mark 1 ships an absolute liability, early on in the game.<br />
** The changes are as follows:<br />
*** Mark 2:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 2.1 to 1.4<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 1.5 to 1.25<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 2 to 1.25<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 225 to 100<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 3 to 2<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 1.3 to 1.1<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 1.4 to 1.2<br />
*** Mark 3:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 3.2 to 2.1<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 2 to 1.5<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 3 to 1.75<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 450 to 220<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 5 to 3<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 1.6 to 1.3<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 1.8 to 1.4<br />
*** Mark 4:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 4.3 to 2.8<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 2.5 to 2<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 4 to 2.5<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 675 to 400<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 7 to 4<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 1.9 to 1.6<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.1 to 1.75<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 1 to 0.<br />
*** Mark 5:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 5.4 to 3.6<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 3 to 2.5<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 5 to 3<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 900 to 650<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 9 to 6<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 2.1 to 1.9<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.4 to 2.1<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 2 to 1.<br />
*** Mark 6:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 6.5 to 4.2<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 3.5 to 3<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 6 to 3.5<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 1125 to 900<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 11 to 8<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 2.6 to 2.2<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.8 to 2.4<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 3 to 2.<br />
*** Mark 7:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 7.6 to 5.4<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 4 to 3<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 7 to 4<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 1350 to 1150<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 15 to 10<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 3 to 2.4<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.8 to 2.4<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 3.4 to 2.8.<br />
** All of these changes help to make it so that it's partly more about what KIND of ships you have, and not just having the top of the line mark levels.<br />
*** But there's a similar progression to what used to be the top-level mark 5 stuff (which is now mark 7), minus some of the extreme tankiness that was there before.<br />
*** Additionally, there is no longer a crazy spike where mark 2 stuff is just soooo incredibly much better than mark 1. That was problematic, and the entire curve is thus smoothed out a lot more.<br />
*** The goal with all this is that a fleet of mark 1 ships should still be useful even in the midgame, and not such a liability as it is right now. But ALSO that if you have a mark 7 fleet you're not just curb-stomping the AI, who only has mark 5 until now.<br />
*** It's also worth noting that the AI and you both would be teching up more often in this model, but all of these numbers are super duper preliminary and will need testing.<br />
*** Also also it's worth noting that we still need to do some things about lower-mark ships and their costs, to keep those attractive, but those will come separately from this particular balance shift.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for coming up with this general idea, and for the feedback of a lot of other people related to these changes.<br />
<br />
=== Player Economic Balance Boom ===<br />
<br />
* Repairing the engines or personal shields of friendlies is now a free action, it just takes time (but not metal).<br />
** Note that repairing bubble forcefields or hulls still costs metal.<br />
** It's also worth noting that drone production has been a free action for a long time.<br />
** This should help avoid certain metal spikes, cost-wise.<br />
<br />
* In addition to other changes relating to mark levels, now within your fleets your lower-mark ships now get a serious discount in metal cost depending on how much lower-mark they are than the highest-mark ship type in that fleet.<br />
** Aka, if Fleet A has at least one mark 3 ship type in it, then all of its mark 1 and 2 ship types will be discounted. If Fleet B is all mark 1 units, that wouldn't hold true; so there's some benefit to upgrading at least a little bit of something from every fleet.<br />
** These benefits translate into faster build times for low-mark stuff, lower metal expenditures, and lower repair costs. Aka, they make way better chaff -- without tanking your economy -- which is similar to what AI War Classic did. But in this game we had to go with a discounting system rather than an increasing-cost system so that as you upgrade your ships you don't run into a tanked economy for THAT reason.<br />
** The discounts are:<br />
*** 90% of normal cost if 1 mark below the max of the fleet.<br />
*** 75% of normal cost of 2 marks below.<br />
*** 55% if 3 marks below.<br />
*** 35% if 4 marks below.<br />
*** 25% if 5 marks below.<br />
*** 10% if 7 marks below.<br />
** These values can be tuned in the external constants xml, and we also will be making other economic changes to balance in general, probably. But this core change should make it so that a lot more things are useful a lot more of the time.<br />
<br />
==== Seeing Your Metal Outflows ====<br />
<br />
* A basic display of metal outflows is now displayed when you click the metal resource line in the top bar of the GUI.<br />
** There are some funky things that this is showing and/or not showing, so please let us know as you find them. Some of what we've seen might just be old savegames, but it's hard to say.<br />
** Eventually we'd like these to be more robust reports that come out on all the resources in the top bar, including things about the AIs and other factions (whatever details you are allowed to know) when you click AIP, for instance.<br />
** This uses a modal popup with a scrollbar, which is a lot more suited for really long-form text data (as long as it needs to be!), so this is basically considered driving down to a much more detailed level compared to the tooltip, which is more realtime and more brief/summary in nature.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for the initial implementation and idea!<br />
<br />
=== New Mechanic STYLE: Fleet Bonuses From Member Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new supercharges_min_speed_of_rest_of_player_fleet xml property for ships, which is now applied to Raiders.<br />
** When this is on, as with the case for Raiders, then all of the other non-centerpiece ships within any PLAYER fleet that also contains these ships get boosted up to at least the speed of the raiders.<br />
** This is in response to people noting that often Raiders were not super useful because they're very fast but everything else was not, so it's not like you could build a giant strike fleet out of them.<br />
** But even more than that, this is kind of a first-item showcase for how we can create new synergies from different ships in a fleet, compared to having to exploit existing/inherent ones. In other words, we can make it so that a ship that "doesn't play well with others" is able to make others more awesome in a way that is similar to itself, thus making fleets... even more slightly procedural in nature, is one way to put it?<br />
** We arent' having procedural ships, per se, but this lets the procedural fleets actually adjust the other ships within their fleets. This is only for human players, and probably we can think of some various other interesting things to do with this that will make some ships more useful and varied in surprising new ways.<br />
** It's worth noting that we'll definitely want suggestions for "hey this ship isn't very useful with many others, maybe part of its abilities could transfer over," and then also there are simply some ship types (etherjets?) that probably should be limited to AI-side-only simply because they're too esoteric for player use. That said, this whole piece is a marathon, not a sprint, and this is more of a case study of the sorts of cool things we can do over time, long-term.<br />
** The alternative was going to be trying to really make it so that "unhelpful fleeet compositions" were not ever created, but that was going to really limit the types of fleets people would see. It's a lot more interesting to make it so that the weak fleets get buffed by new abilities that ships can grant to their fleet, we figured.<br />
** Thanks to a ton of players for the discussion that inspired this.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.866 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released June 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed Enraged Macrophages having 1/10th of the shields of normal Macrophages.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for spotting.<br />
<br />
* Macrophages now spawn at the correct mark level<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we were checking the Stacking Cutoff in the wrong way, and that was basically Breaking Everything.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.865 The Return Of Deepstriking ==<br />
(Released June 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Improvements and Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, the header sizes for some of the text on the map tab line items is now a bit larger.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, on the map tab it now has the Randomize button up next to the Map Seed, as a half-width button again, to show its lesser importance. This definitely helps it be confused with the Regenerate Map button less.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting the confusion.<br />
<br />
* The game now supports actions being triggered when you press enter or return in textboxes.<br />
** We have to hook this up via a new OnEnterOrReturnPressed() method on a case-by-case basis, but the first place that this is now being used is in the lobby on the map seed textbox. Pressing enter in that now causes the map to regenerate.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== In-Game Ability To Change A Subset Of These ====<br />
<br />
* The Performance section of the regular settings screen has been removed, and the singular option from there (when to start stacking units) has been moved into the Lobby Options instead. This way this will function properly during multiplayer, since this is a global thing and not a local setting.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The settings screen now has a header of "Personal Settings," instead of "Game Settings," to be a little more clear.<br />
<br />
* In the escape menu during gameplay, you can now see two options: "Personal Settings," and "Galaxy-Wide Options."<br />
** The new Galaxy-Wide Options screen is basically just a subset of the Options tab from the Lobby screen. It's only the options that make sense for people to be able to change once the game has started.<br />
** To make any option show on this screen, the xml tag changeable_during_gameplay="true" simply must be added and it will be there.<br />
** This lets players, presently, change the contents of the Scouting and the Performance tabs. Later we may add other things, but these were the only things that didn't seem like they would be exploitable by players in some way. And the only things that aren't cached by the AI factions or whatever, and aren't just something for during mapgen like how many capturables are seeded.<br />
** This is actually a pretty powerful new tool we have, which will let us do some interesting things in the future beyond what we have right now.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Selected Units Improvements and Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding issue where if you clicked a single item in your list of selected units in the lower right corner, it wouldn't just limit down to that only.<br />
** Basically we can't call Unselect() from inside DoForSelected(), we need to return RemoveAndContinue instead or else if will skip indices.<br />
** Thanks to Jonesmz, Kahuna, and Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If you have selected some ships that are remains (turrets, whatever), then those now show up as separate line items in the list of selected ships, and show REMAINS next to themselves.<br />
** Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* In the UI, if you have selected a fleet directly, rather than selecting just all or some of the units from it, it now shows the fleet itself in the selection window.<br />
** Functionally there is no difference from before, as selecting a fleet would select the fleet as a whole plus any new ships that were inside it, and that is still the case. But now you can visually tell that.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, the only way to "select a fleet" was to right-click it in the fleets sidebar, or to use the number key assigned to that fleet. Now you can also double-click the fleet centerpiece and that will select the fleet rather than just selecting all the units inside it.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Sneaking Around AI Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the AI Behavior section of the lobby options: Guard Aggro Distance<br />
** At what distance from an enemy will a guard post release its internal ships, or will a ship standing near a guard post leave its post to attack the enemy? Default is 5000.<br />
** Note that if the guard post or one of its ships get shot, then they immediately aggro no matter what the distance. This is about them noticing someone who is being passive.<br />
** Default is 5k, min is 3k, max is 10k. Prior to this build, this was hardcoded in at an insanely-high 13k, which is half the gravity well. That made the AI just absolutely notice everything you did immediately, and made the planets feel smaller than they are.<br />
*** The ranges of ships may also be a bit too on the high side in some cases, in terms of making the gravity wells feel too small and cage-matchy, so we might make some changes there to reduce ship attack ranges, but we shall see.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting. Hopefully we can actually do some deepstriking, now!<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where AI units were being aggro'd even by cloaked ships. Ships that are cloaked no longer can cause guards to notice them at all.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a super longstanding issue with the hitboxes for planets being strange/biased on the galaxy map. This was because, as WeaponMaster discovered, the important structures icons were never disabling their colliders and thus there was a giant invisible area where hovering would select the wrong planet.<br />
** Thanks to rkfg, Mckloshiv, Draco18s, Ovalcircle, and WeaponMaster for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code that will give us better errors when there are problems linking planets up in octopus maps or various others.<br />
** This likely won't fix the actual issue, but will let us find out where the issue actually lies.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the player command station type changes at a planet, it now properly removes all of the command-station-fleet ships that are not a part of the new command station's fleet design.<br />
** It was already properly doing this in terms of making ship counts drop for types that it now had too many of, but it wasn't clearing entire ship types that were disallowed.<br />
** There was already a destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command="true" xml flag that you could put on ships in order to make them not reduce their count to match whatever the new command station is.<br />
** Now there is also a new is_auto_scrapping_skipped_when_command_station_type_changes="true" that prevents this scrapping logic from happening at all if the type isn't a match to the new command station fleet type.<br />
*** This is pretty important for things like the Zenith Power Generator, or other capturables, which are not part of the fleet design but should remain. Same for anything you might buy from the Zenith Trader.<br />
*** This has been applied to all the relevant structures and ships so that they shouldn't disappear, but that hasn't been explicitly tested, so please let us know if you see problems with those sorts of things.<br />
** Also please note that losing your command station doesn't cost you any units. It's not until you rebuild the command station as a different type (switching from economic to miltiary, for instance) that it changes what you're allowed to have.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 and AnnoyingOrange for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the fleet definition would show a zero cap, it no longer shows you that in the fleet tooltip. This is for things like command stations that were switched, or old turret types from an old command station type, etc.<br />
** Essentially it was just extra visual clutter for no reason (well, the reason was that it was an oversight).<br />
<br />
* Corrected a tooltip in the lobby to note the new default that there are three battlestations on each planet that you would capture.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of visual glitches with the Zenith Trader:<br />
** The notification at the top bar now says "Zenith Trader" rather than "Zenith ???".<br />
** Some of the items for sale on the sidebar now have sidebar abbreviations so that they can fit on one line properly.<br />
** Rather than saying "unnamed" for the fleet name, it says "Zenith Trader," so you can tell where that's coming from.<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.864 Humanity Strikes Back ==<br />
(Released June 3rd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Some minor tweaks to the Simple and Realistic map types to decrease connectivity<br />
<br />
* Dyson Antagonizers now only spawn on Intensity 8 or higher, and are less frequent<br />
<br />
* A new Instigator Base type has been added that strengthens the Warden Fleet.<br />
** Thanks to kesseleth for thinking this up and also implementing it!<br />
<br />
* Add one more Basic Quickstart, as well as three Moderate Quickstarts.<br />
** Two Moderates are returning (with some changes) and the third is new.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug causing crippled mobile factories to still be able to produce ships if engineers assist them.<br />
<br />
* Put in two separate instances of defensive coding to prevent index out of range exceptions.<br />
** One is in Inner_CheckForCollisionOrMakeEntityMove, and will simply identify the problem if we have one there, but it's unlikely we actually have on there.<br />
** The second is in the three DoForEntities methods on EntityCollection, and basically make it so that if they try to index beyond what they should (because of cross-threading competition, most likely), then it will just gracefully continue on.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in several layers of defensive code that should prevent null reference exceptions from happening in certain rare cases with the Warden fleet trying to pathfind around.<br />
** Thanks to MatthewYCR for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Hunter/Warden difficulty differentiation ===<br />
<br />
* Give the Hunter Fleet some bonus income independent of the AI for intensity >= 7<br />
<br />
* Give Hunter and Warden fleets an Overconfidence Ratio; hunter/warden fleets will overestimate their strengths at lower difficulties<br />
<br />
* Hunter and Warden fleets now choose less effective targets to shoot at lower difficulties<br />
<br />
=== Human Player Balance Shifts ===<br />
<br />
* The default number of battlestations per planet is now 3, rather than 2. This should make it so that you have an easier time defending your planets without having to capture SO darn many other planets. And there's nothing that really says you have to use every ounce of those battlestations' capacity, so if you're doing well then you can use this opportunity to be more choosy about exactly which kinds of turrets you build out of them, rather than maximizing constantly.<br />
** Generally we've been getting the sense that on difficulty 7 things have been a bit on the difficult size, mainly in terms of the AI being able to mobilize more stuff than you, and you feeling perpetually poor, which is not a good feeling to have on the "standard" difficulty. Difficulty 7 has been coming out more like between difficulty 8 and 9 from the first game is the feeling, at least recently, and that has to do with the ability you have to defend yourself instead of the AI being clever or whatever else.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the most recent report and suggestions.<br />
<br />
* Human Cryogenic Pods now give 7500 energy instead of 5000.<br />
** Rather than being forced to have 10 of these on your starting planet, it now lets you choose between 0 and 30 of them. The default is still 10.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* On your home planet, the starting positions of the cryogenic pods and the home human settlements are way closer to your actual home command station, and thus stay under your forcefield a lot longer.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Human Home Settlements now give 520 metal per second rather than 280 metal per second.<br />
** There is also now a slider on the setup for the human factions in the lobby that lets you configure if you want the default 2 of these, or as few as 0 or as many as 5.<br />
** It's worth noting that this is essentially like an economic boost slider, in a lot of respects, except that it has more to do with the early game than the entire game, AND it has potential disastrous consequences in AIP. Much more interesting than the economic multiplier in the first game.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The forcefield on the home human planets is now scale 5 instead of 4 (normal forcefields are scale 3).<br />
** This provides a much longer window before your shields are low enough that your stuff under it can be shot up (particularly the cryo pods), while still keeping the shields-shrink mechanic consistent.<br />
** Especially with how the cryo pods have moved more inward anyway, this really should keep them pretty safe against a lot of incursions.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Energy Boosts:<br />
** Military Command Stations now provide 20k energy, with an added 5k energy per mark level, rather than 2k and 2k.<br />
** Economic Command Stations now provide 100k energy, with an added 20k per mark level, rather than 10k and 10k.<br />
** Logistical Command Stations now provide 50k energy, with an added 50k per mark level, rather than 25k and 25k.<br />
** For comparison, the basic Energy Collector produces 150k energy, and the Zenith Power Generator produces 600k energy.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for reporting the energy shortages that were now likely to be common in standard play simply because of how many more units you have in play using up that energy.<br />
<br />
* Citadels:<br />
** Citadel Shields 125,000 -> 175,000.<br />
** Citadel Energy Consumption 50,000 -> 30,000.<br />
** All Citadel shots per salvo doubled, excluding Inhibitor which is only increased 50% (it was higher than the others by a fair bit already).<br />
<br />
== Version 0.863 Control of Capturables ==<br />
(Released May 31st, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== New Lobby Settings for Controlling Gameplay ===<br />
<br />
* Added new setting to the Scouting section of the lobby options: Max Planets To Scout At Once<br />
** Depending on the topography of your map, capturing a planet may cause a TON of planets to suddenly be revealed. Rather than this getting TOO crazy and showing you the whole map after you capture one planet, this lets it be more gradual. The default is 8.<br />
** Ranges from 3 to 40.<br />
** This is a good example of the new types of things we can do thanks to the Lobby Options tab, which we couldn't cleanly do before using the regular game settings (because of multiplayer sync, and the potential for abuse with mid-game changes, etc).<br />
** Note that this is so far untested, so let us know if there are bugs.<br />
** Thanks to Mckloshiv and BadgerBadger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* A new capturables section has been added to the lobby options, with 6 different options in there that you can now tune.<br />
** This is one of the first examples of an option that affects mapgen seeding but not then the gameplay after that.<br />
** These basically let you control how many of each type of fleet you'd like to have out in the galaxy, in a multiplier-like fashion.<br />
** It also explains what all the kinds of fleets are, and what their role is in the game, so that's kind of a self-teaching moment, which is nice.<br />
** As one example, it lets you turn off basically all the officer fleets (all but one of them) by setting the multiplier for that to 0x, and you could then double or triple the number of regular fleets to compensate. This would let you have a very hero-less sort of game style, if you don't like the big centerpiece flagships being there at all. Or of course you could completely reverse it, and make it very hero-centric with only two (in that case) transport-based fleets, and instead have all the rest be officer-style.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring this addition, which lets people have more the flavor of game they want.<br />
<br />
* Added a new slider setting to the capturables section of the options menu in the lobby: Basic Battlestations Per Planet<br />
** Your command stations give very few turrets for defending themselves (except the Military variant), so in order to defend yourself you'll want to capture battlestations (which come with LOADS of turrets and other defensive goodies).<br />
** Since you have to capture territory to get a battlestation for defending territory... it makes a lot of sense to have more than just one on any planets that have them. The default is 2, but you can have up to 4, or make things really hard and just have one.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and others for inspiring this new flexibility.<br />
<br />
* Added a new slider setting to the capturables section of the options menu in the lobby: Citadels Per Planet<br />
** Similar to the basic battlestations, these provide defensive goodies and turrets to help defend your planets. However, since the citadels themselves are also giant fortresses in their own right, giving only one per planet seems to make the most sense for most cases. But if you want to grant yourself more, you can!<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and others for inspiring this new flexibility.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts Return ===<br />
<br />
* Quick Starts have been added back into the game, and now function again.<br />
** However, we had to create a whole new set of them, since the old quick starts were all in the old savegame format and also didn't really have settings that make sense anymore, anyway.<br />
** The order for the categories of basic, moderate, and harder is now in the order you would naturally expect (1,2,3), and then the Fun With Factions are later on. As will any other generalized quick starts be.<br />
** We have only added in three quick starts thus far, all in the basic category. The others we'll work on soon.<br />
*** One has the classic fleet as the starting situation, with a difficulty 6 AI and 100 planets on a realistic map.<br />
*** The next has the classic fleet, with two difficulty 6 AIs and a 120 planet Octopus map.<br />
*** The last has the raid fleet, with one difficulty 7 AI, and then also the Zenith Trader wandering around. Clusters microcosm map.<br />
** Thanks<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Minor Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* A variety of changes have been made to the map generation code and interface so that the number of planets allowed per galaxy is now shown as a slider, and is properly enforced at all times.<br />
** The actual map types have also had their minimum and maximum numbers of planets brought inwards some -- up from 10 in most cases to 40 for the minimum, and down from 200+ to 120-200 on most of them. For Realistic, which is particularly slow to generate right now, it has a cap of 100.<br />
** All of this should prevent some of the long-running slowness that could be encountered previously and that would lead to strangeness if it was taking 5-10 seconds to generate the basic outline of a map.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Also put in some defensive code for cases where potentially there could be an error happening in mapgen if it was aborted partway through, and thus didn't have a parent galaxy for a planet it was trying to find the neighbors for.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The escape key now works in the lobby to close it.<br />
** For whatever reason it doesn't work to close the add factions popup, but we can deal with that another time.<br />
** Thanks to dv = i ln(w0 / wf) for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix divide by 0 in PlanWave<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code to prevent errors when trying to find out the strength or contents of a ship that has a null fleet or other similar issues.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo in the Direct Waves tooltip.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new HandlePostSavegameLoadLogic method that gets called on World_AIW2 after a savegame is loaded, giving us a chance to fix any problems in it.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the DoGameStartLogic method for galaxy settings to allow for this to be called when it's a string value that has been set.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoAfterSavegameLoadLogic method for galaxy settings to allow for these to do fixes to existing savegames that might have some issue.<br />
<br />
* When the "Ally To AI" option is on, now any allies of the AI will automatically ally with you as well. So this means AI Instigators, etc, become your friends as well.<br />
** This also retroactively fixes itself in existing savegames.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo that was causing the warden difficulty to come before the warden type in the lobby settings.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking a faction in the add faction window now adds it without you having to click it and then click ok.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the factions tab of the lobby where if you were clicking between two factions of the same type (for example, marauders), then any dropdowns used by those two factions would not be properly updated to the real values of the new faction when you click from the other faction.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Until now, if savegames in the old pre-0.850 branch were attempted to load in the new game, then it would just silently do nothing. Now it throws up a visible error telling you that the savegame is an out of date format.<br />
** Thanks to BandDrinks for the savegame that led us to finding this.<br />
<br />
* The test chamber, which was broken during the lobby upheaval, is now fully functional again.<br />
** Interestingly, for some reason you can control both your units and enemy units. Nifty, I guess?<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with clusters microcosm map types where it was trying to get a setting to display that wasn't actually used in that map type.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the list of "things in my fleet" to not include command stations and some other things like that.<br />
** Normally that already wouldn't be showing, but if you had switched the kind of command station on a planet, then in particular it would show the other types in a way that was not helpful.<br />
<br />
* The scrap units hotkey (and a variety of other hotkeys that should not have been active) no longer work in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The lobby now properly shows the human-readable text names for things in dropdowns on the factions tab. This makes them way more clear.<br />
** Additionally, the lobby now shows tooltips for individual line items in dropdowns on the factions tab if those have been set up for the table in question.<br />
*** This is super useful for the starting fleet for the player, and the AI types for the AI, etc.<br />
<br />
* The AI Difficulty table now has a description field which tries to explain what each difficulty level means. This is now shown in the lobby tooltips for those.<br />
** Note that warden and hunter fleet difficulties don't show anything yet.<br />
<br />
==== Ability To See What Command Station Fleets Consist Of Before Creating Them ====<br />
<br />
* For fleet centerpieces that you can construct from the sidebar and which have non-procedural fleet designs attached to them (for both of these categories, the command stations are the only things at the moment), you can now see what their constructed fleet will be like once they are created.<br />
** Basically, the upshot is that for command stations you can now see what their fleets would be before you create them. That's... kinda important info! And was causing people to not know that essentially they could get some extra military firepower by using the military command station, for instance.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.862 Lobby Overhaul, Knockback, Nanocaust, and the Final Battle ==<br />
(Released May 29th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add Notification for any Raid Engines that are alerted. Untested, but hopefully it works?<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it<br />
<br />
=== Complete Lobby Overhaul ===<br />
<br />
* The entire lobby has been redone from scratch, and now works much better as well as having a more visually-pleasing style, and fitting a lot more information in in a less-overwhelming way, and being more modder-friendly than before.<br />
** There are some bits that still need fixing up, please see here for the known todo list at the moment: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=20151<br />
<br />
* The map configuration now actually gets saved into your local settings file so that it's the same the next time you load back into the lobby.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" (those on/off switches on the Options tab in the lobby) have been removed, and a new system under the hood has been added which allows for us to do boolean or integer data in a much more robust fashion.<br />
<br />
* The Wave Composition, Wave Warning, Threat Waves, Cross Planet Waves, Direct Waves, Reconquest waves, and Shark A and B settings are no longer on the AI directly, but are instead under Options in the lobby.<br />
** This allows for those to be more clearly set apart as advanced options, and also makes it so that when you have multiple AIs they all share these particular pieces of behavior (which is in general desired for a variety of reasons).<br />
<br />
* For the settings for factions, and the settings in the Options tab of the lobby, EVERYTHING is no longer dropdowns. Now there are integer sliders, bool checkboxes, and so on.<br />
<br />
* Previously it wasn't possible to mod in custom fields for factions and have them display in the UI without also altering the lobby code. Yikes! Now you can directly just add stuff in the xml and it shows up, same as with the settings elsewhere.<br />
<br />
* In the faction xml, the team colors no longer have special secondary custom field entries. This was duplicative and confusing, and previously was just done in order to make the ui lobby code simpler. We have a better way now.<br />
<br />
* The AI Hunter and Warden fleets no longer show up in the lobby as distinct entries. Their small amount of data is now under the main (now singular) AI faction that they are related to.<br />
** Since we want to have multiple AIs, but not endless clutter, it's very convenient for UI purposes to have the AIs just show as one line item per AI with their hunters and wardens wrapped into one entry.<br />
** This doesn't actually change the reality of underlying gameplay, but each hunter or warden looks to the AI that is most recently preceding them in the list of factions in order to get their settings.<br />
** It's possible in some circumstances (from well before now) for a warden to be getting some donations from some AI faction that it wasn't originally tied to, and that's fine. All of that still works, even though the original settings from the lobby came from one specific AI faction.<br />
<br />
* The warden and hunter factions now inherit the central color from their preceding AI faction (that they are initially tied to), and then have their own custom trim color.<br />
** Previously, all the hunter and warden factions were showing themselves with the same colors as the first hunter or warden faction, which is no longer a thing.<br />
** This is particularly useful for civil wars with the AIs, since now you can tell whose wardens and hunters are whose, and thus why they are fighting.<br />
<br />
* Ever hit a point while working on some code where you go "how did this ever work in the first place?"<br />
** Well, things like the Starting Fleet selection for players were one of those things. Clearly it worked, and worked well, but things were so sprawling and have changed so much that the method for making it work is entirely different now (and hopefully easier to follow for anyone who wants to set up "table subsets" in the future.<br />
** This was probably another example of some custom code in the old lobby that was redirecting some values from the more generic case to a more specific case. But now that all the data is xml-driven, that old lobby code was missing and so hence likely the confusion. Now it can be just directly driven, at any rate, which is great.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the nanocaust where it would start throwing errors after you win the game.<br />
<br />
* Setting the color of the player faction now fully properly works in the lobby.<br />
** Not only is it using the nice color-picker interface for all that stuff, but it's actually updating the display and the game, versus before it was just only ever using your values from your local profile. It still defaults to that, but you can now override that.<br />
<br />
* The debug setting for setting more than one AI type up in the lobby has been removed. You can simply add more AI types directly now. Hooray!<br />
<br />
* As part of all the lobby changes, you can now have any number of factions that you wish to in a galaxy without running out of room due to the way the interface is set up.<br />
<br />
=== Nanocaust Buffs ===<br />
<br />
* Give the Nanocaust stronger defensive fleets when the Hive is under attack. <br />
* Give the Nanocaust more income.<br />
* Created ships start in Attacker_Full. <br />
* Nanocaust ships should not start patrolling until there are no enemies on the planet<br />
* The Nanocaust is not allowed to kill Command Stations until it has a significant advantage on a planet<br />
** Prompted by discussions with Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the a bunch of the Nanocaust's weapons weren't firing due to some missing XML<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
=== New Ship Mechanic ===<br />
<br />
* Knockback (translocation for AI War veterans) has been put in the game!<br />
<br />
* The knockback mechanic has two methods of functioning:<br />
** The first calculates the knockback direction based on the angle between the ship that fired the shot and the shot that hit (aka directly towards or away from your ship) and functions with all types of weapons: single target, laser, self-centered AoE (tesla ships), and enemy centered AoE (Seige frigates).<br />
** The second calculates the knockback direction only for secondary targets hit by an AoE (non-laser) weapon. Ships will be pushed or pulled towards the point where the shot hit, making enemy ships group up together to make other AoE effects more potent.<br />
<br />
* Each method works with both pulling ships towards, and pushing ships away from the target.<br />
<br />
* Knockback is currently only limited by mass. There is a maximum mass that will be able to be knocked back, and the closer a ship is to that maximum mass, the less knockback the ship will take (down to a minimum of 50% of the listed knockback). The equation for this is Effective Knockback = Knockback * ( 1 - ( Ship Mass / (2 * Mass Limit ) ) )<br />
** As an example: If a knockback had a strength of 1000 and a mass limit of 4, a fleet ship of 0.2 mass would take 975 knockback, and a guardian of 4 mass would take 500 knockback<br />
<br />
* Ships are immune to knockback if they are: Too heavy, are protected by a bubble shield, are projecting a bubble shield, are currently tractored, are immobile (turrets), or are immune to damage.<br />
<br />
==== For Modders ====<br />
<br />
* XML tags are as follows for creating ships with knockback:<br />
** knockback_to_ships_mass_tx_less_than="Mass Limit" - Needed for knockback to function at all, sets the max mass that will be affected<br />
** base_knockback_per_shot="Base Knockback" - For markless and mark 1 ships, this is the knockback that the shot will deal. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** added_knockback_per_shot_per_mark="Added Knockback" - For mark 2 ships and up, this is how much extra knockback is added to the shots. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** knockback_at_target_location="true/false" - Setting this to true means that AoE weapons will make ships be pushed or pulled away from the center of the AoE. Defaults to false. Must have a defined AoE on the weapon for this to work.<br />
<br />
* C# methods<br />
** int EntitySystem.CalculateKnockbackPowerAgainst( GameEntity_Squad Target ) - Returns 0 if the weapon has no knockback effects, or if the ship is immune. Otherwise return the knockback from the equation above.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.TakeKnockback( int KnockbackAmount, float angle ) - For custom knockback effects, this method ignores any convention of towards or away, and just pushes the ship at an angle that you want. This method has no immunity checking in it currently, so make sure the target is actually mobile, not bubble shielded, and not tractored.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.AddKnockbackSourceForFramePlan( int KnockbackAmount, EntitySystem FiringSystemOrNull, GameEntity_Shot ShotThatHitOrNull, bool KnockbackAtTarget, ArcenSimContext Context ) - If KnockbackAtTarget is false, log the source of the knockback from FiringSystemOrNull.GetWorldLocation() and power from int KnockbackAmount. If KnockbackAtTargetis true, check that the ship this is called from is not the same ship that ShotThatHitOrNull hit, then log the source from ShotThatHitOrNull.Target.Ref.WorldLocation and the power from int KnockbackAmount. Get's called by TakeDamage automatically.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Antagonized Dyson Sphere rebalance. <br />
** Every so often the Dyson Antagonizer will level up and increase the income of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere. To compensate, the initial strength of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere will be weaker<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with Democracy<br />
<br />
* Increase the Macrophage's base income<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the comments<br />
<br />
* Instigators are now allied to the player in Friendly AI mode<br />
<br />
* Tweak the anti-minor-faction wave code to make sure the waves are all at a minimum size. Also increase the anti-minor-faction waves against the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to Oval for pointing some more code paths out<br />
<br />
* Keep the Main Menu Music in the Game Lobby; don't switch to 'in-game' music till you really start the game<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the request<br />
<br />
* On difficulty >= 7, the AI will start dumping most of its budget into the Hunter Fleet when you are attacking the AI Overlord or an adjacent planet<br />
** The feeling I get is that the actual AI Overlord combat isn't as exciting as it could be, so hopefully this will be more interesting.<br />
<br />
==== Mines ====<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mine types from 1 minimum, 2 maximum, to 2 minimum, 3 maximum in "Minelayer" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mines in "Minelayer" and "OtherDefenseFocus" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Stations now have 20 Paralysis Mines instead of 10 normal Mines.<br />
** Existing Stations in save games will still have their old Mines in addition.<br />
<br />
* Area Mine damage 20,000 -> 2,000, hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Differentiates it from normal Mines.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Stops it from paralysing an absurd amount of ships.<br />
<br />
* Area and Paralysis Mine explosion radius 500 -> 1,000.<br />
** These mines had a tendency to detonate on the first target that came in range, and not hit much around that. This should hopefully let them get more out of each detonation.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine paralysis time 8s -> 12s.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Parasite damage 20 -> 60, reload time 6s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Paralysers now have the correct target evaluator and should be better at actually paralysing.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboat cost_for_ai_to_purchase increased 25%.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers should now be shot at automatically, if nothing else is really around as a target.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Doubled the health of Logistical and Military Command Stations.<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagship health increased 25%.<br />
<br />
* Guard Post metal cost increased 10x.<br />
** Solely so Metabolisation grants you more metal from them.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of "Spire Core" Tech.<br />
<br />
==== Translocation ====<br />
<br />
* Ark One now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 2000, increases by 500 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Stations now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 3000, increases by 750 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station reload time 6s -> 2s, shots per salvo 6 -> 8, damage 1,300 -> 800.<br />
** Allows it to use Translocation more effectively. Is also a damage upgrade.<br />
<br />
==== Reinforcement ====<br />
<br />
* Removed the increased turret limit that AI planets with guard posts get.<br />
<br />
* Slight increase to the bonus strike craft a planet can reinforce per guard post, 25% extra --> 30% extra<br />
** This still lets the AI build up a "wall", but strike craft are different from turrets in that there's more gameplay to them (i.e. they become threat if you outnumber the AI too much)<br />
** Thanks to the Discord for the talks, Puffin for posting on the bug tracker.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories could produce ships beyond a fleet's cap if you were fast forwarding during construction.<br />
<br />
* Put periods at the end of all the Descriptions of minor factions and map types for consistency<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Probably fixed the bug with marauder outposts causing savegames to break. Have not tested it, but found a definite bug in the code (one variable being serialized twice but deserialized only once) and fixed that, so unless there is also a second bug in this area it should be good to go now.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Hunter Fleet budget from Instigator bases wasn't being spent <br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where normal waves weren't sending<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* If you have 0 hacking points and haven't finished the hack, the hack should now fail instead of giving you negative hacking points<br />
** Thanks to x4000 for the mantis ticket, but I assume someone else originally reported the problem (on Steam?)<br />
<br />
* Paralyzing a ship with a cloaking device no longer gives it full cloaking points once it's unparalyzed again. Particularly infuriating with the Raid starter fleet, the Cursed golem stuns for just enough time to have ships recloak before the next shot fires.<br />
** Minor downside - If you manage to stun ships with an AoE effect (Nanoswarm is the only ship capable of doing this off the top of my head), it will no longer be briefly unstealthed. Very minor since this situation happening is unreliable at best.<br />
<br />
* Marauder Mark 3 Outposts once again spawn Raiders<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Avoided a bug that would temporarily break save games once the game version rolled around to 1.0<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "Singular Freaky Surprises" map generation item for real this time. Golems should be a common appearance for Golemite AI now, and rare (1 / 1001) for other AI types again.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI wasn't seeding its full compliment of Strikecraft on most planets<br />
** This is a giant buff to the AI's initial defenses<br />
<br />
== Version 0.861 Strength Of Remains==<br />
(Released May 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Added a new PlannedWaveOptions struct that is great for sending specific groups of options to the PlanWave() function without it having a million optional parameters.<br />
** This also lets us have specific static Create() methods set up that have just the parameters that we want to set, which reduces the chances of bugs via typos or misalignments.<br />
<br />
=== Gameplay Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* When "Ally to AI" mode is selected, the player gets vision of all planets at the beginning of the game<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* Ships that get unloaded from fleet centerpieces now inherit orders such as wormhole move commands and behaviors such as pursuit mode.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Turrets and ships that are remains, not claimed yet, crippled, or in the process of being built are now not shown as strength in either galaxy view or local view.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and Trillioneyes for noting that this made it hard for players to judge at a glance when the AI is outnumbering them.<br />
<br />
* Cross planet waves now display the source planet of the wave to match the other wave types.<br />
<br />
* Improved the feel of dropdowns by making it so that you can click the dropdown a second time to hide it, just as you can in most other applications in the world.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that caused things that produced multiple types of drones (certain AI guard posts, AI drone guardians) to produce only 1 drone at a time and at a reduced rate.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Anti-Player Zombies were also hostile to the AI. Note that this fix only affects newly created game, existing games will still suffer from this bug.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a probable fix to exceptions that could happen inside UpdatePositionAndSize() on the tooltips. This is almost always indicative of some worse problem, but it's worth having this not compounding the problem at least.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the most recent report of this.<br />
<br />
* If there are errors during map generation (sometimes this is "valid", in the case of things like too many factions for the available planets), it now pops up a harmless but hopefully-informative error message log and doesn't just start the game in an invalid state.<br />
** Long-term obviously we want it to not be in a position to generate an error like this, but realistically modders can do all sorts of things and we need errors to happen gracefully.<br />
** Have tested this and it works as expected. However, it requires that all errors during mapgen use a new method which is Engine_AIW2.Instance.LogErrorDuringCurrentMapGen() if it would previously have used ArcenDebugging.ArcenDebugLog( Verbosity.ShowAsError ) or equivalent. If there are any remaining cases of the latter, then those would not get caught by this new code.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting the issue.<br />
<br />
* Previously there was a bug where if you set the number of planets in the lobby, but then just hit Start Game without hitting Generate Map first, it would not actually use the correct number of planets.<br />
** This was... kinda old, kinda-new. If there isn't enough room to seed whatever factions you have selected, it's now super duper fast to change the number of planets and hit start game and see if it works, etc. Without slowing anything else down in the lobby responsiveness in general.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where if you had one faction selected and then changed the faction, the colors would not update properly for them in the lobby.<br />
** This was not a problem limited to just the colors, and it probably was display-only in terms of problems, and it doesn't solve the issue with the human player colors, but this is still nice to have fixed.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The various custom data for the individual map types (how many arms on the octopus, etc) now all do a much better job of actually retaining and showing their proper values, and never have a stale view on the interface itself.<br />
** This was another old and new problem, but is now fixed for both cases.<br />
** Thanks to hawk and BadgerBadger for the original reports.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug in the TextMeshPro dropdowns where if one was in a sub-panel and opened, then clicking another one to open the other one would not close the first one. It led to much visual confusion.<br />
** Why exactly this was happening is actually a bit of a mystery, but we just gave the dropdowns some memory of "dropdowns that think they are still open," and those all close themselves when a new dropdown is clicked. Problem solved.<br />
** Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, there was an extra custom field definition for the human player colors compared to the other faction colors, and this wasn't really needed now and probably just confused things.<br />
** So removed and consolidated that, although it didn't fix the sync issues with human player colors not being settable.<br />
<br />
* Integrated revised versions of the Steamworks .so files for linux, and the related files for OSX as well.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for chasing down what needed to change on Linux; please let us know if it still isn't showing you as logged in properly in the new builds in either of those two OSes, because that would likely mean that something didn't get copied properly in our build scripts.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.860 The Lobby Ate My Factions?? ==<br />
(Released May 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Raid Engines could trigger a null reference if set off by the Dark Spire<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the event that for some reason the game tries to queue a GameCommand with an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 (this seems to happen from time to time during the game and now once in the lobby), it will complain at the time of it trying to queue it, and give a stack trace from there, and not actually do the queuing of it.<br />
** This should help us figure out when and why these things are occasionally happening. It's probably related to a pooling error of some sort, but it's hard to be sure. If the commands are valid at this point and then later have ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 when being read back, then we know we have a different problem entirely and can approach that from another way. Either way we'll start having more info soon on this rare and elusive error.<br />
<br />
* Put in a second place where we now early-assign the ExecuteOnFrameNumber when GameCommands are created. This may then later get reassigned in OnServer_CheckForSendingServerBatchMessageToClients, which is fine, but this should hopefully prevent those rare issues where a command falls through the cracks and has an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 for some reason.<br />
<br />
* Math fixes from WeaponMaster:<br />
** Fixed claim repairing being way out of wack, causing 500,000 metal cost Arks to be built in less than a second by a single engineer.<br />
** Also fixed self construction metal flow healing, metal now heals for a ratio of hp:metal like claim and repair flows now.<br />
** Also made it so self construction metal flows (and the assist construction flows helping it) heal shield too.<br />
** Note: it's possible that things are now wildly too expensive to claim, now that you actually have to pay the metal for them to claim them. If that's the case, please let us (Puffin?) know, and we'll adjust their claim costs.<br />
<br />
=== More Lobby Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Improved the lobby error messaging when it can't find a custom field for a map type so that it now says what it was looking for. Helpful for anyone making custom map types.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the Simple map type where it was trying to look at a setting for the realistic map type (and then not even use it) and thus was throwing an error now that the settings are per-map-type rather than being stored in the global central settings file.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the "remove a faction" bit of code, it now throws a cleaner and more informative error if for some reason it's out of range. It doesn't fix the problem, but should help us fix the problem in the future if we don't find it in the meantime.<br />
** Thanks to Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The long-range planning cycles (background threads) are no longer run when you're in the lobby.<br />
** This probably makes next to no difference to anything, but might make a few things slightly faster or even avoid some potential issues in the future.<br />
<br />
* Some changes have been made to make the dropdown selection changes more synchronous (instant) rather than on a slight time delay. This allows for a few things to be controlled a bit better... in theory.<br />
<br />
* Wow, a whole heck of a lot of wrappering and rework has been done on dropdowns to make it more clear when and how data is being set.<br />
** We were actually still having the same problem with factions getting erased as soon as they were added in the prior build, along with some other known issues like dropdown stuff getting out of sync quickly that we did know about.<br />
** All of this is traceable back to how the dropdowns handle data updates to themselves, and it's another question of "how did this ever work?" This one was a Chris area, not a Keith one, just in case anyone gets the wrong idea that any of the early code problems were all from one source (far from it).<br />
** Issues fixed:<br />
*** still couldn't add more factions<br />
*** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
*** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
** Remaining known issues:<br />
*** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct.<br />
*** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby, although it's not causing errors per se.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.859 Lobby Raid ==<br />
(Released May 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
Note: We no longer plan to break savegames going forward from here. Looks like that won't be needed, and it would break a bunch of bug reports. So hooray!<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Mobile Support Flagships now show that they are building things in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the analysis of this problem<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Objectives (in the intel tab) for capturing battlestations and flagships now shows the supported units<br />
** This was annoying me<br />
<br />
* Both of the modal popup types (the OK window and the Yes/No windows) now support scrolling text, aka way more info than before. Before if the text got too long, it would just cut off.<br />
** This is useful for all sorts of things, such as if we want to have things like header items that you can click (AIP display, for instance) that would give you a readout of a bunch of new details about the state of all the AIs (salvage amounts, reprisal status, whatever else we feel like).<br />
<br />
* There is now a "tall" version of the modal "OK dialog" that is able to tell you info. This is particularly useful for info dumps versus just a quick notice regarding whatever it was going to tell you.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a variety of fonts that were too small, particularly for dropdowns, in the lobby in recent beta versions.<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Allow the Dyson Sphere to free itself if it was reconquered. Otherwise you have to babysit the Dyson Sphere once you free it<br />
** Note this may cause the AI and Dyson Sphere to fight more often, since the AI is apt to try to recapture it repeatedly. May need further tweaks<br />
<br />
* The AI will now wait until a wave is "strong enough" before sending it, rather than potentially sending very small or empty waves<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Allow the Nanocaust to kill Black Hole Machines, since they were otherwise an excessively effective counter to the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting this, including Mosrael<br />
<br />
=== New Features/Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Add a "Ally player to AI" option in the game lobby.<br />
** This prevents you from playing the game normally, and is intended for people who want to play the game in Sandbox mode, watching the AI fight various minor factions, or an AI Civil War (or both)<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines function and are in use again.<br />
<br />
* Like we have had description_appender_dll and description_appender_type for quite some time, we now also have per_second_custom_logic_dll and per_second_custom_logic_type.<br />
** The former calls void AddToDescriptionBuffer( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntityOrNull, GameEntityTypeData RelatedEntityTypeData, ArcenDoubleCharacterBuffer Buffer ) on a IGameEntityDescriptionAppender.<br />
** The new one calls void RunEntitySpecialPerSecondLogic( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntity, ArcenSimContext Context ) on a IGameEntityPerSecondSpecialLogic.<br />
** This allows us to have all sorts of crazy AI watcher units, including AI Eyes or whatever else, that run some completely custom logic once per second. It's easy for modders to define, etc, etc.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Don't allow drones to generate salvage<br />
** Suggested by Democracy<br />
<br />
* Player engineers are no longer able to repair friendly zombie ships.<br />
** A previous change to make zombies attrition every minute was effectively just a metal sink because they were still able to be repaired.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where hydra head ships (that spawn from hydras such as Stingray Hydra) weren't properly attritioning or being set to pursuit mode.<br />
** They will die faster thanks to the attrition working now, but hopefully be more useful as they'll chase enemies automatically.<br />
** For modders, this can be enabled for any ship by defining self_attritions_X_percent_per_second_if_parent_ship_not_on_planet="X" and adding the tag always_self_attritions="true" to your ship. Doing this for any ship except those spawned from another ship dying is kinda pointless though.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Factories and Support Fleets were spending less metal than intended when producing more than one type of ship at once.<br />
<br />
* Fix a logic problem with neutral planet hacking which prevented you from being able to Watch-Hack a neutral planet<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Factories will now only produce strikecraft and frigates for fleet centerpieces that are fully claimed.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a TextMesh Pro setting to "disable warnings," the builds of the game will no longer complain about missing glyphs in fonts that don't need them.<br />
<br />
* The debug output code for what a GameCommand contains now has its line breaks fixed up so that it's actually legible!<br />
** Also some options have been put in to make it output a bit more intelligently, ie only saying what it is doing and not all the empty things it isn't doing.<br />
<br />
=== Various Fixes and Changes to Zombie Fleets ===<br />
* There is now a defined minimum and maximum amount of zombie ships that get randomly sent out when zombies decide to raid another planet. This is currently set at 30 and 50 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The group of ships that get sent out when deciding to raid a planet is now randomized. Previously the ships that got selected to raid were always the first ones created on the planet, now the group that gets selected is chosen randomly.<br />
<br />
* Zombies that are in the process of going through a wormhole ("Raiding") are left out of patrol/raid logic so they don't get conflicting orders.<br />
<br />
* Planets that have less than 0.05 strength of hostile units on them (basically only a warp gate and command station) are considered not hostile and so zombies will run their patrol/raiding logic.<br />
<br />
* Zombies now correctly lose only 1% of their hp per minute. Previously, ships with high shields were losing much more hp per minute.<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Guts Revamp (Visually No Improvements Yet) ===<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the inner guts of how the lobby keeps track of changes that you're requesting, and how it then goes about updating and syncing the game and the UI, respectively.<br />
** It's a lot more responsive-feeling now, although we can get it even better than this. And it also provides a basis for us to be able to make this properly visually better soon.<br />
** This also fixes a number of problems that have existed where people in multiplayer making changes at the same time would have conflicts and lost data.<br />
** Essentially this is now doing differentials of changes rather than wholesale copies, and it keeps track of a separate "setup as per the lobby" that only the lobby can touch, and a "long term settings" that the game reads from later on.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a number of things with the map type sub-controls so that it is now fully modder-friendly, and multiplayer-safe.<br />
** You can now mod in you own map type sub controls without having to edit the central files (which of course would be overwritten next time there's a release).<br />
<br />
* Made the game way more robust when it comes to having a map set up that doesn't include any factions for whatever reason.<br />
** It's possible to make this happen in the lobby code if you mess up other things, and it's much easier to just have this be robust so that we can see the real errors.<br />
<br />
* A variety of the map types now have much easier-to-digest names for their options, and all map types now have proper spacing between the words in their names and their options.<br />
<br />
* A new settings option has been added to the Debug section: "Write Lobby Setup Changes To Log"<br />
** If something strange is going on with the lobby, in multiplayer or otherwise, this is a way for the log to have a variety of data sent about what changes are being requested, and when.<br />
<br />
* New options for writing the full contents of a GameCommand have been added, to get all the details of what's in each list being sent, etc. This is now used a variety of places that can benefit from that extra clarity (all error-reporting-related or otherwise debug stuff).<br />
<br />
* GameCommands have been expanded to allow for a third RelatedString, which is needed by some of the new lobby stuff.<br />
<br />
* Automatically-created controls (such as in dynamic interfaces like the lobby) now can have a string control code sent to them along with the two integer control codes.<br />
** This again is needed for the lobby, and makes some of the new modder-friendly map stuff possible.<br />
<br />
* Some data during mapgen was previously stored in the Factions object, and others in ConfigurationForFaction in the WorldSetup object, and still others off in settings, etc.<br />
** The game now properly stores all that data inside the WorldSetup object, so that it can be copied around and separate versions can be read at various times (for display versus for mapgen asynchronously, etc), and so that it plays nice with multiplayer.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen logging now includes a new entry for ControlledByPlayerAccounts_DuringGame, which is now split between Factions (for ingame) and the WorldSetup (for the lobby), as noted in the above note.<br />
<br />
* A ton of debugging data about the state of the WorldSetup objects, and the basic faction data as well, can now be exported via either ToString() or WriteDetailsToStringBuilder().<br />
** This lets us actually look inside and see what is happening, which is kinda relevant!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the initial fleet not being serialized properly in the WorldSetup.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section of the settings menu: "Show Debug Details Button In Lobby"<br />
** When enabled, a 'Debug Details' button appears in the lobby, which you can click to have it pop up all the relevant information about the current setup from a very low-level debugging style.<br />
<br />
* Some changes Chris has wanted to make for a VERY long time are now in under the hood in the lobby. Basically the game now only does a "partial" generation of the map whenever things change in the lobby, which means that the map generation is now vastly faster than before.<br />
** But as part of this, it has to go back and do the full generation of the map based on the final data when you actually click Start Game, and it now does that, too. This also has the benefit of being safer in terms of making sure things are ultra consistent with whatever the UI says when the game actually starts.<br />
<br />
* When you are changing things in the lobby that don't change the map topology _as it is visible in the lobby_, such as factions and conducts and faction options, it no longer causes the map to regenerate itself.<br />
** This feels more responsive by far, and in multiplayer (or if we get any super slow-to-generate maps in the future) it will have an amplified effect.<br />
** But also... this mysteriously fixes the problem we were having in the last few builds where you couldn't add factions.<br />
<br />
* The game now includes an implementation of DiffLib (https://github.com/lassevk/DiffLib), which it uses to calculate the differences between Setup states in the lobby export at the moment. Though certainly one imagines there could be other uses for this in some sort of other in-engine analysis data in the future, whether by us in some bowels of the UI for looking at enemy data, or something modders cook up.<br />
<br />
* Several lobby fixes, including to where we were setting the local player's color so that it wasn't getting out of sync. For multiplayer lobbies this will later need to be expanded further, but that's a task for later and not a huge deal right now.<br />
<br />
* '''Known lobby issues:'''<br />
** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct?<br />
** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby<br />
<br />
== Version 0.858 Hotfix: The Lobby... Ate My Galaxy? ==<br />
(Released May 9th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed the Vanguard Hydra Head benefiting from Heavy Tech instead of Light like their parent unit.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug in the prior version that threw invisible harmless errors while loading the game because it was trying to find the settings for the galaxy map before the settings had been properly loaded.<br />
<br />
* Guardians will now have a chance at spawning with waves. If maxGuardianTypes is larger than 0, a random value between 0 and maxGuardianTypes is chosen as the minGuardianTypes. Random bags of anyGuardians are chosen until the minimum is reached.<br />
** Right now guardians only get added if the strikecraft fail to completely fill numDifferentShipsToSpawn. This can be changed easily by removing the comparison ( chosenUnitTypes < numDifferentShipsToSpawn ) in both the if statement and the while loop.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug introduced in the prior build where if you changed anything in the lobby or even clicked to the factions tab of the lobby, then you'd get control of a ton of planets and be under fire on all of them and probably lose the game instantly as well. Very amusing in small doses, but that's quite enough, thanks, game. ;)<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, WeaponMaster, Gerard, Mosrael, and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.857 The AI Strikes Back... Hard ==<br />
(Released May 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* The name of the currently playing music track is now shown in the Escape menu, for people like me who can never remember the titles<br />
** Prompted by music nostalgia from Puffin and Democracy in discord<br />
<br />
* There are now Achievements for winning in Civil War mode<br />
** Untested, like most of the other Achievements<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now be less afraid of distant enemies<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now consider enemy forces when choosing how to route to a target, so they don't accidentally suicide into a heavily defended planet on the way to somewhere else<br />
<br />
* The AI now has an "overconfidence ratio", where on lower difficulties Threat will overestimate its strength when choosing whether it's strong enough to attack. This makes it more aggressive, but also more likely to lose when it attacks<br />
** Finding ways to differentiate the AI difficulties is good<br />
<br />
==== AI Civil Wars ====<br />
<br />
* An AI will only give resource to to its own Hunter and Warden Fleet(s)<br />
<br />
* The AI Civil War now includes Warden and Hunter fleets. Each AI's warden/hunter is now hostile to other AIs and other Hunter/Warden Fleets.<br />
<br />
==== AI Homeworld Battle Changes ====<br />
<br />
* If an AI homeworld is attacked:<br />
** AI Threat ships on the homeworld will fight to the death<br />
** Ships Guarding planets near to the homeworld will become Threat. The higher the difficulty the more planets will be turned to Threat.<br />
** Threat ships will converge on the homeworld. Threat already waiting against a strong target will just join the Hunter fleet<br />
** That AI's Hunter and Warden Fleets will immediately converge on the homeworld<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a number of people for noticing the AI homeworld battles could be dull, including Nameless Terror from Steam. Thanks to StarKelp for a helpful save game to let me test this.<br />
<br />
==== Changes to AI Reinforcement ====<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft were being counted as turrets when loaded in a guard post, limiting the amount of turrets the AI could rebuild<br />
* Fixed a bug where the strikecraft currently on an AI planet were calculated incorrectly, allowing the AI to infinitely reinforce strikecraft if it never built guardians<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft inside the AI Command Center were not being counted as guard strength for reinforcement<br />
** These bug fixes improve more defensive AI types like Turtle, as these two issues combined usually meant that the AI could never reinforce strikecraft or turrets<br />
<br />
* The AI can now reinforce an extra 25% strikecraft and Turrets per living guardpost on alerted planets<br />
** AI planets are alerted when there is a human command center adjacent to them<br />
** Destroying guardposts on planets next to human planets is now much more important, as they can reinforce to be much stronger than they started out as if left untouched<br />
<br />
* These are large changes that are mostly untested, let us know if this ends up making the game too hard or frustrating<br />
<br />
=== New Settings Options For Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Galaxy Camera setting: Extra Background Hexagon Intensity<br />
** If you would like the background to be more stylized hexagons, then you can turn this up.<br />
** Nobody was really asking for this, but Chris had mixed feelings about his defaults and so figured why not.<br />
<br />
* The previous amount of bloom on the galaxy map was a bit on the high side, with an intensity of 2.06. That has been reduced to a new default of 1.4.<br />
** However, a new setting allows you to configure it between 0.4 and 4, which are two fairly extreme ends of it.<br />
** New galaxy camera setting: Bloom Intensity<br />
*** How glowy would you like the galaxy map to appear? More looks more computer-screeny, but can be distracting depending on your contrast settings on your monitor.<br />
** Thanks to Badger and danny for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== New Debug Commands ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to decrease AIP<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to kill all AI units and structures on the currently viewed planet<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== When a flagship of yours gets crippled... ====<br />
<br />
* Having a Flagship crippled by the AI now gives the AI a nice burst of Salvage, enabling them to power up reprisal waves. This is intended as a penalty for losing Flagships.<br />
** Different flagship types generate different amount of salvage. Officer flagships generate more than Support or Transport, for example. The Regenerator Golem will generate much less salvage than other flagships<br />
** The AI will generate less salvage if it cripples a flagship on a neutral planet (but still some)<br />
*** All the tunables are in XML for this<br />
<br />
==== When you don't have enough energy... ====<br />
<br />
* Claimables that would cost you more energy than you have available now can't be claimed, and it shows that in their tooltip.<br />
** Previously it could just claim stuff and throw you into negative energy.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Similarly, if you don't have enough spare energy to create something out of a factory (strikecraft, frigates, whatever) then it will only build up to 100% and then will stop and not actually emerge.<br />
** Same with drone production; it won't produce the next drone, but just will stick at 100%.<br />
** In both cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Any units that are currently trying to self-construct, and you don't have enough energy for them (or negative energy in general) will completely stop constructing (unless they either don't consume energy or produce it).<br />
** In the relevant cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== AI Overlord Phase 2 ====<br />
<br />
* Now uses a Plasma Overdriver in place of the old Plasma Torpedo, affecting everything in a large radius.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Bolt damage 4,000 -> 6,000, shot count 40 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Fusion Bomb damage 30,000 -> 50,000, added 2x bonus multiplier vs targets of mass >= 5.<br />
<br />
==== Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Guardians on AI planets.<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian Fusion Bomb Bypass 0.6 -> 0.9.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian damage 350 -> 450.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian damage 1,000 -> 300, shot count 1 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Temperamental Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Fragmenting Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% for Tantruming Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tantruming Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Fragmenting Guardian Shard health increased 50%, damage 800 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian damage 1,200 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 220 -> 330.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Guardians now have a bonus multiplier vs albedo >= 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Guardian damage 3,500 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Increased health of Pike, Nucleophilic and Grenade Launcher Dire Guardians to match the others.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guardians, excluding Forcefield - still increased.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guardian shot count 5 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian explosion size 300 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Dire Pike Guardian damage 6,000 -> 4,000, shot count 3 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian shot count 3 -> 6.<br />
<br />
* Dire Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 1,300 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* AI Hunter / Killer shields 1,000,000 -> 2,000,000, Fusion Bomb shot count 25 -> 35.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for an AI Hunter / Killer to be chosen in place of a Dire Guardian.<br />
** This thing spawns as Mark 5 if it does, so be really careful.<br />
<br />
==== Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Guard Posts excluding Forcefield.<br />
<br />
* Increased health by 25% of Forcefield Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10, reload time 4s -> 3s, range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Sabot Guard Posts increase their bonus multiplier with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Guard Post damage 480 -> 240, shot count 8 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 1600 -> 2,200.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for non-Swarmer AI planets to have a Swarmer Guard Post.<br />
<br />
* Increased frequency a bit of Forcefield Guard Posts (as well as Forcefield Generators).<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Dire Sabot Guard Post damage 3,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guard Post shot count 6 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Parasite Guard Post damage 6,000 -> 3,000, shot count 12 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Spider Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 2,000, shot count 12 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 8,000 -> 10,000, shot count 3 -> 6, range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Gravity Guard Post damage 12,500 -> 2,000, reload time 1s -> 2s, shot count 1 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
==== Drones ====<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, damage 4,000 -> 8,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
==== Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Golems (Player and AI).<br />
<br />
* Increased health of all Arks.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% of all Spire Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Combat Factories.<br />
<br />
* Increased shields by 25% of all Citadels.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette shields 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Molotov explosion size 500 -> 650.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot base damage multiplier 3x -> 6x.<br />
<br />
==== Science, Tech and Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced Upgrade Costs of Battlestations and Citadels a bit.<br />
<br />
* Starting Science 20,000 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Science gained from Spire Archive Extraction 5,000 -> 8,000.<br />
<br />
* Increased secondary response strength of some AI hacks.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cap multipliers on Transport Flagships a bit.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a tooltip typo that incorrectly identified the StrikeCraft version of the Intragalactic Coordinator as increasing the turret cap.<br />
<br />
* Only explore new planets when a Player kills an command station. Otherwise the Nanocaust and Civil War were giving tons of free vision<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations can now build multiple energy collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting, and puffin and ptarth for debugging assistance<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug causing fleet centerpieces to not cost any metal to claim.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the metal cost to claim capturables, this was causing most capturable things to cost less metal than intended. <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hunter Fleet was refusing to enter defended planets<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the internal drone construction logic that was previously present in the 0.850+ branch, but which was really only rearing its head on the new internal versions. Curious.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the seeding of SingularFreakySurprises where the chance for a golem to appear was being rolled once per galaxy instead of once per planet.<br />
** No more galaxies full of golems.<br />
<br />
==== Trying and Failing To Fix The Lobby ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the lobby regenerates the galaxy map is now slightly less direct. Rather than just directly updating things every time any dropdown value changed or similar, it now queues up those changes cumulatively and then applies them all 100ms after the last change.<br />
** This is because we can have situations where one dropdown changes, causing others to change, and that was causing repeat and often incomplete commands to be sent.<br />
** This was what we thought the disappearing-factions bug from the last few builds was, and we assumed it had to do with the dropdowns handling onValueChanged differently. That may be the case, but we can't really see how that's the case from a code review.<br />
** So this does seem to help with not missing things like some of the smaller secondary data for factions for instance, but it wasn't the complete solution we had hoped it would be.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, put in some defensive code to prevent certain errors when the game is trying to show a row for a faction that is out of bounds.<br />
** We get a lot more info about what went wrong when this is happening, at least. These errors are also no longer silent, but instead pop up a good error message with a useful stack trace.<br />
<br />
* Split the internal CodeDirectiveTag int on the ArcenUI_CreateElementDirective struct into CodeDirectiveTag1 int and CodeDirectiveTag2 int.<br />
** The purpose of this is so that we no longer have to do any crazy bitshifting to get the data out of a single integer for the faction index and field index in the lobby. This approach was mathematically clever, but had legibility issues at bare minimum.<br />
** Various parts of the lobby were incorrectly reading the data back as just faction index with no bitshifting going on, and maybe that was correct for those fields (??), but we're not really sure and that lack of sureness is not worth a tiny bit smaller struct.<br />
** This may or may not fix some bugs, but at least things are clearer.<br />
<br />
* Did NOT manage to fix the lobby with all these various changes.<br />
** But have managed to make ourselves wonder how it ever functioned at all.<br />
** Simply opening the MORE options next to a faction will change what is available in there, fun fact. That broke as heck, and probably isn't completely new.<br />
** Going through all this is, on the plus side, giving us a vastly better idea of how we want to rearchitect the lobby from a technical standpoint while keeping as much of what is there as possible. It looks like the "new lobby" is going to be a feature for 0.900-era AI War 2, simply because of all this.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.856 Clever Girl ==<br />
(Released May 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Ships that are in the process of loading into the fleet centerpiece no longer collide with other ships when near the centerpiece; faster loading with less micromanaging required.<br />
<br />
* Beam weapons now optionally support maximum_number_of_targets_hit_per_shot in the XML.<br />
** If the max is defined, ships hit past the maximum split the damage of the maximum equally between all ships.<br />
*** As an example, if you had a 10,000 damage beam with a max of 2 targets and it hit 4 targets, each target would take 5,000 damage only ( 2 max / 4 hit ).<br />
<br />
* Tweak the text for some hacks to fit the text in boxes.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators now cost AIP when the AI kills them<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror on steam for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The AI is now allowed to send waves against Unowned but defended planets in Civil War mode. The AI also gets buffs to its "anti-other-AI-planet" waves in civil war mode.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy now have an Objective to destroy them<br />
<br />
* Changed the way science hacking scales to be more intuitive<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it.<br />
<br />
* When transferring units between factions, clear any previous orders and set the units to be in Attacker mode. This was causing issues when transferring units to the Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having crippled flagships on a planet could sometimes cause hacks to fail<br />
** Someone complained about this but I don't remember who it was.<br />
<br />
==== Improved AI Attack Coordination ====<br />
* When the AI chooses targets for the Threat Fleet, it has a mild preference for attacking planets with critical player structures like Zenith Power/Metal Generators and Intra-Galactic Coordinators<br />
** The tunables for how strong that preference is (as opposed to going for more poorly defended targets) is an XML tunable per AI type<br />
<br />
* The AI now takes into account incoming wave strength when considering whether it is strong enough to attack a target when a wave is < 20 seconds out<br />
** This should allow Threat/Hunter ships to coordinate attacks with incoming waves when appropriate<br />
<br />
* When calculating whether a planet is a good target, the Hunter/Warden fleets now also include allied ships on their way to the target, as well as those currently at the target. <br />
** More coordination improvement code<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboats should now actually decloak.<br />
** Thanks to Mac for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Gravity effects cannot reduce a units speed below 20%, up from 5%.<br />
** This is to stop being able to stack Gravity and effectively replicate Tractor Beams.<br />
<br />
* Target priority lowered for Tachyon Sentinels and Arrays.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY for reporting the bullet magnets these were.<br />
<br />
* Decreased the time for AI Threat to join the Hunter Fleet, from 15 minutes at all difficulties, to starting at 10 on Diff 1, lowering by 1 for each Diff higher, maxing out at 3 minutes on Diff 8, 9 and 10.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.855 Galactic Markings ==<br />
(Released April 30th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for waves. The hovertext now shows the Target planet name in the colour of the planet's owner, and the planet with the warp gate in the colour of the faction sending the wave.<br />
** Thanks to Ptarth for making sure I did this right<br />
<br />
=== Hacking Improvements And Science from Neutral Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new hacking mechanism to allow extracting Science from neutral planets. It currently costs 5 AIP as well as a few hacking points. Performing this hack will cause the AI to launch a wave at you.<br />
** The AIP is part of the "AIP for taking a planet". So if you killed the command station there's actually no AIP cost (since you paid it when killing the command station). If another faction destroyed the command station then it will cost 5 AIP, but if you eventually capture the planet it will only cost 15 AIP when you capture instead of 20.<br />
** Note that this allows for you to collect Science much more quickly than normal by killing the command station and then doing this hack before capturing the planet, at the cost of some hacking points and the AI getting a bonus attack at you.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, DD the GerbilStrangler, Nameless Terror, themouthofsauron, x4000, Puffin and Apthorpe for useful discussion<br />
<br />
* If a Flagship becomes crippled mid-hack, the hack fails. Also Crippled Flagships are no longer allowed to start hacks.<br />
<br />
=== Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map's bloom settings have been updated a huge amount, giving the entire scene a bit of a computer-screen glowy vibe.<br />
** The blue hexes in the background have been adjusted and the scanline effect is now less noticeable, as part of this, though. It was just a bit too much visual distraction.<br />
<br />
* All of the roman numerals for mark levels have been switched to a more thematic sci-fi type font.<br />
<br />
* All of the graphics for planets on the galaxy map are now more consistent in size, and generally smaller, as is the selection radius around the one you're viewing right now.<br />
<br />
* The positioning of all the font stuff on the galaxy map has been changed around a lot, to be tighter around the planets but no longer ever overlapping with the overlarge planet icons (that no longer are overlarge).<br />
** In general this keeps things more compact and hopefully also more legible.<br />
<br />
* The little icons for "important ships at planets" are also now a bit smaller and more compactly-placed under the planet on the galaxy map.<br />
** They should still be plenty legible, but no longer oversized compared to some of the planet stuff they are essentially orbiting.<br />
<br />
* As you zoom out on the galaxy map, the planets (and their text and icons) no longer stay quite as large as they previously did, instead shrinking down more.<br />
** On most screens this should remain legible, while at the same time keeping them from overlapping.<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.001" to galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.0007" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalVisualConstants\CMP_VisualConstants.xml file.<br />
<br />
* The amount of time the icons and text now stay next to planets on the galaxy map have also been changed dramatically, so that they remain around until almost the last possible amount of zoom (and it's kinda useful having a super far zoom that gets rid of that clutter, at least at first thought).<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="1500" to galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="2000" and galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1300" to galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1700" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalConstants\KDL_VanillaConstants.xml file.<br />
** Particularly with how it's easier to see at a glance what the mark levels of planets are, and if you have current intel on them, this final-decluttered stage seems particularly useful. If you disagree, there are actually sliders in the options for changing it so that it declutters sooner or later.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Add a mechanic to allow anti-AI zombies to self-attrition over time. Currently set to 1% self-attrition per minute. This isn't very fast, and your engineers will repair them, but it's something?<br />
** Done after seeing some games where HeartHunter seems to have zombified the entire Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Reduced the power of Mark 5, and greatly reduced the power of Mark 6 and 7.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels should have more Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Beam Cannons and Plasma Turrets in "Monochrome Turret" designs.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Frigates in "Frigates With Support" designs.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Mass Driver damage.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem shots per salvo 80 -> 50.<br />
<br />
* Player Botnet Golem damage 750 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Changed the scaling of most Tech Upgrade costs to somewhat match what they used to be before Fleets.<br />
** Some are cheaper, some are more expensive, and some just have the Marks evened out.<br />
** This is something that will probably always be a bit off somewhere, but hopefully this is an improvement.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Turret range 10,100 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon and Heavy Beam Guardian range 15,000 -> 12,000, reload time 4s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Allow far more Anti-AI zombies to leave their current planet whenever that event occurs.<br />
<br />
* Mugger does a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Array range 2800 -> 4200.<br />
<br />
* Doubled count of Tractor Arrays in almost every player-available source.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator shields 250,000 -> 350,000.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Generator shields 150,000 -> 500,000.<br />
** Extreme, but these are apparently tiny roadbumps currently. They're rare, so this shouldn't be obnoxious.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator size increased.<br />
<br />
* Shield Guard Post shields 90,000 -> 150,000.<br />
<br />
* Focused Gravity Generators and Gravity Guardians now only slow things below engine_gx 14, rather than 15.<br />
** There were a few units that should've been resistant to this but weren't due to a minor error.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestations will now always have Minefields as well as Engineers, instead of just Engineers.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix some issues with the science hovertext, where it was still listing planets even after you'd taken all their science.<br />
<br />
* Handle the case where a player might have Overspent building a unit. This can happen if a player was building a unit after spending X metal, saves the game, then changes the metal cost of the unit to < X via XML and reloads the game.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Updated the Steamworks integration library that we use (and the Steamworks dll/so/dylib files from Valve) to their latest versions.<br />
** More details are here: https://github.com/Facepunch/Facepunch.Steamworks<br />
** On windows, we can confirm that now it actually shows you as being logged in properly, and also lets you see the proper main menu visuals rather than a blank space background.<br />
** To check on your OS that this is working, please look in the bottom right hand corner of your screen on the main menu and it should say "Logged in as [your username]." If it says "Not logged into Steam" or similar, then achievements won't be working properly for you later on. And in general it's something we'd want to know about.<br />
** Mostly this is a compatibility thing with the newest version of Unity, so far as we can tell, but we also have some new capabilities that we might flex at some point in the future.<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators for turrets and strikecraft should now work properly.<br />
** On any ship, there is now an is_strikecraft="true" flag, and an is_turret="true" flag that you can apply in order to have them be considered strikecraft or turrets for these (and later potentially other) purposes.<br />
** We didn't use the special_type field because it's possible that these things might be strikecraft or turrets and something else at the same time, and the case of being a strikecraft or being a turret isn't "special" enough to warrant the special_type field usage.<br />
** Note that it's also possible that some of these will be both is_strikecraft="true" and also have a special_type="Drone". In those cases, it won't give the ship cap bonus regardless of the is_strikecraft="true" being there. So drones don't have to un-set that, in other words.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Invert Mouse Zoom" setting in the All Cameras section.<br />
** Normally when you spin the mouse wheel forward, you zoom closer; backwards zooms you away. This lets you flip that functionality. OR, in the case that your hardware or OS is inverted for whatever reason, this lets you correct it to work like everyone else.<br />
** There is a bug in Unity 2019.1 on linux machines that causes mouse scrolling to be inverted, so this lets us work around that: https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/linux-input-dot-mousescrolldelta-returns-reversed-values-in-linux-player<br />
** Note that this won't help with inverted scrolling with dropdowns and other scrolling areas, unfortunately.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.854 Garbage... Collected! ==<br />
(Released April 26th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Known issue: in the bottom right corner of the main menu, it says you're not logged into Steam even though you are, and also if you are logged into Steam the backdrop for the main menu might be just stars instead of the usual colorful thing with ships flying by. We'll be upgrading our Steam integration dlls next build, which should fix that. Hopefully it causes no other issues.<br />
<br />
* Known issue: the intra-galactic coordinators for turrets and strikecraft do nothing right now. We wanted to get this build out asap, since it's beta anyway.<br />
<br />
=== Quality of Life and Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Player mobile defensive ships in planetary fleets now start in FRD mode<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Hovertext for incoming wave notifications now colours the target planet name for ease of reading<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Science in the resource bar now shows the planets science is being extracted from and the amount of science remaining for each.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Ship AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to targeting logic from WeaponMaster, where the code was accidentally prioritizing the worst possible targets.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Add some new Zombifying targeting code, where ships with zombifying guns will prefer to attack things they can zombify<br />
** Thanks to Jonesmz for the suggestion and WeaponMaster for the code<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* If the top unit of a cloaking Stacked Squad dies, the next ship to spawn inherits its cloak state. So if you've decloaked it, killing the top unit doesn't allow the next unit to recloak.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix some typos in the Experimental: Civil War conduct text<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix typo on Encapsulated map type description<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Intra-Galactic Coordinators were increasing the unit cap for Energy Collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some debugging code to catch a null reference exception in the Warden Fleet Long Range Planning code<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for making us aware of a problem in this area<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Flagships that are crippled can no longer pick up units for transport. Flagships that were transporting units and become crippled now unload all their units immediately. This fixes a few ways players could abuse the Crippled mechanic.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Split Intra-Galactic Coordinators abilities. Instead of buffing all ship caps, there are now three, one for each of Turrets, Frigates and Strike Craft. Note that each Coordinator now gives a bigger buff.<br />
** Note that this doesn't work for strikecraft and turrets yet in the current build, we just didn't have time.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleet Centerpieces should now all Rebuild Remains.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting confusion in this area.<br />
<br />
* "Light" and "Heavy" Tech Upgrades cost more at higher levels.<br />
<br />
* "Disruptive" Tech Upgrade costs slightly more at all levels.<br />
<br />
* Battlestation, Citadel and Ark Tech Upgrade costs reduced.<br />
<br />
* "Spire Core" Tech Upgrade cost reduced a bit.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate reload time 9s -> 12s, damage 25,000 -> 20,000.<br />
<br />
* Tamed Macrophage metal cost increased to 2 million, energy consumption increased to 25,000.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Scrubbed Abomination metal cost increased to 350k.<br />
<br />
* Muggers and Brawlers now cost their proper amount of metal - 300k - instead of 3 million...<br />
** Muggers sure lived up to their name.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting this! <br />
<br />
=== AI Threat Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Thanks to ptarth for a great save game that led to all these changes<br />
<br />
* The AI now has a per-AI Type tunable, RatioOfFearOfRemoteEnemies, which informs how seriously the AI takes into account your forces on planets near the planet it is attacking. This reduces the AI's tendency to be terrified of nearby large player/nanocaust forces.<br />
<br />
* The AI is now capable of having Threat that it uses only against minor factions. There was a longstanding bug preventing this from working correctly. This threat is "Dumber" then general purpose (aka "anti-player") threat.<br />
** Treat threat specifically against a player as "general purpose"<br />
<br />
* Improve the way the AI handles Threat adjacent to the player home planet.<br />
** If the Threat is Waiting against your home planet (since you have fortified it too heavily to attack) and there are much easier targets, it will prefer to take your other planets out first rather than just building up a giant fleetball.<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to units keeping track of the fact that they are Threat. Failing to do this was confusing the AI's Strength Counting, leading to the AI believing it was weaker than it should have been<br />
** When Threat gets an order to attack another planet, make sure to stay in Threat behaviour.<br />
** Fix a bug where Retreating AI ships would sometimes lose track of the fact that they should have Threat behaviour.<br />
** Copy Orders when splitting a stack (via the Split GameCommand or when the top unit in the stack dies) to preserve Threat behaviour.<br />
<br />
* Also improve debug hover tooltip for squad orders/Threat behaviour and improve some code commenting/readability<br />
<br />
=== Unity Engine Upgrade (To 2019.1 - Now With Incremental Garbage Collection!) ===<br />
<br />
* Upgraded the game to Unity 2019.1.0f2! The prior version was on 2018.2.0 or something along those lines, so this is a big jump.<br />
** The really big improvement is time-sliced garbage collection: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-incremental-garbage-collection/<br />
*** Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhfzzLyG7_w<br />
** This also has numerous bugfixes, and lets us upgrade from a VERY old version of TextMeshPro to the newest version, which in turn fixes a variety of bugs relating to text, blurry text, textboxes, etc.<br />
*** That said, as part of this, we knew this was going to happen, but it breaks ALL the references to any sort of text-based thing inside of any of our unity projects.<br />
*** But we kind of needed to go ahead and have this done before we started in on a bunch more UI updates or else it was just going to be creating even more work for ourselves in the future.<br />
** There are also a variety of stability improvements to the unity engine in general, and a few performance improvements. I think that Linux machines will see the biggest boost.<br />
*** There are some new capabilities that we can in theory use in the future, too, and nested prefabs are an amazing thing for sure. But we're not really needing those bits in this specific project right at the moment.<br />
** Oh and this does upgrade us to the latest version of the post processing stack v2, as well, which means probably better performance and some edge bugfixes for some folks in that area, too.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so we've been using the mcs.exe compiler for the last two years, and it turns out that doesn't support the newer versions of C#. It would have been nice if that had been more clear.<br />
** Instead, when we were updating our TextMeshPro component or a few other things -- or trying to, anyway -- we would instead get mysterious "System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: "Void System.Array.Reverse(!!0[])" compilation errors. Good luck googling that, almost nobody has that.<br />
** The solution is to STOP USING MCS.EXE, and instead use csc.exe. That's the new Roslyn compiler that Micrsoft created and unity is using for the newer C# 6.0+ features.<br />
*** The !fun! part about that is that all the syntax is different, and also it requires references to... a whole bunch of dlls that are the "reference dlls" instead of the "runtime ones."<br />
*** If you ever find yourself referencing a dll called System.Private.CoreLib.dll, or anything like that, STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING and try a different dll.<br />
**** Even though the compiler just told you that what you need is in that dll, it's actually lying.<br />
**** Actually what you need is in... good luck figuring that out!... but probably it's in the REFERENCE version of System.Core.dll or similar. It has nothing to do with "netcoreapp" or "netstandard," unlike the few non-unity-related references to this on the internet would have you believe. That's unrelated to unity, and is just a fun thing on some web servers and various other software.<br />
**** What the heck is a "reference dll" in terms of what the compiler needs? Well, it's a fuller version than is used at runtime, I suppose. I haven't explicitly seen that said anywhere, but that seems to be the general feeling I'm getting. Why they needed this split I'm not sure, but I'm guessing different compiler flags or perhaps the ability to have different per-platform versions. Something like that.<br />
**** Where do you find those reference dlls?? Ha! Good luck with that. Some of them seem to be in the Roslyn compiler folder... except not really, some of them have way too small of sizes. Others are almost certainly in your [UnityInstallLocation]\Editor\Data\Managed\UnityEngine folder, but there again it's not perfect.<br />
***** Generally you're going to find yourself searching around inside the unity install folder, and you might even find yourself (if you're on windows) searching around inside C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.6.1\ or whatever your equivalent is. Nicely packaged for you? NO.<br />
** So that explains one of the big mysteries that Keith and I have been scratching our heads on for a couple of years now.<br />
*** But even with that "solved," I couldn't get all of the aspects of LINQ working, and some of our third-party networking code uses LINQ, so I moved that into an external dll that will get loaded at runtime. That's more efficient anyway, but annoyingly indirect.<br />
*** All of the network code has been open-sourced by the original authors anyhow, so that actually will work out extra well for us when we get to that point. But in the short term it's another pain in the rear we didn't need.<br />
<br />
* One bonus of all this upgrading of unity-stuff is that the editor is no longer complaining about our external dlls being something that will crash the editor and so something they refuse to load. That's... always a plus. And is related to the whole compiler saga.<br />
<br />
* Okay, nested prefabs from the latest versions of unity are actually indeed insanely useful and we're starting to use those more than we otherwise might have.<br />
<br />
==== Complete Overhaul Of All Fonts ====<br />
<br />
* ALL of the fonts in the game have been reworked (in terms of how they are imported into TextMeshPro and thus how they look in general).<br />
** And a bunch of new fonts have been added to the game as options for us to use in various contexts.<br />
** And we've completely redone what fonts we are using in almost all contexts as it is.<br />
** There was a lot of complaining about the fonts not feeling properly militaristic, or otherwise being non-thematic, and hopefully this helps.<br />
<br />
* The background story is again its own window and scrolls rather than is paginated, but this time is a lot more condensed, uses an improved version of the more-recent rewritten version, and uses strategic coloration to make it easier to read quickly.<br />
<br />
* The little notification icon/panels at the top of the screen now show up with a new font (as with most other parts of the game), but this is a particularly good font for condensed/confined places. It should let you read more things without them trailing off too ellipses, while it also not looking tacky in terms of how it's crammed in.<br />
** Also, the TextMeshPro upgrade itself seems to do a better job of choosing when to go to ellipsis instead of just drawing the raw text of whatever it is. So some of the planet names that were drawing ellipses very much too soon now won't.<br />
<br />
* As an aside, it's quite possible that the following issues are present somewhere in the game now, and we'd love to know about it:<br />
** Some sort of text not wrapping properly or being outright invisible, or cut off.<br />
** Some sort of text section making it impossible to click something near it, or picking up clicks from way further away than it should have.<br />
** Some sort of text section having the wrong font, or being misaligned in a subtle or not-subtle way.<br />
** We tried to correct all these that we could find, but bear in mind that this was a couple of dozen interfaces that we had to edit BY HAND for this version, so we probably missed something.<br />
** Honestly this was another reason we did this now, during the beta period, versus during a non-beta time. Thanks for being our guinea pigs to all the testers helping on this!<br />
<br />
* Given that we're changing so many of the fonts, and may choose to do so even more as feedback rolls in, we've now codified the in-code font-sizing a bit in a new FontSizes class.<br />
** Essentially size 12pt in font A might be waaaay larger or smaller than 12pt in font B. So we needed a way to normalize the offsets from the defaults of whatever we decide makes sense with a given font.<br />
<br />
==== Various Changes to our Post Processing Stack ====<br />
<br />
* Oh, I'm sorry, did we say we were going to be using the new unity Post Processing Stack V2? Blah, that really doesn't play nice with what we wanted to do.<br />
** Instead we're now using Beautify again, stripped down into performance mode but using it for vingnetting and tonemapping. We continue to use amplify bloom for the bloom effects, because messing with that again would be... insanely time consuming.<br />
** Overall this does mean there's a subtle shift to the look of the game yet again -- and, wait, no we're not using that now, either. Sigh. We'll figure out the tonemapping at some point, but frankly our general lighting is doing the heavy lifting on its own.<br />
<br />
==== Splitting Some Network Code Off Into Its Own Area ====<br />
<br />
* A bunch of the networking code has been offloaded into its own dll now, which we're able to more easily update as needed.<br />
** This actually makes our iteration time on that sort of code faster in the future.<br />
** In the process of getting this working, we managed to waste about two hours trying to figure out why the entire game was broken (and it was a one-liner typo). Fun!<br />
<br />
== Version 0.853 An Officer And A Bunch Of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 22nd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Only the offensive (strike and officer) type of fleets are now auto-assigned numbered hotkeys.<br />
** If people want to manually assign hotkeys differently in the future, they can (when that interface is in place), but this really is the most likely use case most of the time.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Command stations can once again die to remains.<br />
** This means that if you have a battlestation or a citadel on the planet, then they can rebuild the command station for you automatically just like remains rebuilders would have done once upon a time. Yay automation!<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes, Badger, and Nameless Terror for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Ability To Scout With Nanites Properly Works (And Related Visual Effects) ===<br />
<br />
* Unlike all the other versions since 0.850, you can now click over to planets that you have never explored.<br />
** This lets you actually use the Explore With Nanites hack, which is kiiiinda important, honestly. Or at least it's important to a lot of people, depending on playstyle.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and others for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The visual effect for viewing a planet where you have stale intel (but have seen it before) was before a bit confusing and a bit much.<br />
** Much as Chris liked the matrix-y effect, that has been ditched and things are a lot more Factorio-like in terms of just being darkened and grainy.<br />
** The effect is subtle enough not to be irritating, but to be definitely noticeable. Given the sidebar notes Stale Intel, and things don't look super duper crazy in terms of the visual distortions, hopefully we don't need any bigger onscreen messages to explain what is happening to players.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, Nameless Terror, and RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* There is a NEW visual effect for viewing a planet where you have never even explored before.<br />
** Through the distortion here you can barely even read the wormhole names, and all you can see are the planet graphics and wormhole graphics (not even metal spots, etc).<br />
** This one is heavily stylized, but is so TV-like and the sidebar is utterly empty and saying "you have never explored here" and similar that hopefully it's really clear what is going on.<br />
** This is needed simply because we're allowing players to click into planets that are unexplored so that they can do the nanites hack against them to explore them.<br />
<br />
=== New Background Story ===<br />
<br />
* A new and brief, paginated story has replaced the longwinded scrolling-based "background story" section of the main menu.<br />
** The old story was complicated and no longer really accurate to the game. This does mean all those character portraits that Chris created are now completely gone from the game, but such is life. The initial pre-game story is super simple and that's kind of how it always has been. We want the rest of the story, what there is, to be based on what happens during your gameplay.<br />
** The new story reads:<br />
*** After an 800-year civil war between humans fighting amongst the stars, they finally birthed a force that would end all human wars forever: Artificial Intelligence.<br />
*** Quickly eclipsing the humans in power and taking control of most of their automated forces, the AI nearly wiped the human race from the face of the galaxy. Only scattered pockets remain, hiding amidst the scattered wreckage from the civil war and the AI-led extermination that followed.<br />
*** You are in command of the last substantial remaining human military force. It is so small that the AI is either unaware of it, or just doesn't care.<br />
*** Potentially coincidentally, something outside the galaxy seems to have distracted the AI far more than humans ever did.<br />
*** You must grow your forces, capturing and reactivating fleets from the old wars... but you must be careful not to grow so strong that the eye of the AI turns back toward you.<br />
*** Gain just enough power, capture just enough fleets, take back just enough planets, that you can destroy the massive structures known as 'AI Overlords' and end this new war before the AI is even fully aware it has begun.<br />
*** If you are too greedy, if you make yourself too threatening, if you let the AI realize you might be a true threat... expect us all to lose everything.<br />
*** You must use discretion, avoid distraction and temptation, and wield your forces like a scalpel. Take risks, be bold, but don't try to be a conquerer.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Removed the "build remains rebuilders" intel tab entry, since that is outdated.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The strength of waves that are incoming should now be correctly stated, whereas before it was not since we switched the AI costs and strengths to be two different things.<br />
** Some internal variables have also been renamed to be more clear.<br />
** This has not been tested, so it might still be wrong.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new capturable_can_seed_at_all="false" flag, which is now applied to the Cloaked Ark One and the Agile Cursed Golem.<br />
** These two entities should no longer seed at all in the galaxy, since they were only ever supposed to be granted via the starting fleet choices anyhow. This won't fix existing savegames, but if you see them in new savegames as something you can capture, please do let us know.<br />
** Thanks to vinco and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases should now seed at more appropriate distances from you.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding and fixing, and reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where you could not select the starting fleet without it always just defaulting back to classic.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for the fix, and HeartHunter7 and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes so that if you have invalid/mismatched options (custom or otherwise) in the lobby, it will now complain about them properly and let you know that things are failing.<br />
** With this we found that the team colors for Instigators and the AntagonizedDysonSphere were not working properly, for instance.<br />
<br />
* Attack warnings in the top bar should now properly show stacked ship counts when you hover over them.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Some complicated code fixes from WeaponMaster have been put in place to hopefully solve the "multi-shot doesn't function when there's an enemy fortress or other super important item present" issue. Please let us know if this doesn't fix it, or any other strange cases wind up happening, but things seem okay from some limited testing so far.<br />
** Big thanks to WeaponMaster for the fix, and to KMan_Gladiator for the initial report!<br />
<br />
* Fixed some internal bugs with "last second we saw a planet" that was causing some oddities in the local tab's reporting of what you could see of enemy strength, etc.<br />
<br />
* The local tab summaries now include strength and ships that are inside other ships, aka drones and reinforcements not yet deployed, etc. It's way more accurate now.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips in the local tab were showing the strength values as being 1000x what we show them elsewhere in the UI. Oops, fixed.<br />
** This bug is old as the game itself, more or less. Wow.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting this right as we also discovered it!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where in the post-0.850 builds you could get too much intel about various other planets if you clicked to them in the first 2 seconds of gameplay. This wasn't as big a deal until we changed it so you can click to unexplored planets.<br />
<br />
* The little "battle at a planet" notification cards at the top of the screen now properly show all the ships that are inside other ships, making it so that their ship counts now match that of the sidebar (which is itself only newly correct in this version).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the incoming wave notifications had strength values that were laughably tiny and wrong. It was only tallying the strength of the first ship of each type, which meant that if there were 1000 ships in a wave, it was 1/1000th the value it should have been.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Strike Fleets vs Officer Fleets ===<br />
<br />
* There was previously a general "mobile combat" (MobileCombatFleetFlagship) category for fleets. This has now been split in two:<br />
** MobileOfficerCombatFleetFlagship - this is the style that we had before, where the centerpieces are either an Ark or a Golem. These are big centerpiece fleets that have small and medium craft but also something big and scary at the center.<br />
** MobileStrikeCombatFleetFlagship - this is new, and is just basically a transport with a "super meh" fusion bomb weapon at the center. Basically this is meant to be the big groups of your ships that are moving around doing the most of the fighting, and the transports are there for... transport! And for ships to pop out of during construction.<br />
<br />
* There are now EVEN MORE fleets seeded around the galaxy for you to find, although many more of them are the "strike" kind of combat fleets instead of the "officer" sort.<br />
** This gets back to the main playstyle for most people from earlier version of this game and from the base game; having big centerpiece units is great, but let's not overdo it. And for those who don't prefer that kind of gameplay, they can entirely skip it.<br />
<br />
* The number of certain types of Arks and Golems that can be seeded has been drastically reduced from what they were before (those that are part of fleets, not lone ones).<br />
** You should still see almost as many of these types of fleets as before, but a greater diversity of them. And in general way fewer armored golems, for instance.<br />
** On really large maps, you will find that you're maybe not getting quite as many of these as you once were, though.<br />
** The ultimate goal is for these to feel more rare and powerful over time, and a lot of them are seeded a bit further away, now.<br />
<br />
* The "Drone" specialtype has been split into DroneGeneral and DroneFrigate.<br />
** This lets us better use the multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_drones and multiplied_nonfrigate_ship_cap_for_drones xml entries when relevant.<br />
** Most stuff is just DroneGeneral, though, as it is.<br />
<br />
* We now have two new entries, multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_mobile and multiplied_strikecraft_ship_cap_for_mobile.<br />
** These let us make fleets larger or smaller based on what the centerpiece is, separate from the fleet design itself. This is intended specifically for the officer and strike fleet types, to let us have them share the types of fleets but to let the non-officer fleets be larger in general.<br />
** Note that officer fleets and non-officer fleets are NOT intended to be balanced with one another (officer fleets are more powerful, naturally), but the officer fleets are more rare and more powerful as well as more expensive in general.<br />
<br />
* There are several variants of tranport flagships, which all look the same and have the same name, but which seed at different frequencies and have much larger frigate, strikecraft, or some mix of the two caps.<br />
** The idea is that if you want really huge fleets of smaller ships, then these are where they come from.<br />
** The balance of all this new stuff is very untested, but the seeding of them seems to work at the very least.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring these various changes.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Overloader Combat Factory speed boost increased from 20% to 40%.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels that roll the OtherDefenseFocus design (i.e Tractors, Tachyon, etc) now have Turrets as intended.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation shields increased from 350k to 500k.<br />
<br />
* Shifted Strength values around (mainly Guardians are lower).<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleets should now always have at least two unit types.<br />
** Finding a Fleet with just one unit type was rather bad, and kind of doomed that Fleet to being relatively useless.<br />
** This was especially bad if it happened to the one adjacent to your Homeworld.<br />
<br />
* Most units for the AI now cost twice as much for it to purchase.<br />
** Guardians and Turrets cost 50% more, Frigates cost 33% more.<br />
** At the same time, the starting AI defenses are increased to make them roughly the same, as that seemed mostly okay, it was mainly the sheer wave sizes people were getting.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Armored Golem hull into shields.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the inspiration.<br />
<br />
* Economic and Military Command Stations store 300k metal instead of 100k, Home Command stores 2.5 million instead of 2 million.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for mentioning a problem here.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate durability upgraded a fair bit, the "Railcannon" variant has a 50% damage increase on the Railcannons, and the "Laser" variant loses the damage bonus in place of simply firing a lot more shots.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes and ptarth for bringing the issues up.<br />
<br />
* Citadels have some weapon boosts.<br />
<br />
==== Speedier Flagships! ====<br />
<br />
* Player Golem Arks speed doubled.<br />
<br />
* Ark speed increased to 1400.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Player Arks and Spire Frigates move 50% faster after entering a planet for 5 seconds.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Decloaking Capabilities For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories now spawn with Combat Sentry Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Engineers For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new category of ship_cap_group for fleet memberships, this one called Civilian.<br />
** Turns out that we just completely forgot to add in the ability to generate more engineers via battlestations and citadels, that that was most definitely supposed to be a thing.<br />
** This won't affect existing savegames, but you should be finding caches of engineers that you can construct along with your battlestations all over the place now in new games.<br />
** The idea isn't to increase the ship cap for engineers on a given planet by adjusting the planet itself (unless you want to change command station type), but rather by which types of stations you put there, and what engineering caps they have. That was always the plan with fleets, but was just a complete oversight.<br />
** The reason for the new Civilian category is so that we can have caps of engineers (and later maybe a mix of something else) that is separate from the OtherDefenses, turrets, and whatever else. Basically to let them not compete with other types of defenses while still being added new.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== No More Mysterious Metal Increases As Marks Go Up ====<br />
<br />
* There is no longer any added metal cost to having higher-mark units.<br />
** Some may lament this, but this was the only downside to increasing the mark of units, which is otherwise an all-positive thing to do. It was such a sharp negative that you could actually tank your economy without warning.<br />
** The first game made good use of this because you could choose to build cheaper low-mark units at any time, and then more expensive high-mark units later, and the higher metal and energy costs, as well as lower ship cap, were all deterrents to the higher marks being overly relied-upon. That was an interesting system, but we moved away from that well over a year ago, if not more, when we combined all the ships of yours into being the highest mark of whatever their line is.<br />
** This new system is one that does stress your metal reserves less, probably, but you're gaining so many more ships over time (by capturing more fleets) that you're still going to need more metal later in the game than what you start with. It's just due to increased ship counts in this game, not due to your units suddenly and unexpectedly costing more.<br />
** Thanks to Karhax for reporting the root issue here.<br />
<br />
==== No More AIP Increases From "Too Many Fleets" In A System ====<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the "too many fleets at a planet" logic entirely, at least the current version.<br />
** It simply felt punitive and un-fun, and there was no version of that style which was likely to be fun. Nonetheless, we still just commented it out for now so someone can build something on that if desired in the future. We are also going to be working on some things to prevent players going absolutely nuts with how they stack things, but they won't be so opaque or so likely to unexpectedly bite you.<br />
** Thanks to basically everyone playing the betas for complaining about this. Honestly that didn't hugely surprise any of us, but the discussion it sparked was interesting. In particular thanks to Nameless Terror, Ecthelon, themouthofsauron, Karhax, and probably some folks we missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.852 Directness Is Better==<br />
(Released April 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Rather than being markless, Sentry Frigates are now mark 1 but only get upgraded by the fleet itself upgrading (which isn't a working mechanic yet, it's coming!)<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for noticing this.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Tooltips setting option: "Show Weapon Activity Details"<br />
** If enabled, then each weapon in your tooltips shows you a bunch of info about how long until it reloads, why it didn't fire most recently, and other such info.<br />
** Previously this info was just always shown, but now it's off by default.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips -- for player ships or anything on the build sidebar -- now tell you if the ship is unable to be upgraded, or what techs upgrade it if any do, or if they are of the sort that only upgrade when their fleet itself upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reminding us just how important this is, although we were already going to do it.<br />
<br />
* One crippled mobile fleet flagship among several functional ones could previously erroneously prevent you from building command stations. Fixed.<br />
** Additionally, now battlestations/citadels are able to build command stations, not just mobile fleet flagships.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== AI Reconquest Command Stations ===<br />
<br />
* There once was a specialtype of "NormalAICommandStation." This has been removed, and split into:<br />
** AICommandStationOriginal, which is used in the majority of cases.<br />
** AICommandStationReconquest, which is used for cases where the AI reconquered a planet.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "AI Reconquest Command Station," which is now what the AI will seed after taking back a planet during a reconquest wave.<br />
** This acts just like the original command stations of the AI, with the following exceptions:<br />
*** It has twice as much health and shielding.<br />
*** It doesn't have any confusing messages about AIP going up if you destroy it (that already wasn't the case, but the interface made it sound like it did).<br />
*** It can't be hacked for science extraction. Go build your own command station there if you want that science, sonny.<br />
*** It doesn't grant any scouting intel when destroyed, so you can't use any exploity type of behavior to let the AI take a planet back and then destroy the reconquest station in order to get more scouting intel AIP-free.<br />
** Note that in existing savegames, any existing command stations the AI put there because of reconquest will still be of the original sort. So you won't see this until the AI does a reconquest wave in this version or newer.<br />
** Fun fact, the humans-don't-autotarget-this rules are still the same here, for now at least, but this can be changed in xml if we really want to. We left this not because of an AIP cost (which is why the original has it), but because there might be a very valid reason you want to let the AI keep the planet (aka them wasting reinforcements on a planet that has been neutered). So having your ships go into auto-kill mode would probably break some valid advanced strategies.<br />
** Thanks to BadgerBadger, TechSY730, and Exlium for suggesting and reporting various issues that led to this.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Rallying Out, Direct Orders Inheritance And Position In ===<br />
<br />
* All concept of ships rallying to... anything... is now gone. It was annoying and full of edge cases that would cause players to have their fleets not behave how they wanted them to as refleeting was in progress.<br />
** Now all ships that are created for a fleet by a factory now pop straight out of the fleet centerpiece, with all the orders from the fleet centerpiece (including stance).<br />
** This gets around some of the most annoying logistical issues, and because the centerpieces of the fleets are so large it makes enough logical sense to not cause huge amounts of cognitive dissonance. Putting gameplay first, this is the only thing that really solves our age-old (literally like a decade old) problem.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 and others for reporting, although here again we were already leaning in this direction because of our own frustration.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.851 Drones And Economies==<br />
(Released April 19th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Player Command Station Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the economic command station description:<br />
** Economic variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variant gives greatly improved metal and energy output, but lacks the ability to directly defend itself very well. It doesn't even have any means of decloaking enemies directly. Planets with these should either be protected by a powerful citadel or battlestation, or so far back from the front lines that they are safe.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The matter converters and energy collectors were higher on the logistical command stations, and now that has been swapped with the economic command stations.<br />
<br />
* Logistical command stations now come with 20 mines built in, and also two focused gravity generators. More stuff to help them be more tricky and dangerous directly.<br />
** They also now get 2 forcefields while the military variants only get 1 instead, swapping those two.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the logistical command station description:<br />
* Logistical variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at finding cloaked enemies, tractoring enemies, and even laying traps (mines!) for enemies. Beyond that it's kind of a halfway point between the military and economic drives of its peers. They also get two forcefields where their peers only get one, and way more engineers.<br />
<br />
* Military command stations now get 5 beam cannons and 15 ambush turrets, making them by far the most able to defend themselves without the help of a battlestation or citadel.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the military command station description:<br />
** Military variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at defending itself, and perfect for dangerous border planets. It also gets the most factories, making it probably the best way to resupply your fleets near the front lines.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The lost spire frigate faction has now been properly removed from the game.<br />
** We had already folded the functionality from that into the main game itself, so the faction was pointless and just broke things if you enabled it. If you enabled it in your savegames, then those savegames are probably now broken.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding issue where if we removed game settings from the game, then old settings files that were loaded in would complain about UnrequestedXMLAttributes.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that are owned by no faction (aka not claimed yet) should no longer have their cloaking devices function until they are claimed. Tested and works as expected.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The seeding logic for NormalPlanetNastyPicks, SpireArchives, and CivilWarTriggers was... nonsensical? The code did some kind of strange things.<br />
** It should now work properly and not do things like putting spire archives on AI homeworlds.<br />
** It also now logs what it is doing to the mapgen logger if you have that turned on and want to see what it is doing.<br />
** We've not tested this at all.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with beam cannons where they were being upgraded by the Melee tech instead of Splash.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where it would register a double-click if you were clicking too rapidly between different parts of the screen. Mice are fast! Now if you've moved the mouse more than 10px, it doesn't consider it a double-click. Probably. We need to test that.<br />
** Fully fixed (and verified the fix) to the double-clicking stuff.<br />
** Thanks to Bobtree, Talkar, Kaleopan, and Exlium for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "MISSING LOCALIZATION: AIPChangeReason_FleetConcentration" bug.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* It is now possible to explicitly set up in the xml that units cannot be stacked. Use the tag cannot_be_stacked="true".<br />
** This also now automatically happens on all AI guardians (dire and regular), drones (that got exploity), lone golems, and NPC centerpieces.<br />
** All of the marauder raiders and similar can no longer be stacked because of the tag, to prevent issues with them.<br />
** Astro Trains also can no longer be stacked, since that's just odd.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where drones were never being set up properly on drone controllers at all (hive golem, etc).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories would help with drone production.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that was preventing drones from ever being deployed even if they were internally created. Fun with boolean inversions!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a whole nest of bugs where drones that were a part of non-drone-specific fleet types could never be spawned by their spawner.<br />
** Aka this was breaking things like hive golems, but drone producer guard posts would have been fine (though that bit is untested).<br />
<br />
* Fixed some issues with the drone caps getting higher when the mark level of the drone controllers was higher. It should be the same ship cap for those drones regardless of cap, unlike with regular non-drone ships.<br />
<br />
* The data and tooltip info for AIs unlocking new ship types has been removed, as that mechanic actually isn't a thing anymore.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Irritation Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* AI guard posts that are no longer on AI-controlled planets now lose their cloaking. This also just seemed like a needed thing to avoid an annoying bit of cleanup you otherwise have to do. Typically they would be sitting around doing nothing, since all their defenders fled. Tested and works as expected.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking fleet leaders (centerpieces, flagships, command stations, whatever) now selects or deselects all the stuff in their fleet, rather than all the things of their same type.<br />
** For individual ship types, like fighters or whatever, it works like it always has.<br />
*** HOWEVER, when it comes to individual ship types, it no longer considers spinoff units (Daggers, etc) something to select along with the main unit type that you might have clicked. Sharing a common ancestor is no longer good enough for the selection stuff to work that way, particularly given the ludicrous number of variants we now have.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 for suggesting the change to double-clicking on centerpieces.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips now specify how many undeployed drones there are inside an entity.<br />
** Additionally, you can see the construction percentage on each drone that is getting created inside.<br />
<br />
* In preparation for some upcoming changes, the Ships tab has been renamed to the Local tab, and says "At Local Planet" instead of Ships up at the top.<br />
<br />
* On the fleets tab, it now has a new piece where it will show the hotkey assigned to that fleet, if there is one assigned.<br />
<br />
* You still can't manually assign hotkeys to fleets, but hotkeys are now automatically assigned to fleets as you acquire them early on in.<br />
** This is something we want to have happen so that the use of these hotkeys is encouraged by the large numbers of people (including some of us on staff) who never bothered to use them in the past.<br />
** But obviously prior to 0.900 we want it to be something you can control directly, too.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Dire Guard Posts no longer increase AIP on death.<br />
** Was intended to mimic the AIP Floor increase from Classic, but didn't play well with the random Post count and multiple AIs.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlords Tachyon system is a bit shorter range and decloaks at half the speed.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where this was a major roadblock - more than intended.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida and Shredder Guard Posts fire every 3 seconds instead of 1.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where a Tethuida was actually far scarier with the gun than intended - it's meant to use the drones, mainly.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation and Rorqual Hegira Ark have much larger forcefield radius now.<br />
** Things are bigger in general, so you weren't able to fit as much as you used to under these.<br />
<br />
* All Citadels except Interceptors now have a weapon range of 10,100.<br />
<br />
* AI requires higher AIP before increasing its tech level.<br />
** Used to be, starting from Mark 2: 150, 300, 450, 600, 800, 1200.<br />
** Now is, starting from Mark 2: 225, 450, 675, 900, 1125, 1350.<br />
*** The AI no longer pays more for higher Mark units, and so it was having very large power spikes relatively early on.<br />
*** Although, Mark 7 is actually triggered not much slower than what it used to, so really annoying the AI is still going to hurt a lot.<br />
<br />
* All Battlestations shield points increased to 350,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.850 The Arrival of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
''We are breaking '''all''' the savegames again, sorry about that. This series of updates leading up to 0.900 should collectively be the last time '''for real''' for real, although we've said that before. It's not our practice to do this sort of thing at all, typically, but this game has been going through a lot more pre-release evolution than most of our titles have. The old savegames won't even make sense in the new version, really.''<br />
<br />
* This got super long and we wanted to show what we were working on as we went, so we wound up also having this: [[AI War 2: 0.850 Raw Chris Changelog]]<br />
<br />
* And in general if you're not clear why we're doing all this, then here's a really long document that explains it: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/16dJvDOWckK4vfnW2Mwut7wv2OF_bCn17XuspBlPBymQ/edit#heading=h.wkf7np25ov5 AI War 2 - Unit Construction / Fleets Rework].<br />
** Although we went much further than the document laid out, moving into territory like making the AI planets more unique from one another, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Misc ===<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres will remain antagonized much longer after hacks.<br />
** More hacks against a Dyson Sphere will increase the antagonization time.<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI to spawn Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy. Only Dyson factions with high enough intensity can spawn antagonizers.<br />
** Antagonizers affect all Dyson Factions, so if you've enabled 3 dyson factions, the AI will spawn antagonizers for each dyson faction, and you have to kill all the antagonizers before they will become friendly again.<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers follow similar spawning rules to Instigator Bases; they need to spawn close to the player at lower AIPs, and at high AIP can spawn anywhere.<br />
** To compensate for this, the Dyson's income has been slightly buffed.<br />
<br />
* Gives some units unused voice lines, and the Dyson ships the Zenith voice.<br />
** Engineers and other similar civilian ships now actually talk!<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map now has more of a "military screen" style look to it again, although this doesn't yet apply to the actual icons and lines and so on. But it has that same sort of scanline effect and whatnot as in the first game, though more involved now and fancier with some hexagons, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts and Tutorials Gone for Now ===<br />
<br />
* The old quickstarts have all been moved to QuickStartsOld, since they no longer function with the new system in general.<br />
** Because of the way Steam updates work, the QuickStarts from now on will be loaded from QuickStarts2 instead, which is presently empty and needs to be for the next little while. But at least it won't be throwing errors when players try to start quickstarts in the new build.<br />
<br />
* The pre-existing tutorial has been completely disabled, since it is probably nonfunctional in general and tries to teach you a lot of things that are no longer relevant. We're going to be majorly redoing that in the future, but for now we don't want people accidentally going in there.<br />
<br />
=== Fleets Added ===<br />
<br />
* Fleets are a new concept in the game, which are basically collections of ships in one of a few different categories. The AIs and NPCs don't really use these, per se, although there's nothing stopping them from doing so. But on the player side, this basically is now the central grouping of units for your stuff, and you use these offensively and defensively. You can get waaay larger ship caps than before, but each group is... well, automated as well as being a distinct flavor unto itself.<br />
<br />
* The concepts of destruction points and Ark Upgrade Points are both gone, and replaced by Fleet EXP instead. This works similarly to both of those other things, in that if your fleet centerpiece is on a planet with an enemy ship that dies to your forces, then that fleet gains some EXP. More for big-ticket items.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of logic for how fleets are selected and moved around, which was previously related to control groups, is now in place.<br />
** The logic for how to assign fleets to keybind indices (fleet groups, essentially) for now is going to be clicking-the-interface-only, since that's really confusing in keybinds. We may wind up reintroducing keybinds for this at some point in the future, but more likely would be a better interface for organizing fleets into the keybinds directly, since this would avoid the confusion factor for players.<br />
** The big sticky spot for confusion is people thinking they're making a control group of ships, when really it is of fleets, in essence. Even this explanation is confusing. ;)<br />
<br />
* The various things that you can purchase from the Zenith Trader are all now planet-bound, even if they are normally mobile. They go into the fleet of that planet, and are on permanent station-keeping there.<br />
** In theory we could later have something that can let you purchase new ships for mobile fleets from the Zenith Trader or otherwise, but that would need a new UI and new general mechanics. That would be fun, but in terms of replicating the experience of the Zenith Trader thus far, here's how it needs to work for this part.<br />
<br />
* The various kinds of command stations now each come with their own hand-designed fleet styles, which are of the type that just use the max cap of each type they can have inside of their categories. That way they are always predictable per type, but you get more forcefields with a military command compared to economic, etc.<br />
** Things like minefields and the gravity generators don't go with any of these, but rather have to be gotten via Battlestations.<br />
** When it comes to factories, some of the command station types grant more factories per planet than others.<br />
<br />
* The Battlestations in general are set up, although most of them just seed randomized template-based fleets. The Ensnarer one has an example instead of a specific type of fleet that it uses in place of a template.<br />
** Bear in mind that there are several different ways to set up how a fleet leader (Battlestation or mobile) might have its fleet design created, and if none of them are set up then you'll have a lonely empty fleet. Right now the game doesn't warn the designers about that.<br />
** In general there is a looooot more that could be done here in terms of making new and unique things, but right now the procedural fleets themselves are enough that probably that's not a big priority.<br />
<br />
* The general strikecraft and frigates are all now set up so that they'll populate some interesting different procedural fleet designs in (currently) 9 different overall flavors. But even within those 9 flavors, there's a huge amount of variety likely to be found.<br />
<br />
* The game now actually seeds the Battlestations and fleet flagships, and makes sure that they have their fleet designs populated right from mapgen start.<br />
** First it tries to seed 1 item with tag "MobileCombatFleetArkOrGolem" on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed 1 more two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least eight more, but up to 1 per 25 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** It's possible that it won't have enough types or will run into blockages, and that's A-OK to happen.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 Battlestation (based on the SpecialEntityType directly) on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least five more, but up to 1 per 50 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** In both cases, if it couldn't seed a thing closer in, then it will retry with it further out. This is mostly only relevant for snake maps and other things with very few direct and secondary connections from planets.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 item with tag "MobileSupportFleetFlagship" on a planet two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least two more, but up to 1 per 150 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** The reason it uses the SpecialEntityType directly for Battlestations is because that's the most direct thing. For the other two categories, those both have a MobileFleetFlagship type, and so those tags help specify a bit more if they are regular (and thus more common), or are "support" (and thus less common and further out).<br />
<br />
* The Battlestation special entity type has been split into two: BattlestationBasic and BattlestationCitadel.<br />
<br />
* The MobileFleetFlagships special entity type has been split into three: MobileCombatFleetFlagship, MobileSupportFleetFlagship, and MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship.<br />
** The third in this category is for the things that don't have a fleet with them, namely right now the spire frigates.<br />
<br />
* The seeding for battlestations and mobile fleet flagships has been updated, as you might guess.<br />
** The existing logic for mobile fleet flagships now applies to MobileCombatFleetFlagships, and MobileSupportFleetFlagships still also work the same.<br />
** The existing logic for battlestations now applies to BattlestationBasic.<br />
** MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship is now seeded "kinda wherever" and is both rarer but also no longer counts against the normal combat fleet flagships.<br />
** BattlestationCitadel is following the general pattern of the basic battlestations, but with the following differences:<br />
*** It only ever seeds one on a planet, not two at a time.<br />
*** It seeds one within 2 hops of a player starting planet if possible.<br />
*** It then seeds a smaller number of citadels out in the galaxy, mixed between the middle-distance and far out. These are in addition to the basic battlestations, not in place of them.<br />
** With all this, there's a better sense of control of what exactly the player can look forward to out there, but also in general there are yet more capturables out there, and they can continue to be balanced in their niches: we can add more lone wolf stuff without swamping the main mobile flagships, and we can add more citadels or regular battlestations without affecting their relative mixes.<br />
<br />
* The various MobileSupportFleet flagships now are able to get upgraded from Mark1 to higher marks based on their fleets being upgraded. They have no techs that benefit them directly.<br />
** This fixes an issue with them referencing an Engineer tech that was nonexistent.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each faction as their "loose" fleet.<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just used for all their ships, more or less, and doesn't really get used for much. Drones don't go in there, but that's it. Actual useful fleets can be created as-desired in the future, but for anything not using something specific, it uses this.<br />
** For the players, there is a PlayerLoose fleet, which is basically "remainder units" that are not in a fleet. Odds are that this won't be used, but it's an overflow valve in case we have a truly odd case or potentially even a bug that we want to fail more gracefully.<br />
*** Oh! Actually, we are using this now for ships that are being captured via zombification. So there you go, a use for it already.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each PlanetFaction as their "fleet of that planet."<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just a reference to their parent loose fleet from the faction itself.<br />
** For the players, these are unique fleets that are what the command stations go into and put their stuff into.<br />
*** It's entirely possible for a command station of a player to die, but in those cases the fleet must live on.<br />
<br />
* When the game creates a new ship/structure, it now REQUIRES that the appropriate Fleet.Membership be passed into it.<br />
** This solves all sorts of bugs where fleet membership was never being set previously.<br />
** In the case of fleet leaders or ships that create drones, it ignores this membership, however, and creates and populates its own fleet.<br />
<br />
* Added a whole bunch of ways to calculate the strength and health percentages of fleets based on their type, which is more complicated than you might think.<br />
** For command station fleets, or the battlestation ones, it's based around the total power out of what you've DECIDED to build (and what has died to remains or is hurt or whatever).<br />
** For drones and mobile fleets, it's out of the total things that would be auto-built, since you get no decision-making in whether to fully stock those fleets or not (aside from keeping them away from docks).<br />
** This is surprisingly complex when it comes to things like the ships being transported in fleets, or undeployed drones, etc, etc.<br />
<br />
* A new destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command xml tag has been added.<br />
** This is used only in a really narrow set of circumstances: it was a planet that a human player controlled with one kind of command station, and they now have a different kind of command station there.<br />
** Basically, different types of command stations give you different numbers of engineers, basic turrets, energy collectors, etc. This prevents you from having too many left over after you switch from a military to an economic command station, for instance; there were all sorts of games you could play with that to exploit things.<br />
** What this does NOT do is destroy units after your command station has died on a planet; in those circumstances, whatever is there continues to live on until you build a new command station. Presuming you rebuild as the same type, nothing gets destroyed.<br />
** This flag is also explicitly NOT on certain units like the human home forcefields and the various things you get from the Zenith Trader. They will frequently be over-cap (since their command station type doesn't always include it but you might have bought it separately), and so these are always assumed to be valid.<br />
** Confusing? Basically this just shuts down an exploit and doesn't affect much else.<br />
<br />
==== Docks Sidebar Tab Gone, Fleets Tab Added ====<br />
<br />
* The docks tab is gone, and a new fleets tab has taken its place.<br />
** The fleets tab has a bunch of sections which show first your fleets at the current planet, and then all of your fleets in the entire galaxy, by category, after that.<br />
** The categories, in order, are:<br />
*** Current Planet<br />
**** A quick view of all your fleets at the current planet.<br />
*** Mobile Combat<br />
**** The most versatile of your fighting forces: generally intended for offense, but quite able to come and defend your own planets as need be.<br />
*** Mobile Support<br />
**** Unusual supporting fleets that are able to either act as a force multiplier for your offensive or defensive fleets, provide remote supply on deep strikes, or perform surprising other secondary duties.<br />
*** Lone<br />
**** Unusual single 'lone wolf' massive ships that forego having attending ships in exchange for a simply awe-inspiring amount of direct power. Use them offensively or defensively, as you see fit.<br />
*** Battlestations<br />
**** General battlestations that are useful for either defending your planets or for setting up offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Citadels<br />
**** Citadels that are much stronger versions of your general battlestations, packing a huge punch in their own right as well as providing access to defenses for your planets or for offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Planet Cmd Stations<br />
**** Each command station you have on a planet has a small force of mostly basic, utility, or economic nature. However, if you've made purchases from the Zenith Trader or found other unique capturables throughout the galaxy, you might have some fixed-position weapons of surprising power here, too.<br />
** For the time being, the tooltips over the actual fleets just shows the tooltip for their centerpiece. This won't always be the case; they'll later have their own unique tooltips that are more informative.<br />
** For the time being as well, clicking these does nothing but show you a message saying that the fleet management interface is coming soon.<br />
** The individual fleet entries show the name of the fleets, their health percentage, their total ships out of their EFFECTIVE ship cap (for the stationary things, that's out of what you've deployed), their planet name, and their total effective strength if they were fully powered at the level that is chosen for them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new specific tooltip for the fleets in the fleet sidebar.<br />
** This gives a lot of the same info you could already see on the centerpiece's tooltip, but in a slightly more focused and condensed format.<br />
** You can also now right-click to center your view on the centerpiece and select the entire fleet. The tooltip now tells you this. You can also hold shift to select multiple fleets quickly by doing this, as you would have with selecting control groups previously.<br />
<br />
* Given that the fleets in the fleet sidebar can be shown twice -- once for their current planet, and once for their other category -- we decided to add some color to the ones for the current planet to set them apart. This helps to keep it clearer visually what is happening.<br />
<br />
==== Hand-Designed Fleet Capabilities ====<br />
<br />
* Normally it's nice to only have... one way to do things when setting up the XML, right? I mean, that's the most clear thing, eh?<br />
** However, in a few cases it is sometimes nice to be able to have parents talk about their children, rather than children always being the ones talking about their parents.<br />
** This is most notable for hand-designed fleet templates, where we don't want auto-modded stuff to be added in a bunch.<br />
** Thankfully, we can do both things, with both coexisting and neither acting in exclusion of the other.<br />
*** Basically, NORMALLY, you should definitely still use the fleet_membership nodes on ships in order to get them into fleets. This is more modder friendly and more flexible in general.<br />
*** THAT said, now you can also define ship_membership nodes in the fleets themselves, which basically are just the inverse of a fleet_membership node. They say all the same things, but say "a specific ship is being added to my fleet," versus the other way around with a ship adding itself to a specific fleet.<br />
*** This is now in use in a new CMP_StartingFleetDesigns.xml file, which uses a new design_logic of InitialPlayerFleet.<br />
**** Basically: we want to have 5-7 starting player fleets that are hand-designed including what their centerpiece is as well as what their ship compositions are. This lets players start off the game with something they are excited about, and move forward with whatever they find procedurally generated after that.<br />
<br />
==== "Control Groups" Are Gone ====<br />
<br />
* Fleets basically handle the same thing. But better. Some of the interface for this won't be until an upcoming build, though.<br />
<br />
==== "Supply" From Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new IsConsideredOutOfSupplyOfParentFleetCenterpiece bool, which is calculated based on ships within a human mobile or defensive fleet not being on the planet of their centerpiece.<br />
** This is done separately because that way it can only be calculated once per second, which is a lot more efficient.<br />
** This then gets used by things that are checking to see if ship systems are disabled -- aka guns, engineers, etc. These ships can still move, but they're neutered on purpose.<br />
** If the centerpiece is itself kind of hobbling along half-dead, it's okay because the ships are still able to draw supply.<br />
** For the stuff that is either considered "loose" or part of a command station's fleet, these things don't have the concept of supply at all, because their fleet leaders can legitimately be destroyed permanently and they need to still function. Or the loose ones don't even have a fleet leader.<br />
** The goal of the fleet leaders thing is to keep the mobile fleets, and the Battlestation stuff, remotely in the same area as one another. You can't start segmenting your fleets and sending them off to fight WAY off, only raiding neighboring planets. This is for balance purposes more than anything else, and is similar in reasoning to the old Supply concept from AIWC. Funny how things like that come back around!<br />
<br />
==== Squads Removed ====<br />
<br />
* Intra-Squad Formations have been removed, as have the concept of squads, the counts of "visual things per subsquad," and so on.<br />
** The whole "squads" idea was mainly to have more ships without having more ships, and that just wasn't working out for a variety of reasons. Now it's just ships instead.<br />
* large_ship_scale_multiplier has been removed, so that all marks of a starship or whatever are now the same size. This lets us define them in ways that are best for being able to see them without them getting too stupidly huge.<br />
<br />
* Various parts of the game referred to "squads" and "ships" as separate things, and there were internal mechanics for repairing lost ships in a squad, etc.<br />
** That's all gone now, but there are some code remnants (to say the least) that still refer to squads. If you run into anything in the front-end (aka actually in the game) that mentions squads, we'd appreciate a heads up so that we can correct that.<br />
** There ARE still visual groups of many of the smaller ships (V-Wings, etc), which is because those are just a single "3d model" made out of several smaller 3d models at this point. We can go back and correct that later, or we can leave it; we're kind of on the fence.<br />
<br />
==== Rallying Ships From Factories to Fleet Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* IF a mobile fleet of yours is on a planet with a factory, or on an adjacent planet, then the factory now produces ships for it as fast as it can.<br />
** In the interest of fairness, a given factory divides up its resources evenly between every possible ship that it can build for every fleet in range, and works on them all at once. So there are no queues, there is no order to set, there's just whether or not you accelerate the factories with engineers or not.<br />
<br />
* The various types of "ships rally to X location after construction" are now gone, with instead all the ships from docks rallying to their fleet centerpiece, whereever that may be.<br />
** This is highly automated and much more the default thing we want to have happen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of bugs with ships rallying to their fleet centerpiece (which is the only type of rally that now exists).<br />
** They should rally to where the centerpiece either is or is heading, and they'll stop rallying once they get very close to where the centerpiece is.<br />
** They stay in rally mode, continually updating their destination, until they reach the target. Initially the target can only be on the planet they are on or an adjacent planet, but it's possible that the target will move even further away while they are chasing it, and they should adjust to follow. That has been tested except when moving more than one planet away while they chase.<br />
** Note that you can't set the rallying directly at all, unlike prior versions of the games. Factories just make whatever is needed in order to bring a local fleet up to full fighting force, and those things automatically rally to their respective fleets. "Local" means on this or an adjacent planet.<br />
** On arrival, the rallying ships should take up the disposition of the ships that are at the other end, but that remains to be seen if that works as the interface for that bit isn't there yet. If you see problems with us, please do let us know.<br />
<br />
==== Procedural Fleet Names ====<br />
<br />
* The fleets for most fleets now have default names that are pulled from folders [FleetNames_Mobile_P1]+[FleetNames_Mobile_P2]. If anyone reading wants to add to these after this build is out, that's certainly welcome.<br />
** This wasn't a high priority item, but Chris needed a small mental break when starting the morning. ;)<br />
** These can be renamed later by players.<br />
<br />
==== AIP Penalties for Fleet Clustering ====<br />
<br />
* If you put too many ships from too many fleets on one planet, basically the AI notices, gets scared and angry, and the AIP starts increasing over time. It warns you about this.<br />
** You're allowed to have WAY more units in this version of the game compared to any prior one, but if you go putting them all one one or two planets the AI is going to kick back... hard. That whole "guerrilla warfare" bit goes out the window if you advertise your presence like that.<br />
<br />
* The fleet concentration AIP penalties will now only kick in at 3 fleets on an AI planet, and 5 on a player planet, rather than 2 and 4 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "too many fleets on a planet" code works has been reworked a fair bit, but not tested:<br />
** It now looks at all the human ships that are part of a mobile (flagship) fleet or a battlestation/citadel fleet. Before it was just looking at the fleet centerpieces, meaning you could have your centerpiece hide on an adjacent planet and send its ships in and the AI wouldn't notice.<br />
** It also now only looks at the ships that are actually on the planet, and not the total strength of the fleet. The strength must be at least 2 in order for it to care at all about it for these purposes. If you send in 10 fleets of strength 1 -- or a slice of them that is strength 1 -- then it won't care.<br />
*** This latter thing will probably encourage all sorts of bad behavior, but we'll figure that out in the future. For now it should feel more natural in general, but it will likely need further iterating.<br />
<br />
=== AI Behaviour Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The AI will now be less worried about distant mobile enemy forces.<br />
* The AI will no longer mistakenly count Guard units as Threat in some code paths<br />
* Make some improvements to hunter/warden fleet routing logic<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the Hunter/Warden save game<br />
<br />
* Each AI faction now has its own Hunter/Warden fleets. The units of each Hunter/Warden will just show as "Hunter Fleet" or "Warden Fleet", but there will now be multiple fleets acting independently. The goal of this is to make those fleets much more flexible in how they deal with enemies.<br />
** Only one Hunter and one Warden are visible in the game lobby. The other hunter/wardens will copy the colours but not the settings of the visible Hunter/Warden.<br />
<br />
* Add a new gameplay mechanic, "AI Civil War". At the beginning of the game, Communication Nodes are seeded near all the AI homeworlds. Destroying all of them will trigger the AI Civil War by making the AIs unable to communicate with eachother. This will make all of the AI factions hostile to eachother; they will send waves at eachother, use Threat on eachother, etc, just like they do against the player.<br />
** This will significantly strengthen all the AIs.<br />
** The Warden and Hunter Fleets will remain friendly with all the AIs. They are unaffected by the Communication breakdown and are quite confused. <br />
** If there is only one AI in the game then the Communication Node will not be in the game.<br />
** "AI Civil War" mode is also available as an option to the Game Lobby, which will start the game with AI's in Civil War mode. This is for testing and sandbox purposes.<br />
<br />
* The targeting code now treats XML-based importances as more important than 'amount of damage I can do'; this makes it less likely for units to ignore Command Stations and other high-value targets in favour of fleetships<br />
<br />
* Change how overkill is calculated; only count units that are actually in range of the target<br />
** This makes ships less likely to dance between multiple targets, unable to pick which one to attack.<br />
<br />
* Don't throw away Distance to Target information when choosing a target<br />
** This also makes ships much less likely to do the "can't decide on a target" dance<br />
<br />
* AIs no longer have any concept of "unlock points," and they don't unlock new ship types over the course of the game.<br />
** This was a neat concept in AI War Classic, kinda-sorta, but in a long campaign it just meant more chaos, honestly.<br />
** The original intent was to make it so that there was a feeling of progression and the AI doing new things with new tools as you go through the game, and that is now handled far better via the ship groups instead, and the planets being more unique, etc.<br />
<br />
* When the budget for a wave is over 3k, the AI no longer randomly gets guardians added in as a thing they can buy for the wave. Instead things are more hand-designed than that.<br />
<br />
=== Map Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Several map types have been improved by Draco.<br />
** Thanks Draco!<br />
<br />
* Make the Simple and Realistic map types more interesting by fixing a dumb bug in them.<br />
<br />
* The Max/Min number of planets in the galaxy is now defined on a per-map type basis rather than a global (since some maps scale up to larger galaxies better than others)<br />
** Some map types go up as high as 500 planets, others are capped at an AIWC-like 120 planets<br />
<br />
* The previous methods for some of the map seeding of AI things are also being... phased out in some ways, and made a lot more centralized and thus flexible.<br />
** This in turn lets us make the various AI planets a lot more unique, and lets modders add to things without replacing them.<br />
<br />
* The warden special forces hideouts were previously always seeding 4, but now it's sometimes more based on the size of the galaxy being larger.<br />
<br />
* The game is now able to seed multiple entities on certain planets if we so desire, during mapgen.<br />
** As the sole use of this so far, we're now seeding two battlestations/citadels on any planets that have those, to make those a lot more attractive as targets and also thus provide more firepower for defensive purposes for players without them having to capture QUITE so many planets for each of these that they get.<br />
<br />
* Did a fair bit of rework on some of the mapgen logic where it is trying to seed things close to the player homeworlds.<br />
** A while back we had some problems where things were frequently seeding too close, so we put in code to counter that. That was in turn preventing us from intentionally putting stuff there more recently.<br />
** Now there's a healthy balance between us being able to do that while still avoiding the old bug, and in general things seem to be working well.<br />
<br />
* There was some other funkiness with it being really unlikely to seed certain things very near to you.<br />
** That has been fixed, to start with, but then beyond that it also now tries to seed half the flagships and battlestations kind of in the middle-distance for you on the map.<br />
** In general this now gives you way more options for middle-game goals for making yourself stronger.<br />
<br />
==== Limited Ship Types For Each AI Planet ====<br />
<br />
* Essentially it's super boring when there are too many types of ships all over the place on every planet for the AI. So now it does this really interesting thing where it chooses a subset/theme for each planet, and some themes are harder than others, rarer than others, etc. Now you can actually see what is there, formulate a strategy of which of your fleets is best to send, and... well, send them.<br />
<br />
* Planets now remember what specific ShipGroup out of a ShipGroupCategory they are using for a given faction. This is where the theming comes in for these planets.<br />
** For the wormhole sentinels, it's actually only seeded at the start of the game, and each wormhole is unique rather than being homogeneous per planet. So those don't get remembered.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that AIs choose their "draw bags" for how to populate a planet's guard posts, strikecraft, turrets, or whatever, has been redone; but also the same is redone for waves and CPAs and the like. It's all using the new AIShipGroups and AIShipGroupCategories.<br />
<br />
* In the tooltips, you can now see how many ships and what strength is contained inside a guard post, as you used to be pre-fleets. HOWEVER, you can also now see exactly how many of each type of ship is inside there, to see what mix the AI is using at that planet without having to go aggro a guard post.<br />
<br />
* Basic definitions for ai ship groups and ai ship categories have been implemented. These are based around the excellent document that Puffin set up on the subject, but with some changes and additions here and there.<br />
** Note that this is ai_ship_groups_i_am_part_of, and it refers exclusively to how the AI uses ships. This isn't meaningful at all to fleet design stuff for players, which is a separate topic.<br />
** This also doesn't affect minor factions, although there's nothing stopping minor factions from adopting this new pattern in the future.<br />
** At the moment this also only describes strikecraft and frigates, and not turrets or other things of that nature. Those are coming soon. Puffin, if you want to set up the other categories and groups based on this starting template, probably ignoring the "singular freaky surprises" stuff, then please feel free as it would save me some time.<br />
** The overall rule with this usage of ships in groups is that anything that is a variant of something else shouldn't be in the same group with it. This is just a design thought, not a technical restriction. Warden and Hunter fleets will wind up having all sorts of strange mixing and matching, but by keeping to this rule we will ensure that planets and waves otherwise don't have that sort of strange mixing.<br />
** You'll also notice that for the ship group categories that are specific to certain AI types, like Turtle or Cloaking-Heavy or whatever, those also include some sub-groups that are unrelated to their type, but which will provide some... well, variety. Aka sometimes instead of being a cloaking-heavy wave, it will by an anti-structures wave. Sneaky! There's nothing worse than a predictable AI type, so having some variety in what they do, even if they are thematically heavy, is good.<br />
** It's also worth noting how the "draw bags" work, in this context. Essentially the number after the things that are included say "how many raffle tickets do I put into the draw bag?" And depending on how many other total raffle tickets have been put in, that's how likely it is to come out.<br />
*** In order to allow for granularity in definitions, our default number of tickets to add is 100. That way we can say "only do this 1% as often as most stuff" by putting in 1 ticket instead of 100.<br />
*** But even there, the odds of it coming out are not 1%, because it depends on what else is put into the bag. And by very definition, what is put into the bag is something that is meant to be unknowable at design time, since it can be modded, and expanded in the future. So we simply use something like "100" to mean "regular frequency, whatever that is," and then the other numbers like "25" to mean "about a quarter as often as usual, whatever that is."<br />
*** It is worth noting that not putting too many types inside a single draw bag is probably good in MOST cases, because it means that players will be facing a planet or a wave that has some sort of coherency to it that they can plan around. I'd say that 3 types is a sweet spot for waves, but sometimes having many more or fewer types is okay. Variety being the spice of life, it's okay that many of the things drift off the "normal" design parameters.<br />
*** Overall we'll find some situations where people go "wow there's way too many xyz unit in this circumstance," and we'll deal with that as need be. But most of these groups are intended for things that are not strictly numbers-bound (aka more than a handful of forcefields on a planet is terrible, so using them in these groups would be a Very Bad Idea since it would lead to occasional bouts of player dismay).<br />
**** Most of the time, we are likely to wind up with something like "holy cow that one planet is a nest of sniper like I've never seen in my life," and we just kind of sit back and go "yep! That will happen, in extremely rare cases. Either deal with it or go around, but that's the fun of this." The prior system was leading to a feeling of samey-ness on all the various planets, and so this is meant to break things up more into various thematic niches, some of which are more rare than others due to being either annoying or scary or hard or whatever. But we still want those rare outliers to happen, because those are either the places where good stories happen during AARs, or where the player's eyebrows can shoot up as they go "I'm glad I don't have to go THERE." Or sometimes it's just going to be the Wave From Hell that surprises players before going away again.<br />
** This whole thing is going to take a lot more defining and redefining over time, but it's really well set up for having lots of ship variants and strange outliers. In a lot of ways, this is intentionally pushing planets and waves a bit more in the direction of a RogueLite, where you never quite know what you're going to find. Chris was really missing some of the sense of exploration, and this is his way of trying to capture that again.<br />
*** And note that this is completely parallel to the player fleet waves and such, so the nice thing is that the AI, other factions, and players can all be thought of using completely separate structures and in completely different terms. As it should be.<br />
<br />
* Each planet belonging to an AI now seeds a single entity from SingularFreakySurprisesAIShipGroup on each of their planets at the start.<br />
** Note that this includes a fair bit of blank space, and that if it chooses blank space that is considered A-OK. So it won't really be every planet, and the frequency is actually determined in the xml rather than the code.<br />
** This lets things like the Golemite be set up a lot more directly, and without using tags.<br />
** The ONE downside of this is that the frequency can no longer be based around things like what the AI difficulty level is. But frankly, that's something that makes the AIs feel less unique and not just easier; if the game is meant to be easier, the player should still be facing the unique foes of that AI nonetheless.<br />
*** As part of this, the explicit seeding code for the Golemite to seed its golems has been removed, and it now uses the new central xml-based function.<br />
*** Note that, if we want to, there's nothing stopping us from using both the old method and the new one at the same time. The new one is mainly a convenience that makes for some powerful new xml-only modding capabilities that don't need to touch C# to add cool stuff to an AI.<br />
<br />
* Guardians now have their own AI ship groups, like Strikecraft, and are similar to them. Did the same for Royal, and it uses those for the wave and reinforcement ones as well, so interestingly it can vary what Guardians it has, or roll the same thing in Reinforcements and Guardians separately and really focus on one thing, or even have almost every kind, with an emphasis on this set, etc.<br />
** Just didn't like how planets were always a mess of Guardians. Sometimes they still will be, but that's a rare "Oh dear" thing.<br />
<br />
===== How The AI Guards Wormholes Is Way Cooler =====<br />
<br />
* The Stealth Wormhole Sentinels have been set up as something that only show up rarely, now that scouting is going to be working differently. This is useful for making planets feel a lot more varied, and not all planets so hard to sneak your stealth ships into.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Basic Minefield Wormhole Sentinels, possibly against our better judgement, to let a tiny minority of wormholes actually have mines around them that players can stumble into.<br />
** Since these should only really show up once, with the AI not rebuilding them, this should be an interesting thing for the player to run into well under 1% of the time. Thanks to Puffin for suggesting this; this should provide for some interesting traps without being too frustratingly common.<br />
<br />
* Actually jacked up the default NobodyHereWormholeSentinels draw bag count to 1000, and the StealthWormholeSentinels to 50, so that the 1 of BasicMinefieldWormholeSentinels is EVEN MORE RARE. Hopefully players run into one or zero minefields during a given campaign, thus making it more exciting.<br />
** Of course, if someone wants to make a minefield-heavy AI type, that is straightforward to do, now.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, there are now 5 different kinds of wormhole sentinel setups that are based around using tractor arrays and turrets, tesla turrets, gravity weapons and pike turrets, and whatever else.<br />
** These are also in the minority in terms of how frequently they will seed, but are way more common than the minefields and should make it so that some of the wormholes are a lot more interesting to face, now.<br />
** This gets back a bit more back to the original design of the original game, which is only possible now because of how some of the scouting changes will interact with the game here. We had had to move away from this because of tedium of automated scouting in other circumstnaces.<br />
** There are still quite a few wormholes that won't be directly defended at all, and it's possible for us to set up way more wormhole defensive types as desired in the future; these are mostly a proof of concept.<br />
** Note that with the sentinels at wormholes, the idea is that these will exist from the start of the game and never get upgraded or reinforced, unlike what happens at guard posts.<br />
<br />
==== Revamped AI Types Based On New Seeding Styles ====<br />
<br />
* Set up new "singular freaky surprises" that includes how golems are seeded for the Golemite now, and actually gives a very rare chance that some regular planets will sometimes have an AI golem.<br />
<br />
* The Vanilla AI type has been renamed to "Full Ensemble," referening the fact how it is basically the most well-rounded AI type that presently exists. It has the most varied surprises up its sleeves.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Simple Ensemble AI variant: Like the full ensemble in most respects, but minus some of the more esoteric ship variants. There's plenty going on here, but not quite so much craziness to discover as you explore.<br />
<br />
* The Starfleet Commander AI type has been removed, as now all the AIs kind of do what it was doing before. It no longer stands out as unique.<br />
<br />
* The Everything AI type has been removed, as it was kind of redundant now, and wouldn't have made for coherent gameplay anyhow.<br />
<br />
* Added in a completely untested new Thief AI type that was kinda-sorta defined previously but seemed to be missing, nonetheless.<br />
<br />
* Also added a completely untested new Zombifier AI type that uses a bunch of zombifying ships and other nasty things. It was kinda-sorta previously defined but again still seemed to be missing.<br />
<br />
* In general there were very few AI types removed, and instead they are all just a whole heck of a lot more vibrant, and we actually added a few.<br />
<br />
=== Hacking changes ===<br />
<br />
* Science Extraction hacking will now show the total cost for the remaining science on the planet in the tooltip<br />
** Requested by Ecthelon on Steam<br />
* Hacking has been feeling a bit too easy these days, so include AIP when calculating how strong the hacking response should be for hacks against the AI.<br />
** The formula is now NewHackingResponse = oldHacking Response + (oldHackingResponse * AIPMultiplier * CurrentAIP)<br />
<br />
* Add the Sabotage hack<br />
** This will kill a random NormalPlanetNastyPick structure on a planet. Many people have asked for this. <br />
<br />
* Allow hacks to be done against planets, not just structures<br />
* Allow hacks to be done without a local hacker on the planet<br />
* Allow the AI to launch an attack against the player after hacking is completed<br />
** These can be set on any hack with an XML tag. So all the previous hacking mechanics can continue to function as usual, but new options are now available.<br />
<br />
* Mercenary Beacons can be done without a local hacker on the planet. They are also nearly instant to complete.<br />
<br />
* Hacking the dyson sphere in order to download a ship design SHOULD now actually work, although it works differently from before.<br />
** Rather than unlocking a new ship line in general (type Dyson Defender), it now adds a permanent cap of 2 more dyson defenders to whatever the hacking fleet is that just did the hack. So it's a way to buff up the particular fleet doing the hack with some sweet new dyson tech that you get to keep forever.<br />
** In general this can now serve as a model for other types of the same thing that we can do, although there's a question mark of course as to whether this actually works since we've not tested it. But it's neat and should be useful in general for the future.<br />
<br />
* The hacking for the dark spire wraiths now works like the dyson hacking.<br />
<br />
=== Bug Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the entity hovering ui where it was incorrectly identifying energy overdrive as an attack penalty<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Zenith Trader (Traitor!) was allowing the AI to buy way too many goodies<br />
** Thanks to lots of people for reporting this, including Jannik2099 and Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when handling GameCommands<br />
** Thanks to jannik for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where v-wings were having damage multipliers based on buildings lack of engines<br />
** Thanks to weaponmaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Correctly flag the "Download Dyson Sphere Ship" hack as unavailable after that hack has been completed<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where vengeance generators were warping in already vulnerable to damage<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and zeusalmighty for the reports<br />
<br />
* Add an Objective for hacking the Spire Archive<br />
** Thanks to settemio for the reminder<br />
<br />
* Only seed one spire archive per AI<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the report<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive isn't invulnerable to all damage, meaning it properly dies after being hacked.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Spire Archives now show on the galaxy map.<br />
<br />
* The Superterminal now explodes after the hack finishes, instead of using a kludgy and bug prone mechanism to prevent it from being hacked multiple times<br />
** Thanks to Lifestrider and zeusalmighty for bug reports<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the settings menu for multiple AI types<br />
** Thanks to coldrage101 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug where the HRF Raiders were never spawning because of a typo in their tag.<br />
<br />
* Fixed that issue with the fullscreen resolution not being settable in recent internal builds.<br />
** Note that there is still some issue that may make you need to alt-f4 the program after changing between fullscreen resolutions or fullscreen to not-fullscreen, but it then shows up properly after that. I expect an upgrade to the unity engine, due in the next month or so, will probably fix that one part. And that one part probably isn't new. But the new part that was broken is now fixed.<br />
<br />
* The game now properly unpauses itself after you close the escape menu, if it paused itself going into there.<br />
<br />
* Units that are stacked, or units that are in transports, now cost energy the same as they do when they are outside of their hosts.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Renaming And Visual Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Cleaned up all entity names, from in the past when they changed function (i.e LaserTurret to NucleophilicTurret).<br />
* Also cleaned up and standardised all the entity system names, and cleaned out a few that were redundant.<br />
** This should make it a bit cleaner to work with in future, as there's no weird cases of there being a WidowGuardian, which is really the Paralysis Guardian, but it shows up as the Widow in all the internal files!<br />
<br />
* The Widow Mine is now the Paralysis Mine, and the Grenade Launcher fleetship is now Grenade Launcher Corvette - seeing as it has the Corvette icon and all.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Frigates are now Sentinel Gunboats.<br />
** Anything in future, like Lightning Torpedo Frigate will use the term Gunboat instead.<br />
<br />
* Fleetships are now called Strikecraft, and Starships are now called Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Space Docks are now simply called Factories, Mobile Space Dock is Mobile Factory, and the Starship Constructor doesn't exist at all now.<br />
** Both Strikecraft and Frigates come out of the same building.<br />
<br />
* Not a rename, but a recolour. Human Resistance Fighters and Marauders have a primary green that shows up better in game, and matches what it is in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Advanced Factory is now the Intra-Galactic Coordinator.<br />
** It's just a thing that increases your ship caps, essentially.<br />
** The ship_cap_multiplier actually works now in the new system. It won't increase the caps for anything with a cap of 1, though, just FYI. It also can't be used to reduce the cap.<br />
<br />
* Mentions of Shields such as the Shield Frigate, Shield Generator etc are all Forcefield now.<br />
** Apparently we were using both in kind of random places?<br />
<br />
* As Squads are removed, all the Strikecraft models are much bigger, with a single one taking up the same space the full squad used to!<br />
** In addition, things like Frigates, Command Stations, Turrets, etc are all bigger. Almost everything, really.<br />
<br />
* All icons in the game are displayed a bit higher above their entity. This gets them out of the way a bit, hopefully not too far that it's difficult to know what they're for.<br />
** With this and the above change, you can actually see the models a bit!<br />
<br />
=== Ship Variants ===<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Harasser" variant of the MLRS Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Porcupine" variant of the Pike Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ablative Troll" variant of the Ablative Gatling.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Dagger" variant of the Raider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Gunbot" variant of the Autocannon Minipod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Velociraptor" variant of the Raptor.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Stalker" variant of the Eyebot.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Tripper" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Railpod" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Pulsar Punk" variant of the Pulsar Tank.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Aggressor" variant of the Agravic Pod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Mirage" variant of the Space Plane.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Hydra" variant of the Vanguard.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Zapper" variant of the Inhibiting Tesla Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Terrier" variant of the Spider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Molotov" variant of the Grenade Launcher Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ranger" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Medic Gunboat" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Absorber" variant of the Vampire Claw.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Thief" variant of the Etherjet.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Paralyser" variant of the Stingray.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Cluster" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Nanoswarm" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Persuader" variant of the Parasite.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ripper" variant of the Warbird Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Brawler" variant of the Assault Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Devastator" variant of the Siege Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Siphoner" variant of the Shield Frigate.<br />
<br />
* The Hydra is now the Vanguard Hydra, and there's a new Stringray Hydra type to keep it company.<br />
** The Stingray version is markedly more strong in the sense that it subdivides but doesn't have worse stats. It's a quick bit of variance for planets or waves that are replicant-heavy.<br />
<br />
* Also added a Parasite Hydra to round it out even more, although made them thankfully lexss frequent.<br />
<br />
* Added Ghost Grenade Launcher Corvette and Ghost Concussion Corvettes, to round out the ghost strikecraft category a bit.<br />
<br />
* A new Station-Keeping Assault Frigate has been added to the loadout of military and home command stations (2x each), and logistical command stations (1x each).<br />
** As with the pike turrets that all the command stations now have, this gives you some more defensive options without having a fleet or a battlestation around.<br />
** Unlike the turrets, these don't require any placement planning, since they are mobile and able to roam around and hit enemies. Seemed like this would get around a variety of frustrating situations that even having turrets would not solve.<br />
<br />
==== New Variants For Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Cloaked Ark One variant, and this one is ONLY available via a new "Cloaked Fleet" (CloakedStartingFleet) that players can get in the lobby at the start of the game.<br />
** This offensive fleet is one of the first that players can choose from, and it's powerful and invisible and likely to make them feel quite powerful.<br />
** Led by the Cloaked Ark One, this has Raptors, Agravic Pods, Gunbots, and then Warbird Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Mugger variant of the Assault Frigate that gets parasitism (this needs to be tested).<br />
** This is ONLY available via the new "Parasitic Fleet" that players can choose at the start of the game.<br />
** The parasitic fleet in general is weak and small by comparison to others when it comes to direct firepower... but of course they create a bunch of zombies to work for them. Uh, and yeah there's a Botnet Golem at the center. So weaker might not be accurate after all.<br />
** Led by the Botnet Golem, these have 60 Parasites and 2 Muggers. This is by far the smallest ship cap fleet you can start with... until you start creating zombies.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Classic Fleet that players can start with.<br />
** This classic mix isn't good at any one particular thing, but is well-rounded against any foe. The forcefields just make things even better.<br />
** It's V-Wings, Fusion Bombers, Concussion Corvettes, and then a Forcefield Frigate, with the centerpiece being an Armored Golem.<br />
** This is a nod both to the first game as well as the classic starting loadout of ships in this game itself, which is now absent.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Raid Fleet for the starting player options, which also has a new "Agile Cursed Golem Ark" that is the Cursed Golem but with way faster engines.<br />
** The whole purpose of this fleet is being able to rapidly move around faster than any other purely offensive fleet in the game.<br />
** It also includes a new "Turbo Stingray" ship that is a faster version of regular Stringrays, and then Velociraptors and Daggers, which are normally already super fast.<br />
** All of these things share the same base (very high) speed except for the last and obligatory part of the fleet, Raid Frigates. These are able to move EVEN FASTER, and so can go off on their own away from the main body if you so desire.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Doorkicker Fleet" as another starting fleet option.<br />
** Mostly focused on crowd control, but with siege frigates along to punch giant holes in large targets when required.<br />
** Basically this is the taking the idea of the Attritioner archetype, but giving one bit of counterbalance to it. Led by a black widow golem, this has MLRS Corvettes, Grenade Launcher Corvettes, Inhibiting Tesla Corvettes, and then Siege Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== New Battlestation Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Revealer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tachyon Array.<br />
<br />
* Gravitic Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Gravity Generator.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has greatly improved shields that extend out around itself.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has very powerful engineering capabilities.<br />
<br />
* Ensnarer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tractor Array.<br />
<br />
==== New Citadel Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Metabolic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing many weak shots that turn targets into resources on death.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of high power Agravic Bombs.<br />
<br />
* Inhibitor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of shots that reduce enemy weapon output.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires multiple paralysis shots.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing small bursts of bolts that zombify victims.<br />
<br />
* Interceptor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, packing multiple railcannons that shred fast moving targets.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Tesla-class structures (Guardians, turrets, etc) now reduce incoming damage from far away by 99% instead of 100%. This allows the targeting code to identify Tesla units as potential targets (instead of ignoring them as if they were Invulnerable). Units in FRD (and minor factions) should now be able to actually attack Tesla turrets.<br />
** Many people have complained about this, including TechSY730 and Democracy.<br />
<br />
* Ark Energy Overdrive is removed for now. Find another place for it (likely in a changed form).<br />
<br />
* Sniper damage bonus requirement reduced from speed 1200 to 1000.<br />
<br />
* Sniper: Starting bonus multiplier 5x -> 8x.<br />
<br />
* Space Plane gets the damage resistance to anything beyond range 4600 instead of 5600 now.<br />
** Basically you have to be closer to it to do full damage. Also means that when using Pursuit, they try to stay beyond that.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units have half the shots per salvo, but reload in half the time.<br />
** Helps them retarget more often.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units get their damage bonus at 30% enemy hull remaining, instead of only 20%.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette, Grenade Launcher Corvette: Mass 0.21x -> 0.3x.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard: EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Raptors, Autocannon Minipods, Space Planes, Agravic Pods, Vampire Claw, Raid Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Eyebot, Stealth Guardian: Albedeo increased to 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette, Sentinel Gunboats, Snipers, Siege Frigate, Tritium Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Tritium Guardian, Concussion Guardian, Plasma Guardian: Armour reduced to 40.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette: Shields 2,800 -> 1,800, EngineGx 8 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Claw: Armour 40 -> 70, Life Leech reduced from 1.5x to 1x.<br />
<br />
* Raptor: EngineGx 7 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Raptor Hull: 2900 -> 1900.<br />
<br />
* Stingray, Etherjet, Metabolizing Gangsaw: EngineGx 7 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette only applies reload penalty to armour below 60.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate: Damage 2500 -> 25,000, spreads it among targets instead of hitting 10 for full damage, range 10,100 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard, Pulsar Tank (main gun only): Range changed to 4200.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard: Speed reduced to 400.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette: Hull 1,000 -> 1,400, shields 1,000 -> 1,600, EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Armour increased to 110.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Shields 2,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
* Etherjet: Damage 30 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Turrets have a similar damage bonus to Ablative Gatlings now.<br />
** Makes them a bit more interesting, and also some room for other changes.<br />
<br />
* V-Wing: Hull/Shields changed from 500/3500 to 2000/2000.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette: Armour 50 -> 70, range 8,000 -> 6,000, shields 200 -> 800, speed 700 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot: Hull/Shields 1,000/1,000 -> 800/800, armour 50 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod: Armour 50 -> 70.<br />
<br />
* Dark Spire get a bit less energy if they're the ones that killed something.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian: Armour 90 -> 50, albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian: Hull/Shields changed from 20,000/20,000 to 10,000/30,000, EngineGx 12 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian, Paralysis Guardian: Speed 1,400 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian: Range 15,000 -> 8,000, Armour 90 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Guardian: EngineGx 13 -> 7, Armour 90 -> 110, range 8,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian: Albedo 0.4 -> 0.3, EngineGx 14 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guardian: Armour 50 -> 70, EngineGx 14 -> 7, range 8,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Guardians now have Cloaking, but attack half as fast.<br />
** Stealth Guardian now has a friend that it shares a group with.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Plasma Turret.<br />
** Closer to Heavy Beams than the rest.<br />
<br />
* All Turrets except Beam and Plasma have 10% lower health, but 15% greater damage in exchange.<br />
** Turrets felt like they slap the enemy to death slowly while outlasting everything. This is minor, but speeds it up a tad.<br />
<br />
* Slow the increase in cost for Science hacking multiple planets<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Minefields are now all one use. Damage increased for normal and Area mines to compensate, Paralysis mines have a longer effect as well.<br />
** This fixes numerous problems with them, including somehow surviving and the AI being confused, being repaired mid-combat, overkill or Military Command Station boosts having weird effects, etc.<br />
** Also lets us put damage bonuses on more cleanly without worsening any of those previous problems.<br />
<br />
* Marauders have a per-outpost cap on the Raiders they can produce. Unfortunately, stacking causes raiders to lose information about their spawning outpost. As a backup, also introduce a global cap on the number of raiders that the marauders can have.<br />
** This should dramatically tamp down the power of high intensity Marauders late game, especially in sandbox games.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Hunter/Killer.<br />
<br />
* AI Co-Processors reduce AIP by 20 more when all destroyed.<br />
<br />
* Player Golems are much weaker now, but can be upgraded alongside Arks. AI Golems have minor upgrades.<br />
** With enough upgrades, the player ones will match then surpass their previous forms.<br />
** Initial testing of Golems as Flagships was...amusing.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos starts with the zombifying weapon already usable.<br />
<br />
* Arks are a bit faster, have a bit less health and a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate can be upgraded as well, has some weapon and health changes and has three versions of itself now.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Guard Posts and Forcefield Generators are now actually in use again, as rather rare finds.<br />
** Connected to this, AI Turrets are in a tighter spread around whatever they defend, so they actually sit in the forcefield instead of uselessly outside.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord Phase 2 should actually come after you on that planet now.<br />
<br />
* Mercenaries spawn at Mark 1 now, and level up with the players tech level.<br />
** They're also a bit weaker to compensate for that.<br />
<br />
* Carrier Frigates are, unfortunately, gone. For the player, Drone producers must be a Fleet Leader, instead of a random Frigate or whatever in it, to avoid having nested fleets.<br />
** Potentially it can return in a fashion as a Fleet Leader in future.<br />
<br />
==== Crippled Status ====<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Mobile Fleet Flagships are now automatically something that cannot ever die, per se -- instead they become "crippled" when their health is less than 10% of its maximum value.<br />
** This solves a whole heck of a lot of problems that we otherwise have, such as where ships should rally to, and it also avoids the "corpse run" problem. <br />
*** If there are lone golems that players are capturing that die to remains, or other similar things that are not fleet leaders in that way, then those can still be a source of corpse runs, so it's not like that mechanic went away. It's simply not being a major focus for these types of ships.<br />
*** For a while, we were having things like Arks (which fall into this new category) automatically warp back away to some sort of safe space, but that's no longer a thing, which is good.<br />
** Their weapons and other systems all go offline when they have less than 10% health now, which is actually a pretty new limiter on them since it gives them only 90% of their health in which to work, although there's no longer the risk of them dying if you're not paying attention. But for balance purposes it's worth noting that we may wind up needing to beef these out slightly.<br />
** Enemy ships will consider them an uninteresting target if they are already crippled. It's possible that actually shots won't do any more damage when hitting them and they are crippled, which if so is a bug I need to fix later. But them not bothering to target the enemy seemed to be the most important thing for now. If you have a savegame with shots not damaging these ships, then please let us know.<br />
** It's also possible that there will be some edge cases where these things actually DO die rather than being crippled, in which cases repro saves will be very welcome.<br />
** Mobile fleets with a crippled centerpiece now have an effective remaining cap of 0 for all the ships that factories might be sending to them.<br />
*** This makes it so that factories won't supply new things for them anymore until there is an un-crippling of the centerpiece. Otherwise there's no reason to bring said centerpiece home for repairs, it's just this strange invincible vessel to which lots of ships rally.<br />
*** The metal spent on partial construction of ships is not refunded, but rather is stored at the fleet and as soon as the centerpiece is un-crippled things will come back online and resume wherever they were.<br />
** Note that if any ships are set to reverts_to_neutral_on_death="true" in xml while being of one of these two types, that really won't matter because they should never die. So those should probably be removed.<br />
<br />
==== Costs of Repair vs Construction ====<br />
<br />
* We recently (in this giant build group) redid how the repair costs were working for ships, and it's unclear how that changed things cost-wise compared to what the costs used to be (the costs as they used to be were super unclear).<br />
** What IS clear is that we changed it to just be the equivalent to rebuilding the unit, aka repairing it 50% is the same as building half a new unit. This was by design and we didn't think much about it, but it is definitely something that was eating through metal prodigiously.<br />
** What's also clear is that we were charging this FULL amount for repairing shields, health, and engine health -- ouch. So really if you were at half engine health, half shield health, and half hull health, you'd spend 150% of what it would cost to just build a new unit. Not good! We'd much rather encourage repair in general.<br />
** We now have a variety of dials in the xml external constants to affect the percentage of the full metal cost that it will cost for various repair types:<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_hull_points: 50% cost for repairing hulls.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_personal_shields: 20% cost for repairing personal shields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_bubble_forcefields: 75% cost for repairing bubble forcefields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_engines: 10% cost for repairing engine damage.<br />
** This should make things quite a bit less constrained on the player income-wise (it was feeling pretty tight at certain points in the early game because of your much larger forces), and also encourages reuse rather than just refleeting.<br />
<br />
==== Costs For AIs Purchasing Things ====<br />
<br />
<br />
* There is a new field, cost_for_ai_to_purchase, which is an integer that replaces the old_strength values.<br />
** This is now what AIs use to purchase units, and it is separate from how strong the unit is seen as.<br />
** This is problably way out of balance for now, but it at least is something we can tune directly from now on.<br />
** "Strength" in the game is now properly only used for evaluating, well, how strong something is. Aka how the AI acts, or as information for the player.<br />
** This is NOT something that goes up by mark level anymore, unlike before, and that's by design as well. The AI should be able to afford equal numbers of ship type X on a mark 1 or a mark 4 planet. That's how things were in AIWC, but it was oddly not at all like that here.<br />
<br />
* There are a bunch of other related changes to making the game use the CostForAIToPurchase field instead of the Strength field -- and remember that this is on the TypeData rather than the ForMark data, and that this is by design.<br />
** This is probably buggy as eff. There's a ton of code in this area, written by a bunch of people over a long period of time. So AIs will probably wind up making some pretty strange purchases for a little while, until we find and fix whatever bugs there are, aside from the inherent data issues.<br />
** Nonetheless, now was the time to go ahead and make this change, because it was a fundamental deterrent to us being able to balance what the AI builds separately from how strong the AIs and players view a unit as being. And that was one primary driver behind all things being a very similar cost-to-benefit ratio, at least on paper... and ongoing headache for Puffin, with that. The headaches won't end because of this change alone, but they will shift to a new sort: balancing each of those two things independently of one another ("does the strength stated for that unit seem to match how scary the AI and players should think it is?" and "does that cost an appropriate amount for the AI in most contexts, or is it too cheap or too expensive for them?").<br />
** But in the short term, this will be extra complicated by the fact that the math probably has some bugs in it because probably some things that should be using the new AI budget stuff are still using the strength data. I would be shocked if that's not the case, despite looking at it very carefully until I was cross-eyed.<br />
** And then the other question of "how much should this cost" is now out of date compared to what the strength values were, so even if the math is all perfect we're going to have bonkers data for a bit. That part I do leave to Puffin for the most part, sorry about that. ;)<br />
** As a general design note, both the players and the AIs have been having fewer ships than I would prefer, thus far. For players it was because of the way the ship caps were -- pre-fleets. For the AIs, it was because of the way they were being "charged more" for higher-mark stuff when looking at their own budgets. At the start of the game, a mark 3 planet and a mark 4 planet should have the same relative amount of budget spent, but one gets better stuff from it. Previously, unlike AIWC, the mark 4 planet was getting charged a premium and so felt anemic by comparison to the mark 3 planet.<br />
*** This may in turn wind up with the AI having waaaay too many ships for a while, but if we pack those into the guard posts as contents that are not deployed yet, that should have zero performance impact. And it will be good for the humans who suddenly have a lot more firepower at their disposal. Overall the goal coming up is for everyone to have a whole heck of a lot more shooty things, but having them more spread out so that the mega-battles aren't individually any larger than they are now. It will take us a little while to get that part perfect, so please bear with us.<br />
<br />
* TryToSpendBudget_CPA has had some updates to how it deploys ships from itself, since the way it stores ships is different from the start. This may or may not cause demonic fumes to erupt, so let us know.<br />
<br />
* UnlockShipLineForAI() has been removed, as AIs don't work that way anymore, either.<br />
<br />
=== Achievements ===<br />
<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with each AI type enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with some of the Minor factions enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with various galaxy sizes<br />
* Add Achievements for controlling a given number of planets in a game<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have > X Metal/Energy/Hacking points"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Kill > X units", "Lose > X units" and "Kill > X && Lose > Y units"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have a campaign X hours long"<br />
** Note that the above types of Achievements can be added to the game with only XML changes<br />
** TODO: Add a UI to show the player which Achievements have been earned<br />
<br />
=== Science/Tech Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete rework of how techs function. They are no longer tied to individual ships like before, but rather there are actual technologies that are named and that benefit a variety of ships.<br />
<br />
* Ark Upgrade Points and Destruction Points are both confusing and have been removed from the game as a concept.<br />
** But never fear, something very similar with a clearer name and purpose is being added back: Fleet Experience Points.<br />
<br />
* The initial techs have been added, and applied to ships and turrets and whatnot.<br />
** This is, at best, a first pass for now. However, there are are present 14 distinct techs that you can upgrade that are more ship-abilities-focused, and which are generally shared between strikecraft, frigates, and turrets. This is the general intended design, even if exact matchings aren't correct or ideal right now.<br />
** The costs here are also potentially bonkers for real-world use. Additionally, there is a maximum number of times a given tech can be researched, and that is usually set at 4 right now, kind of arbitrarily. That does NOT mean that the max tech level of a ship is 4, however.<br />
*** Ship tech levels are a combination of all the techs that benefit them (some have more than one), as well as any upgrades to the tech level of their specific fleet. So some are much easier to get to a VERY high mark now, whereas others are almost impossible to do.<br />
** There is now a new UpgradeMeFromFleetOnly tech that isn't shown on the menu, but which we use in cases where we want to denote that this IS something we can upgrade, but only at the fleet level rather than the ship level.<br />
*** This is used for things like command stations, engineers, economic production units, and forcefields. That makes these things a lot more location-dependent in terms of how high quality your ships of those sorts are. This should be pretty interesting, actually, and it takes them out of contention for the main science upgrade costs more.<br />
** Overall the goal here is fewer science upgrades happening, but each one having a much larger impact. We may have gone too far in that direction with this first setup of the data, but at this point it's all an xml-based issue.<br />
** Note that all of these techs are based around upgrading all the ships that you have that subscribe to this tech via tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and that crosses fleets.<br />
*** This should benefit mercenaries, although that hasn't been tested.<br />
*** We did base this loosely around Puffin's classes/roles document, but this is meant to be... slightly both more and less granular than that document, and to be multi-categorized in many cases. So your document is still relevant (mainly for fleet design), but it's just semi-related to this specific use.<br />
** It's also worth noting here that some ships/turrets/whatever have multiple tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and those are going to go up in tech quality FAST by comparison to their peers. Assuming that players unlock techs synergistically. So some of the ones like the Light, Heavy, etc, might need to be a lot more expensive than they are right now.<br />
*** As noted already, the balance here is a bananas basic proof of concept right now, and I'm sure broken in a thousand ways. The only purpose of me throwing this together at the moment was to give a proof of concept unified design philosophy to look at, even if details are really wrong. This gives Puffin and others a chance to actually make it make a lot more sense while I move on to work on other things.<br />
** Note that the EXP concept doesn't come into play at ALL with these sorts of techs. These are purely science costs. The EXP is fleet-based stuff instead, and may not cost any science at all (fleets that auto-upgrade would be nice). But also spending some science on a specific fleet's upgrading would be nice, so that's something that will likely be possible. How that works at the planet level is still TBD, I have two different possible models for that and haven't been able to choose between them yet.<br />
** Also please note that for an individual ship/turret/whatever type, there's no risk of it going above its max mark level, which is either 7 or is explicitly defined as something lower, or is markless. If it subscribes to 2 techs that each have 1 upgrade, it would naturally be mark 3, unless it's capped at mark 2 in which case it will sit at mark 2. And if its fleet is also upgraded 3x, then it would be mark 6, unless it was capped lower.<br />
** A general note: This overall tech system has way fewer decision points than the old one, which is good because that makes them actually something that you can contemplate. However, as a byproduct of that, you'll often get some secondary stuff upgraded that you cared less about, and that actually provides opportunities for you to make new use of them in interesting ways if you so choose. Also also, you're a lot more likely to have really wide mark level disparities between parts of your empire (different planets and fleets), which is more in keeping with the first game albeit from a completely new angle. This is exciting.<br />
** Another general note: the overall ship caps per fleet will only be whatever they are, but the idea is to have larger effective ship caps for players by the late game because of a proliferation of fleets. In some cases in the late game you'll also have some fleets that are incredibly technologically superior to the AI, and other fleets that are incredibly behind the times. How this exactly plays out will be interesting to see from players, but in a theoretical sense there's nothing wrong with that; we may just have to adjust some balance dials over time to keep things from being TOO extra weak or strong, and/or to make the AI really reactive to overly-advanced forces if those exist. Here again this is an opportunity for more gameplay, rather than a real challenge in a negative sense.<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for science has been improved to be more accurate and also more descriptive:<br />
** Spend Science to unlock higher-level units and structures. It is gained primarily by claiming new planets and holding them for a while.<br />
** There is a limited amount that scientists can learn from what they find in each system, so you'll need to keep finding new research targets for them.<br />
** A single ship type can be upgraded by multiple tech upgrades as well as from its parent fleet gaining experience, so be sure to consider your options carefully.<br />
** More techs will appear in the tech sidebar as you capture fleets with ships that can benefit from them.<br />
<br />
* The tech sidebar is once again functional, and allows for you to unlock techs that benefits various ships that you have.<br />
** It looks and works a lot more like the hacking sidebar instead of the build sidebar, now, since the type of data it needs to show is very different. This makes it a lot more text-heavy and showing related costs and the mark levels of ships in a really clear and concise fashion. Yay! It does mean no real icons on here, though.<br />
** The tooltips for techs that you can upgrade are also now completely redone, and it shows you which ships will benefit as well as how many of them you have. It doesn't show you the mark level of the ships, because you might have several different mark levels of each ship type since they may be upgraded by fleet upgrades.<br />
** This was certainly needed in order to make the game all that playable in 0.850, but in terms of why we did it right now versus after the build menu, it's mainly because this was simpler and was therefore a nice dry run for the more complicated menus.<br />
<br />
* Ok! So we've already learned quite a bit about techs and how people will wind up using them. Clearly the new system works well, but is going to need refinement; chief among that is just how many upgrades a given line can grant.<br />
** One of the other things that was immediately most clear was that "Ark" as a technology was really not cutting it. This was way too broadly useful, and "Battlestation" was almost as bad.<br />
** First of all, these need to be more pricey, but some Arks should cost more than others, and some Arks should share techs, but not ALL Arks.<br />
** With that in mind, there's a new schema in place for various Arks and Battlestations broken out as follows:<br />
*** Ark Spirit (most basic stuff), Ark Heart (happy helpful stuff, less dangerous), Ark Armor (beefcakes you need to really pay for), Ark Fist (holy smokes these things are powerful, and thus expensive, and only have 3 marks rather than 4).<br />
*** Battlestation Shelter (protection-oriented), Battlestation Hand (grabbing or slowing enemies), Battlestation Architect (engineering or construction).<br />
** And it's worth noting that Battlestations are really oriented into those as well as the previously-were-fortresses Citadels that are way more combat-oriented, so splitting those also matters:<br />
*** Citadel Executioner (kill a lot of things), Citadel Protector (yeah, hurt them, but protect other stuff as the primary), Citadel Consumer (eat or steal the enemies).<br />
** And then there's the Spire Frigates, which really don't need to be lumped in with Arks or Battlestations or Citadels. I'm sure these will expand in the future, but for now we just have the new "Spire Core" (for all three types of Spire Frigate), and they're super expensive but can be upgraded 4 times.<br />
** The overall lesson here is that we CAN have more techs than we maybe were once thinking, particularly since they only show up conditionally. This also makes the Arks and Golems and so on a lot more unique in terms of how well they are upgraded (or not).<br />
*** This will get more crowded in the tech tab with time, unfortunately, as you unlock a lot of ships. For that reason they are now down at the end of the list below all the actual main ship lines.<br />
*** This may also hint that we want more tech lines in general for the other ships, and/or that they need some changes to their science costs, but we'll cross those bridges when we come to them.<br />
<br />
* The science intel message is now more brief in the sidebar, and more informative in the tooltip. Now everything fits.<br />
<br />
* On factions, there is now a InheritsTechUpgradesFromPlayerFactions serialized bool that should be set to true for any factions that the designer wishes to recieve all of the upgrades for the player techs.<br />
** Aka, if two players each have upgrades to Tech A, then the faction will get the largest of the two, not the combined value of them.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the (very elegant, sadly) "tech view" version of tooltips that showed all the ways a ship would be upgraded by gaining a mark level.<br />
** That was overwhelming as an amount of information, but also there's just no place where we'd actually be asking you to see that anymore. Now you upgrade techs that hit a bunch of ships at once, and so this per-ship-type comparison stuff just has no place in there anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Vision Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete vision rework. Planets are all now either<br />
** Unexplored: You have no vision of what is on this planet. You also cannot send ships to or through Unexplored planets.<br />
** Explored: You can't see exactly what's on the planet, but you can see who owns it and the sidebar works. Chris has a TODO to figure out how to show stale data/interesting visuals when you try to look at an Explored planet.<br />
** Watched: This state means "Explored and you have ships there". You can see what's on the planet, but when you no longer have ships there the planet will go back to Explored.<br />
** Permanently Watched: you always have vision here<br />
<br />
* At the beginning of the game, all Player Homeworlds and adjacent planets are Permanently Watched, and all planets 2 hops from a player homeworld are Explored.<br />
<br />
* Capturing a planet or killing an AI command station automatically Explores all adjacent planets<br />
<br />
* You can also Explore a planet by hacking an unexplored planet, as long as you have an adjacent Explored or Watched planet (otherwise you could just explore random planets around the map which seems less interesting to me)<br />
<br />
* You can Permanently Watch a previously Explored planet by hacking (but the AI will launch a small counterattack at you when you do so).<br />
<br />
* The game now tracks the specific gamesecond that entities were created, and when they entered planets, versus "how long ago."<br />
** There are helper methods for getting the familiar "how long ago" data, however.<br />
<br />
* Now that we know the last gamesecond we had vision of a planet, and the gamesecond that ships entered planets, on planets where we do not have current intel we are instead showing the effective last-known data on the sidebar, as well as actually showing the ships visually (through the distortion), even moving around if they are. <br />
** This won't show any ships that have been more newly added to that planet, though, and the sidebar notes that. So there might be a huge hunter fleet moving through there and you'd have no idea, for instance.<br />
<br />
* For planets that are completely unexplored, you cannot directly send ships there anymore, nor can you select it on the galaxy map or send your view there.<br />
** It IS still possible for your ships to path through completely-unexplored planets, for the time being, however.<br />
<br />
* Trying to make it so that player ships are completely unable to pathfind through unexplored planets is rather more than a bit of a nightmare. With that in mind, they are now simply disabled if they wind up going into unexplored space for whatever reason.<br />
** We can make this more sophisticated in the future, but for now that should handle anything exploity.<br />
** Players can use various tricks on the sidebar to click to the fleet leader heading through unexplored space to see such a planet, but they'll wind up seeing nothing there, so they gain very little. And meanwhile, the ships of the player are unable to shoot but still able to move, and enemies are able to shoot and are completely invisible to them, so that's... quite a bit of "fun."<br />
** Main thing we probably want to do at some point is get player ships to try to prefer not going into unexplored territory if at all possible.<br />
** Edit: nevermind, player ships should not be able to path through them at all. So yay! But if they do, they'll be disabled.<br />
<br />
* The "explored" status for planets has been split into "explored by natural means" and "explored by distant hacking."<br />
** This mostly doesn't matter and isn't something we're making a big deal about in most places. But using spy nanites basically is no longer a way you can expand how much your empire gains in vision every time you capture a planet.<br />
** The "explore next to explored" logic basically ignores stuff that was spy nanites. Maybe there should be a conduct later that makes it not ignore that, since that ALSO would provide some interesting strategic options, but frankly for now that seems like overkill. We shall see.<br />
<br />
* When you don't have vision of a planet, there is now a fancy distortion effect that is part grainy-tv and part slow-matrixy-refraction.<br />
** There's not a way to disable this effect, because it shouldn't be fast enough to make anyone nauseous, and there's no real point in looking at planets that you can't see anything at, anyway. This just makes it clear why you can't see those planets (the sidebar says no vision, but why did all the ships just disappear?)<br />
<br />
==== "Hard Mode" For Scouting ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Scout Adjacent Only" conduct, with the following description:<br />
** TLDR: This is harder and will make you take a lot of planets. For advanced players only.<br />
** Details: Normally when you capture a planet, all planets adjacent to ANY explored planets become explored. Unless the map is very narrow, this causes you to get exponentially more planets you can see as the game goes on. Even further than that, there is a minimum number of planets it will explore for you when you take a planet, depending on the number of planets in your galaxy, so that snake maps and other really narrow maps aren't unplayably hard.<br />
** With 'Scout Adjacent Only' enabled, it tosses all that out the window. Instead it just explores any planets adjacent to the planet you just captured. This will make snake maps almost impossible to play (so that's a bad combo), but on maps with more cross-connections it can lead to... a certain added strategic challenge. This still seems masochistic even in the best case, but have fun with that if you want.<br />
<br />
=== Removed/Revamped Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Science Labs, Hackers and Scouts are removed. Scout functions of the Sentinel Frigate and Sentry Starship are removed.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Starships are now per-planet cap, cannot use wormholes, are built directly (like turrets) and die to remains.<br />
** They're effectively Decloakers from Classic, but far more convenient.<br />
<br />
* Engineers are per-planet cap, cap reduced significantly and can't use Wormholes.<br />
** The new Combat Engineers are able to use Wormholes and are a type of Strikecraft instead.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Space Dock and Mobile Builder are not unlockable or buildable, and are instead capturables.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Builder is now the Basic Battlestation, and is capturable.<br />
** And now there are actually like 5 variants of this, thanks to Puffin.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Factory is now the CombatFactory, and is capturable.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Fortress is now a form of Battlestation called Citadels.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Remains Rebuilder has been removed, and the RebuildingRemains metal_flow has now been granted to all of the player command stations and the player mobile builders. It's no longer something that is assist-line-distance-based, nor is it something that requires a dedicated unit to run around doing things with.<br />
** This is one of those streamlining bits that people have requested for a while, but Chris in particular was noting that engineers and rebuilders need to be two separate functions (and they do). But making this instead essentially work like claimables and "just happen" solves the issue that people were complaining about without getting into territory of making the AI for the engineers likely to be bonkers.<br />
** Later we will need for all of our Battlestation types to have this, most likely, or things will get funky at times. This last is a note for Puffin.<br />
<br />
* Colony ships have been removed from the game, since that was a level of indirection that was not needed.<br />
** Similarly, hackers are gone, as are mobile builders in the classic sense.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers in the codebase are now gone. The concept of warheads, in the codebase, is now gone.<br />
<br />
* Starships are now called Frigates, including in the codebase itself. Docks are now called Factories in the codebase.<br />
<br />
* Golems as a standalone thing (for players) are now gone, as are Arks. They are now combined into being the Mobile Fleet Flagships. They are still called golems and Arks, but they're the centerpieces of your fleets at any rate.<br />
<br />
* Really key new limitation for drones, for the sake of sanity and not having nested fleets. This really only applies to player ships, in the main:<br />
** The drone producer must also be the fleet leader. So if we're talking about a player ship, it needs to be the Battlestation or Flagship of a fleet, and not something like a random Frigate as part of it.<br />
** On the AI and NPC sides, they don't really use fleets the same way normally, so anything that is a drone generator just becomes in charge of a new Drone fleet type.<br />
** This is probably going to be the source of some "fun" bugs. It will start spewing errors like crazy when this happens (once per second per ship that has this issue during gameplay), if it happens. It's possible to set this up with bad xml, basically.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for automatically building remains rebuilders and setting them to auto-FRD are both now gone, since so are remains rebuilders.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for "brave scouts" is also now gone, since scouts are also being removed and rejiggered.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers have been removed. They were not exactly exciting, and they don't make sense in the new method of AIs working with unlocked ships.<br />
<br />
* Schematic Servers (formerly ARSes) have been removed. Those also no longer make sense in the brave new world that is the new setup for fleets, etc.<br />
<br />
* The idea of CorruptedAIDesigns has been removed, as that was something that people weren't really using and it doesn't fit well with the new approach to AIs and fleets.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of stuff relating to Golems the way they used to be, including the entire Broken Golems faction, has been removed.<br />
** Golems are now another form of Ark, basically, and are capturable in that fashion.<br />
<br />
* Metal harvesters are now markless, rather than being upgradeable. This solves an issue with them being funky upgrade levels on enemy planets, and in general the ability to upgrade them is something that I was iffy about in the current system anyway. It was likely to be too powerful.<br />
<br />
* The home forcefield generator, which has existed since the first game as a last-ditch tool that you have until you lose it, is now something that you can rebuild.<br />
** It's also now markless and has its stats more directly set, so that you definitely never get more than one. It was kinda funky having it be mark 2 in this game from the start, and it also led you to having a cap of 2 instead of 1.<br />
** The whole purpose of this is so that you can rebuild it if it dies, since you don't otherwise inherently have access to any forcefield generators on your home planet at all, now. You have to put a battlestation or a citadel there in order to get a forcefield beyond the first, and depending on your playstyle you might choose not to do that.<br />
<br />
=== Capturing Planets ===<br />
<br />
* So long as you have a mobile fleet leader on a planet with no command station (enemy or otherwise), you can now capture it like you would have previously done with a colony ship.<br />
** Aka, just take any of your golems or Arks over to the enemy planet and destroy their command station and you're immediately ready to set up your own. Boom, simpler.<br />
<br />
=== UI Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Player profile stuff relating to choosing a default Ark type is now removed under the hood. It hasn't been on the front-end for quite some time now.<br />
** Note that a lot of the stuff with Arks having a story and a portrait image are thus now gone, although again this isn't new on the front-end. Arks simply have a new role now.<br />
<br />
* You are no longer asked to pick a Chief Adviser at the start of the game for your profile. That was a lot of confusion an un-needed choice on something rather trivial, and got in the way of getting you to the actual game.<br />
** Now it just has a screen for profiles that asks for a name and your default colors and that's it.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, you can no longer select a starting bonus ship type OR a starting Ark for your faction as a player. Neither of those make any sense anymore. Now there's something new:<br />
** The game now lets you choose from special starting fleets, of which at the moment there are 5 handcrafted ones. The player can choose which one they want in the game lobby, just like they could with Arks.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" are now able to, and in fact required to have, a description.<br />
** They also now have tooltips in the lobby, which show these descriptions, thus explaining what the heck they do.<br />
<br />
* The conduct for "start with planets explored" has been removed, as that's really cutting out a core part of the game now.<br />
** The scouting being so much more automated now kind of makes it a bit different from other games where you can turn off fog of war. Despite the first game having the option to turn off fog of war, that really takes out the entire flow of the game when it comes to this game.<br />
** Scouting isn't some hassle thing "that you have to do but might want to skip" anymore, but now is part of the reward structure for capturing planets, and so turning that off just would have... a lot of balance issues, among other things.<br />
<br />
* Added the following description to the Experimental: AI Civil War conduct, which is the only pre-existing conduct currently remaining. This may or may not be fully accurate:<br />
** If there are multiple AI factions, they all hate each other and will fight each other. They still hate YOU, too, but all this chaos and infighting is assumedly to your beneit. Then again, you might just find yourself in the crossfire of AIs who are getting more powerful more rapidly due to aggroing each other... so it's anyones's guess as to how long you'll last.<br />
<br />
* Working on making the tooltips for ships substantially more brief while still conveying the important information. Some of them are getting ridiculous for sure.<br />
<br />
* Added a new type of control for our settings menu, which is an integer slider. This is preferable to the textbox or dropdown for some cases.<br />
** We're now using that for the auto-build engineers, which also defaults to 2 now instead of 0.<br />
** We're also now using that for the various volume controls, which were inexplicably textboxes before.<br />
** We're also now using this for the minimum autosaves to keep, and the autosaves interval.<br />
<br />
* When planets are explored via you having just capturing a planet or whatever, it now shows a message log entry saying what planets were discovered and how many of them there were. This way it's clear that scouting is even happening!<br />
<br />
* display_name_for_sidebar has been added for entities, as it lets us give a more brief name to appear on the sidebar while still having a fuller name in tooltips.<br />
** This is optional and will just use the full name if it needs to. But if the sidebar is having bad wrapping of some text, then this should be filled with something shorter. Case in point is the home forcefield generator.<br />
<br />
* There used to be some logic about automatically opening certain windows when you selected certain kinds of ships (build menu when selecting command station, science menu when selecting science lab, etc), but since so much of that is all centralized or otherwise non-ship-related now, or all related to centerpieces, this just led to the UI kind of oddly seeming to do its own thing at times now. This has been removed.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for factories now show which fleets they are supporting, and what the status is of all the individual line items they are building for that fleet. This is super satisfying to just watch, turns out.<br />
<br />
==== Intel Tab ====<br />
<br />
* Something I talked about on the podcast is an new form of objectives, which is an idea that I've been refining since then (and had already been prior to then).<br />
** However, the "objectives" on the sidebar as they stand right now are not something I want to get rid of at all (most of them), given that they are kind of a "todo list of things you might want to do," and that's a pretty important tool to have.<br />
** With that in mind, the Objectives sidebar has instead been renamed to Intel, and over time we'll probably take out some things like the beginner tips and the primary objectives and so on. For the primary objectives we'll likely just recontextualize the same thing, but the beginner tips we'll probably fold into the new objectives (actual objectives system, separate from this intel system).<br />
** All of the really time-consuming-to-add and detailed "objectives" stuff about where we found things to capture and hack and kill, and where we should be scouting, etc, is all going to stay. It's just under the name "intel" instead, now. Really, that's what it is: information that lets you make decisions yourself, be that diverging from your main objectives or defying them or whatever else.<br />
<br />
==== Build Tab ====<br />
<br />
* The "Direct Build" sidebar has been completely reworked from scratch.<br />
** It's no longer based on icons and tiny buttons, but instead has much larger buttons in categories. This may lead to more scrolling in some cases, but it also should be way more legible AND in general the player should have fewer things that they can build at any given planet unless they've stacked a lot of battlestations and citadels there.<br />
** Each line item not only shows what type it is, but also has to include what fleet it goes with -- so if that's the planet fleet, or one of the battlestations or citadels, that is relevant.<br />
*** Why is this relevant? Well, those things can be upgraded independently, for one. And for another note, it's possible that you might choose to move a battlestation or citadel to a new planet, thus making all of their units on this planet stop functioning. So it does play into the strategy if you plan on moving around your battlestations and/or citadels (as you likely will).<br />
** These also now show the cap directly in a 0/3 fashion or similar, with it showing how many have been built out of how many are possible. It's possible that you might have more built than are possible to build, which it will show properly, but with a red warning.<br />
** It also more directly shows the cost for construction -- super useful -- and grays out the text of any entities that you have already built to the full cap so that they are not so noticeable.<br />
** This whole setup is really geared around having many fewer TYPES of things that you can directly build at a given planet, and that's the intention for the long term. We don't really want dozens of options here, but rather a smaller and more interesting selection that you can build from contextually depending on the planet.<br />
** At this point you can actually construct new direct-placement units!<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch of changes have been made to the way the tooltips look in build mode for entities, and also to how things are hovered-over in the build menu and galaxy in terms of what highlights, when.<br />
** It's stuff we'll refine further with time, but if something seems off, please let us know.<br />
<br />
* When a Zenith Trader is visiting, you'll see a bunch of stuff on the sidebar under various categories, noted in pink as being from the Zenith Trader.<br />
** This is different from past versions of the game where there was a specific category for all the Zenith Trader stuff regardless of what its function was. This actually makes it a lot easier to find things by function, particularly if the amount of wares on offer goes up a lot in the future.<br />
** For things like the Station-Keepers (Chained Dark Spire Eidolon), there is now a per-planet cap higher than 1 for these. That's pretty nifty, and it works!<br />
** Note that even if you don't have the metal for these projects NOW, while the trader is visiting, you can start the projects and pay for them over time. This is as before and is by design. The UI might be a bit confusing on this, not sure.<br />
<br />
* In the build sidebar, turrets and "other defenses" have now been properly split out. Before they were all kind of mixed together in "defenses," which got confusing.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Frigates are now part of the Station Keepers sidebar instead of Other Defenses.<br />
** This is meant to be the case for anything that is mobile, essentially.<br />
<br />
==== Hotkeys ====<br />
<br />
* The hotkey for opening the tech tab now only opens that, versus opening that or the hacking tab contextually.<br />
** Given that the docks tab is gone, the build hotkey now only opens the build sidebar directly as well, kind of implicitly.<br />
<br />
* There are now separate hotkeys for opening the hacking (H) and fleet (R) tabs.<br />
<br />
* The "split selection" keybind that was previously L in this game and the original is now semicolon.<br />
<br />
* The "Unload Transports" (U) hotkey has had its description reworked as follows:<br />
** Any mobile fleet flagships that you have selected will immediately unload any ships they are presently transporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new hotkey (L): Load Transports<br />
** Any ships that you have selected which are part of a mobile fleet will immediately get inside their flagship for transport if their flagship is on the same planet.<br />
** Note that the need for this to be separate for unload is that it will be common to have partially-loaded transports and you don't want to get into funky toggle situations with ships getting in and out when you really meant "keep getting in" or "keep getting out."<br />
<br />
* The keybind for "select all scouts" has been removed, since scouts are removed.<br />
<br />
* SelectNextUnitType and SelectPreviousUnitType have both been removed, as they were buggy like crazy in general, and also don't really make all that much sense in the new workflow of things.<br />
<br />
* Trigger Current Master Menu Action 1-12 are now gone as hotkeys, as they only worked in the escape menu (since the rest of the master menu was gone as of over a year ago) and it was using up a lot of hotkeys for something not all that useful anymore. Once upon a time this was brilliant, it just doesn't fit anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Savegame Format Revamp ===<br />
<br />
* The default serialization style for things the game saves is now Byte arrays rather than the char arrays. This will make savegames vastly smaller than before, although not as legible (as if they were before) to edit by hand.<br />
** This is great for a variety of practical reasons, but among them it causes fewer transient garbage collector allocations. And it also makes it so that large integer numbers are no longer something that make the savegame larger. Rather than one char's worth of bytes per digit in the number (1-6 bits, per UTF-8 specs), it now just has a fixed 4 bytes for the number regardless of how many digits it has.<br />
** This breaks all the previous savegames, but they were already broken anyway.<br />
** Player profiles and settings are still using char arrays so that they can be edited by hand as desired.<br />
<br />
* There was previously a "too smart for our own good" method for "compacting" integers down that were used as primary keys. This could cause all sorts of bugs when used incorrectly, and aside from known bugs that this fixes, we happened to see a few other bugs in passing as we were removing it.<br />
** Note that this was needed almost exclusively because of the char arrays serialization that we were using. Now that we're using byte arrays, this compacting is not just bug-prone it's actually not any more efficient in the first place. So it's really good to have that out of there in general.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting a particular bug caused by this.<br />
<br />
* Items that are truly deprecated, but that we still want some record of for whatever reason, are presently moved into a new GameData/Pre900Deprecated folder.<br />
** This way we still have the xml, but the game never looks at it. Normally the purpose of deprecating something is to make sure that savegames that are older can still be read in. With 0.900 we're breaking the savegames anyway, so clearing out the deprecated stuff is only natural.<br />
<br />
* As part of this release, we had switched to writing our savegames in a binary format. However, this wasn't really working fully properly because it was trying to transcode that into unicode, which in turn would sometimes complain with the "Unable to translate Unicode character XXX at index YYY" error.<br />
** This was also notably less efficient in terms of GC usage. Now we're just directly writing the binary file.<br />
** In fact, now we're writing a BuzzsawBinaryByteArray, which is 449kb where even the binary array was 3.2mb, and the char buffer was even larger.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "external data" (aka modder-type data or data that was being saved into the external projects) is saved used to be based on using a sub-serializer that then itself got written as a string back into the main serialization stream.<br />
** This was probably done as a way to isolate freaky bugs introduced into savegames by modders, but with our new serialization logging that's really no longer a worry. As it stands, the sub-serialization may have instead been preventing us from properly saving sub-data and getting it back reliably. Also it was vastly less efficient in the new context.<br />
** Anyway, given that the new context is such that doing the data saving of external data just fully inline without any wrappering is more efficient, that's now what we're doing. Based on the serialization logs, this seems to work great.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging Additions ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Savegame Serialization Logs" setting into the debug section of the game settings.<br />
** When saving a game, write WorldSerialization.txt, and when loading it write WorldDeserialization.txt -- both in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if a savegame won't load for some reason; this lets us do a diff of the two files and figure out where they are diverging.<br />
** Note that this won't help with an existing broken savegame. This will only help if you have it turned on prior to creating a savegame you expect to be broken. This is basically a way for us to test the savegame creation and load process, which otherwise can be incredibly opaque and take a lot of time to hunt down.<br />
** It's hard to understate just how big a deal this tool is. This is an area that could have us searching for hours or days for a problem, and now we can find it in minutes, potentially.<br />
*** The specific genesis of the feature was in fact Chris spending hours searching for something and not finding a solution, and finally thinking there had to be a better way. We should have thought of this 10 years ago, honestly.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Mapgen Log" field in the debug part of the settings.<br />
** When generating a new map in the lobby, write MapGen.txt in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if mapgen isn't really doing what you expect for some reason, or you just want some detailed insight into what is happening and in what order.<br />
** To hook into this as a modder for your own purposes, you simply write to MapgenLogger.Log(). If you're doing anything CPU-expensive or that involves string concatenation or similar, then you can wrap that inside an "if ( MapgenLogger.IsActive )" statement. This simply avoids slowing down mapgen at all when logging is not active.<br />
** There is some serious funkiness going on with some data being null when it should not be, and this is how we're going about figuring out when and why that is happening. But this also lets us see the results of maps that are generated without having to scan with our eyeballs all over a big map so much. Given how much has just changed in mapgen and elsewhere, this is handy, even if we didn't have an immediate bug issue.<br />
<br />
* The fleet centerpiece "repairs" no longer get dumped to the log unless a new debug setting is enabled. This was essentially just spamming the log for no good reason at the moment, but it's useful to be able to see it in some limited cases, hence the new option.<br />
<br />
* Put in a buuuunch of debugging code for figuring out where excess notifications that hang out at the top of your screen are coming from.<br />
** The tooltips for the excess notifications should now explain what the problem is.<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Early Access Starts!]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Arrival_of_Fleets&diff=35759AI War 2:The Arrival of Fleets2019-06-22T02:34:50Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Version 0.869 */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* The old-style tutorials are gone, and we're still in progress with replacing that with [[AI_War_2:_The_Arrival_of_Fleets#Tutorials_Are_Out.2C_How_To_Play_Is_In|three different styles of other help/onboarding in-game mechanisms]].<br />
<br />
* Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is temporarily disabled''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.<br />
<br />
* There are a variety of ships/units that don't have final graphics at the moment, though they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
* We're in progress with a major revamp of some systems based on cumulative feedback in order to push the game even more towards the feel of the original game... despite further divergence from it at a mechanical level.<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After 3 months of Early Access and 2+ years of development, we've reached a point where we know what we want the 1.0 version of the game to look like. SO very much about this game already works well, but there are some major deficits coming into this phase when comparing this sequel to the original game. The aim of this phase is to close those gaps and make this clearly the superior product in terms of playability, fun factor, the amount of fun thinking-about-interesting-challenges you do during gameplay, and so on. <br />
<br />
There's also of course still more polish and bugfixing that we want to get done, and the lobby redo is still scheduled of course (but quick starts are an awesome alternative, and have helped us to defer a final design for the lobby as we formed up some other bits of the game first), but we're feeling really good about this final sprint toward 1.0. We still do need to also finish some graphics for the existing ships, but they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
There is some more content coming as part of this phase, kind of by definition -- fleets as a concept Change Everything in a good way -- but the focus is on taking what is a pretty awesome game with a lot of depth and pushing it to a level that we hope beats the pants off the original, finally. Stay tuned.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.870 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
== Version 0.870 How To Play And Tip Of The Day==<br />
(Released June 21st, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The sliders in the options and factions tab of the lobby now only send their commands to sync things up 0.2 seconds after you stop making any changes, making them not flood the network with commands as you drag them around.<br />
** This is not super duper important in the short term, but in MP will be. And it's very relevant for the upcoming fleet management screen, so we needed to go ahead and get this in.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the credits getting funky offset the further down you scrolled.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that could cause corrupted savegames to sometimes try to allocate huge amounts of memory (and potentially run out).<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the prior build where savegames were broken because it was saving the names of fleets twice and only reading them once.<br />
<br />
=== Tutorials Are Out, How To Play Is In ===<br />
<br />
* The tutorials button has been removed from the single player section of the main menu.<br />
** We're going to rely on two other kinds of tutorializing, instead of the older method that we used in this game and the original AI War.<br />
*** Firstly, we're going to have more integrated suggestions on what to do next, as little missions that probably grant EXP or similar, which is along the lines of what we did with The Last Federation. This is coming soon.<br />
*** Secondly, we have a huge Intel tab in the game, plus really rich tooltips, that make discovering how new mechanics work pretty much something that is... well, something you can find for yourself.<br />
*** Thirdly, we've got the new How To Play section, which is more like an embedded wiki plus tip of the day, and this should help people much better with advanced questions they have on whatever subject (the wiki itself was considered basically a requirement for playing the original game).<br />
<br />
* There is a new "tip of the day" on the main menu, with one of currently 16 tips that can show up there.<br />
** If you have tips that you'd like to suggest, please feel free to write them up and let us know! We used a lot of player-based tips of the day in the first game, which had about 50ish tips of the day, and that was really successful.<br />
** In fact, some of these tips of the day are adapted from the tips in the first game!<br />
<br />
* There is also a new How To Play menu, which has tips and strategies divided into a number of categories, with longer-form information in it.<br />
** The tips of the day are shown in a Quick Tips section at the bottom of this, for anyone who wants to manually brows those.<br />
** The first section, which is fairly robust at the moment but certainly not all-inclusive, is called "Getting Started."<br />
*** Anyone who wants to contribute ideas for what to put in these sections is also more than welcome to, as things that you wish you'd known or that you feel compelled to look up in release notes or whatever are things that we want to get into here.<br />
** The other sections are all empty at the moment, but are "For Returning Players," basically to talk about the differences from this game and AIWC for people who are coming back from that game; and then Fleet Management, Economic Management, Offensive Strategies, Defensive Strategies, Other Factions, and Modding.<br />
*** We'll be working on filling this stuff out over the coming months, but as noted anyone who has ideas for subjects they'd like us to address, or items they'd like to write themselves, are very welcome to lend a hand.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.868 Fleet EXP Level-Ups and Starting Battlestations ==<br />
(Released June 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add 3 Harder Quickstarts, 5 Fun With Faction Quickstarts, and 2 Civil War Quickstarts.<br />
** Thanks to Mac for providing one of the Civil Wars.<br />
<br />
* The mark level colors have been completely redone, except for mark 1. They now go through a more gradual progression to the original purple that was once mark 5 but is now mark 7, and so now the galaxy map is vastly easier to read in terms of what is where.<br />
** This also helps with telling high-level marks apart in general, too.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Reduced ai_salvage_multiplier from 3 to 0.8.<br />
** The bug fix and calculation change to reprisals in the last release meant that this outdated value was causing you to get really strong reprisals early. Unfortunately, the bad cases only showed up after the release - bah.<br />
*** Thanks to Badger and Ecthelon on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Increased cost_for_ai_to_purchase on Royal Guardians by 50%.<br />
** It still has quite a good deal, but it's not as absurd.<br />
<br />
* Macrophage albedo increased to 0.7.<br />
<br />
==== Boons To Player Energy ====<br />
<br />
* Player homeworlds now include the ability construct up to 10 matter converters, rather than 0.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, the player home planet can now build 3 energy collectors rather than 0.<br />
** Economic command stations can now build 3 rather than 2, and logistical command can now build 2 rather than 1.<br />
** In general, player energy needs are higher now than they used to be, so let's also give more differentiation here. The military command stations still only give 1.<br />
<br />
* In a recent build, we made it so that lower-mark units would cost you less metal to build (depending on how much lower-mark they are compared to their fleet as a whole), as a way to make those units more viable. <br />
** Now this is also applied to energy usage for ships, although the scaling down of energy usage is somewhat less severe.<br />
** For each mark below the max in that fleet, it goes:<br />
*** 1 down: 90%<br />
*** 2: 75%<br />
*** 3: 60%<br />
*** 4: 45%<br />
*** 5: 30%<br />
*** 6+: 20%<br />
** This should help further the goal of the low-mark ships not feeling like a liability unless you simply haven't upgraded their fleet in any way for whatever reason (an entire mark 1 fleet is still going to be costly, so maybe at least upgrade something that will jack up part of the fleet).<br />
<br />
* It is now impossible for drones to ever cost the player any energy. Since you can't control drone production (and really the point is not to do so), them costing energy or metal was always going to be a raw deal. They haven't cost metal for quite some time, either.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in wave spawning where we weren't getting exactly the right number of units in a wave when the wave actually arrived<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where battlestations and citadels could show up in the build sidebar menu.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The debug menu no longer shows (F1), etc, next to options inside it since those hotkeys are no longer bound to that anyhow.<br />
<br />
==== Unity Upgrade To 2019.1.7 ====<br />
<br />
* Upgraded unity from 2019.1.0 to 2019.1.7.<br />
** This has a number of bugfixes, most of which aren't relevant to us, but if you were getting double keystrokes on linux that should now be fixed.<br />
** Additionally, this issue that was fixedin 2019.1.5: UI: removing sprite mesh caching optimization as it was causing too many issues.<br />
*** This is, best guess, going to fix the sidebar issue with the icons going crazy for no good reason. Things like certain icons drawing too large, etc, was probably this. If you see that again, please let us know!<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin, AnnoyingOrange, and Ovalcircle for reporting the icon sidebar issue.<br />
<br />
* TextMeshPro has been upgraded to 2.0.1 from 2.0.0.<br />
<br />
=== Starting Battlestation Options For Players ===<br />
<br />
* Major new feature for player homeworlds! Rather than just starting out with a starting offensive fleet at the start of the game (that you get to pick out of a list of 5), you ALSO now get a starting defensive battlestation fleet (that you also get to pick out of a list of 5).<br />
** The idea here is that this gives you even more customization in terms of how the early game will go, and gives you a significant early-game boost in general.<br />
** This also removes any possibility that your offensive fleet will need to do defensive babysitting of your homeworld, and gives you slightly more choice in just how soon you want to go capture more battlestations (that's still important very early on, but no longer needs to be your first thing in all cases).<br />
** This also, right from the start of the game, makes sure that it's clear that battlestations/citadels are a thing, so that players know to look for more of them and see their mechanics from the start. Otherwise they might just assume that their defensive options are super duper limited in general now (not at all the case!).<br />
** We implemented this as battlestations rather than home command station variants because this does also give you the flexibility to move the battlestation to another planet other than your homeworld if you so desire, which is one of the big nice things about battlestations in general. But also it... as noted... introduces the idea of battlestations well.<br />
** The starting options are:<br />
*** Classic Defenses<br />
**** This classic mix is good at stopping or slowing things as they come through your wormholes, and has good firepower against midsized foes.<br />
**** Gravitic Battlestation, Ambush Turret x30, Grenade Launcher Turret x30, Concussion Turret x30, Tractor Array x7.<br />
*** Shield Defenses<br />
**** Start with an extra forcefield on your home planet, and some very powerful turrets in small quantities. Also snipers.<br />
**** Shieldwall Battlestation, Plasma Turret x7, Beam Cannon x7, Tritium Sniper Turret x30, Tractor Array x7.<br />
*** Eclectic Defenses<br />
**** Wow this is all over the place. Engineering boosts, some regular turrets, minefields, extra tractor beams, and some mobile sentry frigates. Be prepared for anything!<br />
**** Engineering Battlestation, Concussion Turret x30, Plasma Turret x7, Minefield x60, Tractor Array x10, Sentry Frigate x2.<br />
*** Minelayer Defenses<br />
**** Large numbers of all the kinds of minefields, plus area-of-effect type turrets, for when you really want to booby-trap the heck out of your homeworld.<br />
**** Ensnarer Battlestation, Grenade Launcher Turret x30, Fortified Tesla Turret x30, Minefield x60, Area Minefield x60, Paralysis Minefield x60<br />
*** Webbed Defenses<br />
**** This mix is great against cloaking ships, ships with weak engines, groups of small ships, and ships with high energy operation costs.<br />
**** Revealer Battlestation, Spider Turret x40, MLRS Turret x40, Nucleophilic Turret x40, Tractor Array x7.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty and TechSY730 for inspiring this addition.<br />
<br />
* If a quick start is loaded that doesn't have a starting battlestation defined inside it, it now chooses one at random for you rather than throwing an error.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Fleet EXP Now Turns Into Mark Levels For Your Ships! ===<br />
<br />
* Planetary fleets now gain experience points like the mobile offensive and defensive fleets do.<br />
** Old savegames won't have any EXP for those planetary fleets, though, sadly.<br />
<br />
* Something that has been bugging Chris for a while has been the need to manually upgrade fleets when they gain enough EXP. That was always going to be a hassle.<br />
** However, there was still a desire to have flexibility in what sort of bonuses you get as your fleets do well, so there didn't seem to be an "out" on that.<br />
** Instead, however, now we're auto-upgrading fleets as they gain enough EXP, but also granting a "perk point" to the fleet that you can then go back and spend as you wish (once that interface is in).<br />
*** This way, the automation of fleets getting better as they fight better is there -- which is great -- but the flexibility remains for you to be able to upgrade your fleets in various ways using EXP indirectly as a currency. Best of both worlds!<br />
<br />
* Fleets now actually level up as they gain EXP, at EXP levels 4000, 12000, 36000, 108000, 324000, and finally 972000.<br />
** Are these reasonable numbers? It's really really hard to say. Perhaps folks can help us look at this in real world scenarios.<br />
*** The goal of the first level up is that you hit it after having a bit of combat with the fleet, so it's not too hard to get to mark 2 for the fleet.<br />
*** The goal of the second one is that you really have to fight for a while with it before your fleet gains that big bonus.<br />
*** The goal of the third one is that you have a very veteran fleet on your hands that has slain many many foes before you get this one.<br />
*** And then beyond that, these are mostly just for early fleets in ultra long-running games. It's really expected that most of the other upgrades for fleets, most of the time, would come from science and that you're getting a buff of 1-3 marks on average at most in typical games.<br />
** It's entirely likely that our actual numbers are hilariously wrong, so hopefully with feedback we can make some changes in the external constants xml fleet_level_up_exp_cost_1 and similar to get those better.<br />
<br />
* Hovering over the fleet in the sidebar now shows how much EXP that fleet has, and how much more is needed to get to the next level, and what the next level of the fleet is. Note that this is only presently on the fleet tooltip itself, not the tooltip for the fleet centerpiece.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.867 Smarter AI, Better Mark Level Spread, Player Economic Boom ==<br />
(Released June 14th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Zombies should not be counted as Threat; they can be Hostile to the player, but aren't part of the AI's coordinated attack force<br />
<br />
* Warden Secret Ninja Hideouts are now valid reinforcement points.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for pointing out this oversight.<br />
<br />
* Previously, if ships couldn't shoot at something for whatever reason, they would wait for 0.8t o 1.6 seconds before trying to fire again. This made ship shots more offset, and prevented hammering a fairly CPU-intensive method, but also caused issues with them seeming really sluggish to respond to things or retarget.<br />
** Now they will wait between 0 seconds and 0.2 seconds instead, which should be vastly more tolerable. It will still make the shots firing slightly offset, and will reduce load a bit, but should be imperceptible to players that there's ever a delay of any note going on here.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting and identifying the issue.<br />
<br />
* Put in a fix for the issue with the same music track playing over and over again if you didn't have the classic AI War music enabled.<br />
** Thanks to B and Drinks for reporting, and Badger for hunting it down.<br />
<br />
* The Objective for destroying Coprocessors now tells you how many are left in the galaxy.<br />
<br />
* When importing partial fleet names, or planet names, it no longer trims the whitespace off the edges of them.<br />
** This makes it so that you can make two-word fleet names, for example.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* If a player kills a reconquest AI command station after a minor faction killed the original (so the player is incurring AIP by killing the reconquest AI command station) then allow scouting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a very strange bug that could lead to error messages not popping up because mysteriously the modal popup data was null.<br />
** This will now remove the offending popup message and silently log an error to the log since trying to put another popup in there when the popup just failed is probably not the best idea.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* More debug info has been put into the tooltips for ships when that toggle is turned on in the personal settings debug section. This is revealing to us at the moment how often the targetPriorityList is empty (for some reason!) when ships are trying to pursue enemies. Not sure yet why that is the case, but this is the cause of the "movement stutters" reported by Ecthelon and RocketAssistedPuffin relating to units in pursuit mode. Thanks to Puffin for the repro save.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the strength counting for the side bar and galaxy view, reconstructed turrets should properly contribute to a planet's strength again.<br />
<br />
* Give the player more Dyson Defenders when they hack the Dyson Sphere.<br />
<br />
* Improve the BigCircle code for Simple/Realistic map types to hopefully have it work now.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for the initial bug report and weapon master for some research<br />
<br />
* Only display the 'not enough energy to claim' message in the hovertext for units that haven't been claimed yet<br />
** Otherwise all units would start displaying 'can't claim due to low energy' if you ran out of energy<br />
<br />
* Put in some logic that should prevent things that die to remains from being in a funky state after being rebuilt or re-captured.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI was getting double the income it should. Since we were balancing around this bug, fix the bug but double the underlying income. No net change to the game balance.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engine Notifier tooltips now show the faction the Raid Engine will send a wave at<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines will no longer be triggered by Dark Spire, Macrophage, Devourer or Zombies<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* When hovering a planet in the galaxy map with Verbose mode, if the planet is under the influence of a minor faction it will list that faction.<br />
<br />
* Warden, Hunter and Anti-Player zombies which zombify units will create Anti-Player zombies, not anti-everyone zombies<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Neutral world science extraction hacking now correctly costs AIP if the player would accrue AIP from capturing the planet (ie if a minor faction took out the AI command station).<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for the bug report<br />
<br />
* The nanocaust will now wait to more thoroughly defeat a planet's defenses before building a construction center<br />
** Reported by Ecthelon on steam<br />
<br />
* Give the AI a bit of bonus hunter income at AIP > 400. Make stacked units do a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines and other nasty things that can interfere with the Dyson Sphere now blow up immediately after game spawn<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust units shouldn't count as Threat anymore<br />
** Thanks to Kesseleth for reporting very high threat values<br />
<br />
* Nanocaust and Marauders are allowed to kill Raid Engines<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Marauder Outposts were allowed to exceed the raider limit by 1.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Player controlled Nanocaust ships (Abominations/Aberrations) now produce Anti-AI Zombies instead of player-controlled units that aren't in a Fleet.<br />
** Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report<br />
<br />
=== Wave modifications ===<br />
<br />
* On higher difficulty the AI will now not send waves against planets that are 'too heavily defended'. It will either pick weaker targets or roll the wave budget over into the next wave. <br />
** This gives the AI a bit better of a chance against a well-defended or turtling player. I was finding that most of the time waves barely tickled my defenses.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI could sometimes send normal waves against neutral planets<br />
<br />
* Add Wave specific traces for improved debugging<br />
<br />
* Rewrote chunks of the wave target finding logic for improved clarity<br />
<br />
* Reprisal waves buffs to match AIWC behaviour. Instead of having strength = Reprisal Level * Base Wave Strength, it's now strength = Base Wave Strength * baseMultiplier * 2^ reprisal level. baseMultiplier ranges from 1.1 (difficulty 1) to 1.8 (difficulty 10).<br />
** If you have a 4x reprisal level wave at difficulty 7 then it is Base Wave Strength * 1.5 * 2^4 = Base Wave Strength * 12, instead of Base Wave Strength * 4.<br />
** Badger found that the AI was not adequately punishing fleet-wipes. This should make it more interesting. Prompted due to some discord griping with Kesseleth and Puffin<br />
<br />
* Shortened some of the autogenerated fleet names.<br />
** Thanks to Viss Valdyr for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Better Handling Of Reinforcements Being Released ===<br />
<br />
* There was a strange thing where units were often being transferred from guard posts to other places, sometimes ones that could not be reinforcement points at all.<br />
** Likely this was an artifact of how we changed reinforcements over time in the design, and the intent of the transfer isn't super duper clear as it is. But the transfer is being kept for now, but now those transferred units are simply not transferred unless the target is also a reinforcement point. We can revisit the transfer itself later if it turns out to be a problem.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding this issue in a code review.<br />
<br />
*The game now checks all units (just once per second) to see if they are aggro'd and have any units stored in them to set free, not just the "reinforcement points" that are preordained.<br />
** That way if there are any reinforcements hiding in a unit that was not initially supposed to have them, but that got transferred them by whatever arcane methods (it's okay, really), they will behave properly. There are some cases where this might be desirable behavior, and having the extra flexibility here doesn't cost us much in terms of the CPU usage, so that's good.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting, as well as finding the issues in a code review.<br />
<br />
* Now when a unit dies, if it has reinforcements inside it for whatever reason, it should dump them all out immediately. Previously if you managed to kill a guard post full of reinforcements in under 1 second, then the guards would all die in the fire of their parent. Now they go free and attack you, as was always intended.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting, as well as finding the issues in a code review.<br />
<br />
=== Planet Naming Styles ===<br />
<br />
* As in the first game, the first planet added to the map is now always named "Murdoch." This tends to be a significant planet, and the interest of this happening and frequently being an important planet was not lost on people and kind of became part of AI War lore.<br />
<br />
* There are now multiple planet naming styles that you can choose from:<br />
** Standard (what it has been until now)<br />
*** Inspired by famous scientists, along with real and fictional named planets and locations from other works. Created by Chris and Keith.<br />
** No Gravitas<br />
*** Inspired by phrases and spaceship names in a pretty humorous sci fi series. Created by Draco18s for AIWC (edited by Chris).<br />
** Fantasy Monsters<br />
*** Inspired by the names of monsters in several fantasy games. Created by Zoutzakje for AIWC (edited by Chris).<br />
** Kahuna's Real Stars<br />
*** Absolutely enormous list of actual star names, including codenames for them. Plus a few easter eggs in there. Created by Kahuna for AIWC.<br />
** Kahuna's No-Codename Stars<br />
*** Absolutely enormous list of actual star names, but minus the codename-y sort. Plus a few easter eggs in there. Created by Kahuna for AIWC.<br />
** Cities (DE)<br />
*** Most cities in Germany show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr, and was the original inspiration for this change to the game.<br />
** Cities (UK)<br />
*** Most cities in the UK show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
** Cities (US)<br />
*** Most cities in the US show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
** Cities (RUS)<br />
*** Most cities in Russia show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
** Cities (FR/SPA)<br />
*** Most cities in France and Spain show up here, if they are 10 characters or fewer. It's a shorter (and combined) list because most of their city names are quite long! Created by Viss Valdyr.<br />
<br />
* When using the Real Stars lists, which are tens of thousands of entries long, we discovered that map generation would take several seconds to part of a minute.<br />
** Due to this discovery, we made a big improvement to the speed of name choosing for planets, and as a result all of the lists now generate in approximately the same amount of time (and much faster than before), making the lobby more responsive-feeling.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Marauder Bases now have a bit more health<br />
** Prompted by Ecthelon on Steam<br />
<br />
* Marauders have a bit more income<br />
** Thanks to puffin for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Usurpers can now have higher Marks.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of Concussion Guard Posts, Guardians and Turrets by 3,000.<br />
<br />
* Reduced range of MLRS Guard Posts and Turrets by 3,000.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Corvette, Turret, Guard Post reload time 3s -> 4s, damage multiplier 2x -> 4x.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette, Turret, Guardian, Guard Post high hull health damage multiplier 2x -> 4x.<br />
<br />
==== Hacking ====<br />
* Nerf hacking responses, especially the superterminal hacking response<br />
** Thanks to MajorDomo for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Nerf spire archive hacks. Make science extraction hacks a bit harder<br />
** Thanks to ulu for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Sabotage hacks now will blow up the legal target closest to the hacking unit, rather than a random legal target.<br />
** This matches AIWC behaviour.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* AutoBomb damage radius 600 -> 1,200, speed 2,200 -> 2,900.<br />
<br />
* Cluster Bomb speed 1,000 -> 1,800.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard damage resistance upon entering a planet 0.5x -> 0.25x.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette damage 20 -> 30, reload time 4s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
==== Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* Transport shields 500,000 -> 750,000, damage resistance upon entering a planet 0.5x -> 0.25x.<br />
<br />
* Transport range 5,600 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Transport damage 1,500 -> 500.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting a much further range on these, to avoid them being suicidal in combat. To avoid it being a weird fusion sniper, damage is lowered as well. It's pretty much just a weapon so it counts as a combatant.<br />
<br />
* Lost Spire Frigate shield points 750,000 -> 1,750,000.<br />
<br />
* Orchid shield bypass 70% -> 100%, speed 1,400 -> 1,800.<br />
<br />
* Gryn build speed increased 50%.<br />
<br />
==== Tech Upgrades ====<br />
<br />
* Ark Spirit:<br />
** Was: "3500,5500,7500,9500", now: "3000,4500,6000,7500".<br />
<br />
* Ark Heart:<br />
** Was: "3500,5500,7500,9500", now: "3000,4500,6000,7500".<br />
<br />
* Ark Armor:<br />
** Was: "6000,8000,10000,12000", now: "5000,6500,8000,9500".<br />
<br />
* Ark Fist:<br />
** Was: "7000,10000,12000", now: "6000,7500,9000".<br />
<br />
* Citadel Executioner:<br />
** Was: "4500,6750,9000", now: "3500,5000,6500".<br />
<br />
* Citadel Protector:<br />
** Was: "4000,6000,8000", now: "3000,4500,6000".<br />
<br />
* Citadel Consumer:<br />
** Was: "5000,7500", now: "4000,5500".<br />
<br />
* Spire Core:<br />
** Was: "6000,8000,10000,12000", now: "5000,6500,8000,9500".<br />
<br />
==== Marauders ====<br />
<br />
* All Marauder Raider weapon ranges are now at least 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Marauder Raider speed 200 -> 400.<br />
<br />
==== Dyson ====<br />
<br />
* Dyson Defender shield bypass 70% -> 100%.<br />
<br />
* Dyson Sentinel shields 200 -> 1,200.<br />
<br />
==== Nanocaust ====<br />
<br />
* Deviant engine_gx 13 -> 14, range 3,800 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Anomaly base shield bypass 60% -> 90%.<br />
<br />
* Mutation range 1,250 -> 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Aberration Prion Beam range 1,250 -> 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Abomination Prion Beam and Nematode range 1,250 -> 3,800.<br />
<br />
* Aberration and Abomination engine_gx 15 -> 18.<br />
<br />
* Deviant, Anomaly and Mutation speed 250 -> 400.<br />
** They now match Aberration and Abomination speed.<br />
<br />
=== Mark Level Balance Overhaul ===<br />
<br />
* The way that AI planets are allocated, mark-level-wise, is now revised very heavily.<br />
** The AI home planets are now Mark 7 instead of 5, and are surrounded by a mix of 7s and 6s rather than 5s and 4s like before.<br />
** Then in the main parts of the galaxy, there's way fewer mark 2 and 3 planets, and a whole lot more that ranges between 3-5 out there.<br />
** There were also previously some random strange mark 1 planets that really should not have existed (those should only be next to player homeworlds!). Now those are randomly tossed between marks 2 and 3.<br />
** This is... a REALLY substantial buff to the power of the AIs, which kind of goes without saying. But it was very strange-feeling that players were able to use mark 7 stuff and AIs were never really doing that. Now the AIs also use the full range of mark levels that are in this game, versus the player being technologically overpowering for them.<br />
** This will probably make a number of other factions need buffs, so please let us know.<br />
** We'll probably need to recolor some of these to make the map easier to read, now that there's more of this stuff out there.<br />
** The ratios might also not be ideal yet, we'll have to see.<br />
** Note that this won't affect existing savegames, but they will be affected by the OTHER changes below, so now older savegames from the fleets period are going to be a tad on the easy side, potentially.<br />
<br />
* The differences between mark levels is now a lot lower than before, so going up in mark levels doesn't make the older mark levels so darn useless.<br />
** This is pretty critical, given how unevenly you're upgrading your forces. And with 7 mark levels now instead of 5, we can afford to be more granular in general.<br />
** This helps to prevent some of the crazy overpowered fleets that people could get super early in the game, and also makes it so that the endgame mark levels is more of something to strive for and actually achieve. It also prevents some fleets from being absolutely useless, or mark 1 ships an absolute liability, early on in the game.<br />
** The changes are as follows:<br />
*** Mark 2:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 2.1 to 1.4<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 1.5 to 1.25<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 2 to 1.25<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 225 to 100<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 3 to 2<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 1.3 to 1.1<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 1.4 to 1.2<br />
*** Mark 3:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 3.2 to 2.1<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 2 to 1.5<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 3 to 1.75<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 450 to 220<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 5 to 3<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 1.6 to 1.3<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 1.8 to 1.4<br />
*** Mark 4:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 4.3 to 2.8<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 2.5 to 2<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 4 to 2.5<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 675 to 400<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 7 to 4<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 1.9 to 1.6<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.1 to 1.75<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 1 to 0.<br />
*** Mark 5:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 5.4 to 3.6<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 3 to 2.5<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 5 to 3<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 900 to 650<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 9 to 6<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 2.1 to 1.9<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.4 to 2.1<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 2 to 1.<br />
*** Mark 6:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 6.5 to 4.2<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 3.5 to 3<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 6 to 3.5<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 1125 to 900<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 11 to 8<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 2.6 to 2.2<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.8 to 2.4<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 3 to 2.<br />
*** Mark 7:<br />
**** Attack multiplier: 7.6 to 5.4<br />
**** Squad cap multiplier: 4 to 3<br />
**** Hull points multiplier: 7 to 4<br />
**** Required AIP for AI to upgrade to this: 1350 to 1150<br />
**** AI planet defense multiplier: 15 to 10<br />
**** Assist range multiplier: 3 to 2.4<br />
**** Shield radius multiplier: 2.8 to 2.4<br />
**** Dire guardian count: 3.4 to 2.8.<br />
** All of these changes help to make it so that it's partly more about what KIND of ships you have, and not just having the top of the line mark levels.<br />
*** But there's a similar progression to what used to be the top-level mark 5 stuff (which is now mark 7), minus some of the extreme tankiness that was there before.<br />
*** Additionally, there is no longer a crazy spike where mark 2 stuff is just soooo incredibly much better than mark 1. That was problematic, and the entire curve is thus smoothed out a lot more.<br />
*** The goal with all this is that a fleet of mark 1 ships should still be useful even in the midgame, and not such a liability as it is right now. But ALSO that if you have a mark 7 fleet you're not just curb-stomping the AI, who only has mark 5 until now.<br />
*** It's also worth noting that the AI and you both would be teching up more often in this model, but all of these numbers are super duper preliminary and will need testing.<br />
*** Also also it's worth noting that we still need to do some things about lower-mark ships and their costs, to keep those attractive, but those will come separately from this particular balance shift.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for coming up with this general idea, and for the feedback of a lot of other people related to these changes.<br />
<br />
=== Player Economic Balance Boom ===<br />
<br />
* Repairing the engines or personal shields of friendlies is now a free action, it just takes time (but not metal).<br />
** Note that repairing bubble forcefields or hulls still costs metal.<br />
** It's also worth noting that drone production has been a free action for a long time.<br />
** This should help avoid certain metal spikes, cost-wise.<br />
<br />
* In addition to other changes relating to mark levels, now within your fleets your lower-mark ships now get a serious discount in metal cost depending on how much lower-mark they are than the highest-mark ship type in that fleet.<br />
** Aka, if Fleet A has at least one mark 3 ship type in it, then all of its mark 1 and 2 ship types will be discounted. If Fleet B is all mark 1 units, that wouldn't hold true; so there's some benefit to upgrading at least a little bit of something from every fleet.<br />
** These benefits translate into faster build times for low-mark stuff, lower metal expenditures, and lower repair costs. Aka, they make way better chaff -- without tanking your economy -- which is similar to what AI War Classic did. But in this game we had to go with a discounting system rather than an increasing-cost system so that as you upgrade your ships you don't run into a tanked economy for THAT reason.<br />
** The discounts are:<br />
*** 90% of normal cost if 1 mark below the max of the fleet.<br />
*** 75% of normal cost of 2 marks below.<br />
*** 55% if 3 marks below.<br />
*** 35% if 4 marks below.<br />
*** 25% if 5 marks below.<br />
*** 10% if 7 marks below.<br />
** These values can be tuned in the external constants xml, and we also will be making other economic changes to balance in general, probably. But this core change should make it so that a lot more things are useful a lot more of the time.<br />
<br />
==== Seeing Your Metal Outflows ====<br />
<br />
* A basic display of metal outflows is now displayed when you click the metal resource line in the top bar of the GUI.<br />
** There are some funky things that this is showing and/or not showing, so please let us know as you find them. Some of what we've seen might just be old savegames, but it's hard to say.<br />
** Eventually we'd like these to be more robust reports that come out on all the resources in the top bar, including things about the AIs and other factions (whatever details you are allowed to know) when you click AIP, for instance.<br />
** This uses a modal popup with a scrollbar, which is a lot more suited for really long-form text data (as long as it needs to be!), so this is basically considered driving down to a much more detailed level compared to the tooltip, which is more realtime and more brief/summary in nature.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for the initial implementation and idea!<br />
<br />
=== New Mechanic STYLE: Fleet Bonuses From Member Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new supercharges_min_speed_of_rest_of_player_fleet xml property for ships, which is now applied to Raiders.<br />
** When this is on, as with the case for Raiders, then all of the other non-centerpiece ships within any PLAYER fleet that also contains these ships get boosted up to at least the speed of the raiders.<br />
** This is in response to people noting that often Raiders were not super useful because they're very fast but everything else was not, so it's not like you could build a giant strike fleet out of them.<br />
** But even more than that, this is kind of a first-item showcase for how we can create new synergies from different ships in a fleet, compared to having to exploit existing/inherent ones. In other words, we can make it so that a ship that "doesn't play well with others" is able to make others more awesome in a way that is similar to itself, thus making fleets... even more slightly procedural in nature, is one way to put it?<br />
** We arent' having procedural ships, per se, but this lets the procedural fleets actually adjust the other ships within their fleets. This is only for human players, and probably we can think of some various other interesting things to do with this that will make some ships more useful and varied in surprising new ways.<br />
** It's worth noting that we'll definitely want suggestions for "hey this ship isn't very useful with many others, maybe part of its abilities could transfer over," and then also there are simply some ship types (etherjets?) that probably should be limited to AI-side-only simply because they're too esoteric for player use. That said, this whole piece is a marathon, not a sprint, and this is more of a case study of the sorts of cool things we can do over time, long-term.<br />
** The alternative was going to be trying to really make it so that "unhelpful fleeet compositions" were not ever created, but that was going to really limit the types of fleets people would see. It's a lot more interesting to make it so that the weak fleets get buffed by new abilities that ships can grant to their fleet, we figured.<br />
** Thanks to a ton of players for the discussion that inspired this.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.866 Hotfix ==<br />
(Released June 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed Enraged Macrophages having 1/10th of the shields of normal Macrophages.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for spotting.<br />
<br />
* Macrophages now spawn at the correct mark level<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where we were checking the Stacking Cutoff in the wrong way, and that was basically Breaking Everything.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.865 The Return Of Deepstriking ==<br />
(Released June 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Improvements and Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, the header sizes for some of the text on the map tab line items is now a bit larger.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, on the map tab it now has the Randomize button up next to the Map Seed, as a half-width button again, to show its lesser importance. This definitely helps it be confused with the Regenerate Map button less.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting the confusion.<br />
<br />
* The game now supports actions being triggered when you press enter or return in textboxes.<br />
** We have to hook this up via a new OnEnterOrReturnPressed() method on a case-by-case basis, but the first place that this is now being used is in the lobby on the map seed textbox. Pressing enter in that now causes the map to regenerate.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== In-Game Ability To Change A Subset Of These ====<br />
<br />
* The Performance section of the regular settings screen has been removed, and the singular option from there (when to start stacking units) has been moved into the Lobby Options instead. This way this will function properly during multiplayer, since this is a global thing and not a local setting.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The settings screen now has a header of "Personal Settings," instead of "Game Settings," to be a little more clear.<br />
<br />
* In the escape menu during gameplay, you can now see two options: "Personal Settings," and "Galaxy-Wide Options."<br />
** The new Galaxy-Wide Options screen is basically just a subset of the Options tab from the Lobby screen. It's only the options that make sense for people to be able to change once the game has started.<br />
** To make any option show on this screen, the xml tag changeable_during_gameplay="true" simply must be added and it will be there.<br />
** This lets players, presently, change the contents of the Scouting and the Performance tabs. Later we may add other things, but these were the only things that didn't seem like they would be exploitable by players in some way. And the only things that aren't cached by the AI factions or whatever, and aren't just something for during mapgen like how many capturables are seeded.<br />
** This is actually a pretty powerful new tool we have, which will let us do some interesting things in the future beyond what we have right now.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Selected Units Improvements and Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding issue where if you clicked a single item in your list of selected units in the lower right corner, it wouldn't just limit down to that only.<br />
** Basically we can't call Unselect() from inside DoForSelected(), we need to return RemoveAndContinue instead or else if will skip indices.<br />
** Thanks to Jonesmz, Kahuna, and Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.<br />
<br />
* If you have selected some ships that are remains (turrets, whatever), then those now show up as separate line items in the list of selected ships, and show REMAINS next to themselves.<br />
** Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* In the UI, if you have selected a fleet directly, rather than selecting just all or some of the units from it, it now shows the fleet itself in the selection window.<br />
** Functionally there is no difference from before, as selecting a fleet would select the fleet as a whole plus any new ships that were inside it, and that is still the case. But now you can visually tell that.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, the only way to "select a fleet" was to right-click it in the fleets sidebar, or to use the number key assigned to that fleet. Now you can also double-click the fleet centerpiece and that will select the fleet rather than just selecting all the units inside it.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Sneaking Around AI Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the AI Behavior section of the lobby options: Guard Aggro Distance<br />
** At what distance from an enemy will a guard post release its internal ships, or will a ship standing near a guard post leave its post to attack the enemy? Default is 5000.<br />
** Note that if the guard post or one of its ships get shot, then they immediately aggro no matter what the distance. This is about them noticing someone who is being passive.<br />
** Default is 5k, min is 3k, max is 10k. Prior to this build, this was hardcoded in at an insanely-high 13k, which is half the gravity well. That made the AI just absolutely notice everything you did immediately, and made the planets feel smaller than they are.<br />
*** The ranges of ships may also be a bit too on the high side in some cases, in terms of making the gravity wells feel too small and cage-matchy, so we might make some changes there to reduce ship attack ranges, but we shall see.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting. Hopefully we can actually do some deepstriking, now!<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue where AI units were being aggro'd even by cloaked ships. Ships that are cloaked no longer can cause guards to notice them at all.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a super longstanding issue with the hitboxes for planets being strange/biased on the galaxy map. This was because, as WeaponMaster discovered, the important structures icons were never disabling their colliders and thus there was a giant invisible area where hovering would select the wrong planet.<br />
** Thanks to rkfg, Mckloshiv, Draco18s, Ovalcircle, and WeaponMaster for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code that will give us better errors when there are problems linking planets up in octopus maps or various others.<br />
** This likely won't fix the actual issue, but will let us find out where the issue actually lies.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the player command station type changes at a planet, it now properly removes all of the command-station-fleet ships that are not a part of the new command station's fleet design.<br />
** It was already properly doing this in terms of making ship counts drop for types that it now had too many of, but it wasn't clearing entire ship types that were disallowed.<br />
** There was already a destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command="true" xml flag that you could put on ships in order to make them not reduce their count to match whatever the new command station is.<br />
** Now there is also a new is_auto_scrapping_skipped_when_command_station_type_changes="true" that prevents this scrapping logic from happening at all if the type isn't a match to the new command station fleet type.<br />
*** This is pretty important for things like the Zenith Power Generator, or other capturables, which are not part of the fleet design but should remain. Same for anything you might buy from the Zenith Trader.<br />
*** This has been applied to all the relevant structures and ships so that they shouldn't disappear, but that hasn't been explicitly tested, so please let us know if you see problems with those sorts of things.<br />
** Also please note that losing your command station doesn't cost you any units. It's not until you rebuild the command station as a different type (switching from economic to miltiary, for instance) that it changes what you're allowed to have.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 and AnnoyingOrange for reporting.<br />
<br />
* When the fleet definition would show a zero cap, it no longer shows you that in the fleet tooltip. This is for things like command stations that were switched, or old turret types from an old command station type, etc.<br />
** Essentially it was just extra visual clutter for no reason (well, the reason was that it was an oversight).<br />
<br />
* Corrected a tooltip in the lobby to note the new default that there are three battlestations on each planet that you would capture.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of visual glitches with the Zenith Trader:<br />
** The notification at the top bar now says "Zenith Trader" rather than "Zenith ???".<br />
** Some of the items for sale on the sidebar now have sidebar abbreviations so that they can fit on one line properly.<br />
** Rather than saying "unnamed" for the fleet name, it says "Zenith Trader," so you can tell where that's coming from.<br />
** Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.864 Humanity Strikes Back ==<br />
(Released June 3rd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Some minor tweaks to the Simple and Realistic map types to decrease connectivity<br />
<br />
* Dyson Antagonizers now only spawn on Intensity 8 or higher, and are less frequent<br />
<br />
* A new Instigator Base type has been added that strengthens the Warden Fleet.<br />
** Thanks to kesseleth for thinking this up and also implementing it!<br />
<br />
* Add one more Basic Quickstart, as well as three Moderate Quickstarts.<br />
** Two Moderates are returning (with some changes) and the third is new.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug causing crippled mobile factories to still be able to produce ships if engineers assist them.<br />
<br />
* Put in two separate instances of defensive coding to prevent index out of range exceptions.<br />
** One is in Inner_CheckForCollisionOrMakeEntityMove, and will simply identify the problem if we have one there, but it's unlikely we actually have on there.<br />
** The second is in the three DoForEntities methods on EntityCollection, and basically make it so that if they try to index beyond what they should (because of cross-threading competition, most likely), then it will just gracefully continue on.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in several layers of defensive code that should prevent null reference exceptions from happening in certain rare cases with the Warden fleet trying to pathfind around.<br />
** Thanks to MatthewYCR for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Hunter/Warden difficulty differentiation ===<br />
<br />
* Give the Hunter Fleet some bonus income independent of the AI for intensity >= 7<br />
<br />
* Give Hunter and Warden fleets an Overconfidence Ratio; hunter/warden fleets will overestimate their strengths at lower difficulties<br />
<br />
* Hunter and Warden fleets now choose less effective targets to shoot at lower difficulties<br />
<br />
=== Human Player Balance Shifts ===<br />
<br />
* The default number of battlestations per planet is now 3, rather than 2. This should make it so that you have an easier time defending your planets without having to capture SO darn many other planets. And there's nothing that really says you have to use every ounce of those battlestations' capacity, so if you're doing well then you can use this opportunity to be more choosy about exactly which kinds of turrets you build out of them, rather than maximizing constantly.<br />
** Generally we've been getting the sense that on difficulty 7 things have been a bit on the difficult size, mainly in terms of the AI being able to mobilize more stuff than you, and you feeling perpetually poor, which is not a good feeling to have on the "standard" difficulty. Difficulty 7 has been coming out more like between difficulty 8 and 9 from the first game is the feeling, at least recently, and that has to do with the ability you have to defend yourself instead of the AI being clever or whatever else.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for the most recent report and suggestions.<br />
<br />
* Human Cryogenic Pods now give 7500 energy instead of 5000.<br />
** Rather than being forced to have 10 of these on your starting planet, it now lets you choose between 0 and 30 of them. The default is still 10.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* On your home planet, the starting positions of the cryogenic pods and the home human settlements are way closer to your actual home command station, and thus stay under your forcefield a lot longer.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Human Home Settlements now give 520 metal per second rather than 280 metal per second.<br />
** There is also now a slider on the setup for the human factions in the lobby that lets you configure if you want the default 2 of these, or as few as 0 or as many as 5.<br />
** It's worth noting that this is essentially like an economic boost slider, in a lot of respects, except that it has more to do with the early game than the entire game, AND it has potential disastrous consequences in AIP. Much more interesting than the economic multiplier in the first game.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The forcefield on the home human planets is now scale 5 instead of 4 (normal forcefields are scale 3).<br />
** This provides a much longer window before your shields are low enough that your stuff under it can be shot up (particularly the cryo pods), while still keeping the shields-shrink mechanic consistent.<br />
** Especially with how the cryo pods have moved more inward anyway, this really should keep them pretty safe against a lot of incursions.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* Energy Boosts:<br />
** Military Command Stations now provide 20k energy, with an added 5k energy per mark level, rather than 2k and 2k.<br />
** Economic Command Stations now provide 100k energy, with an added 20k per mark level, rather than 10k and 10k.<br />
** Logistical Command Stations now provide 50k energy, with an added 50k per mark level, rather than 25k and 25k.<br />
** For comparison, the basic Energy Collector produces 150k energy, and the Zenith Power Generator produces 600k energy.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for reporting the energy shortages that were now likely to be common in standard play simply because of how many more units you have in play using up that energy.<br />
<br />
* Citadels:<br />
** Citadel Shields 125,000 -> 175,000.<br />
** Citadel Energy Consumption 50,000 -> 30,000.<br />
** All Citadel shots per salvo doubled, excluding Inhibitor which is only increased 50% (it was higher than the others by a fair bit already).<br />
<br />
== Version 0.863 Control of Capturables ==<br />
(Released May 31st, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== New Lobby Settings for Controlling Gameplay ===<br />
<br />
* Added new setting to the Scouting section of the lobby options: Max Planets To Scout At Once<br />
** Depending on the topography of your map, capturing a planet may cause a TON of planets to suddenly be revealed. Rather than this getting TOO crazy and showing you the whole map after you capture one planet, this lets it be more gradual. The default is 8.<br />
** Ranges from 3 to 40.<br />
** This is a good example of the new types of things we can do thanks to the Lobby Options tab, which we couldn't cleanly do before using the regular game settings (because of multiplayer sync, and the potential for abuse with mid-game changes, etc).<br />
** Note that this is so far untested, so let us know if there are bugs.<br />
** Thanks to Mckloshiv and BadgerBadger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* A new capturables section has been added to the lobby options, with 6 different options in there that you can now tune.<br />
** This is one of the first examples of an option that affects mapgen seeding but not then the gameplay after that.<br />
** These basically let you control how many of each type of fleet you'd like to have out in the galaxy, in a multiplier-like fashion.<br />
** It also explains what all the kinds of fleets are, and what their role is in the game, so that's kind of a self-teaching moment, which is nice.<br />
** As one example, it lets you turn off basically all the officer fleets (all but one of them) by setting the multiplier for that to 0x, and you could then double or triple the number of regular fleets to compensate. This would let you have a very hero-less sort of game style, if you don't like the big centerpiece flagships being there at all. Or of course you could completely reverse it, and make it very hero-centric with only two (in that case) transport-based fleets, and instead have all the rest be officer-style.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring this addition, which lets people have more the flavor of game they want.<br />
<br />
* Added a new slider setting to the capturables section of the options menu in the lobby: Basic Battlestations Per Planet<br />
** Your command stations give very few turrets for defending themselves (except the Military variant), so in order to defend yourself you'll want to capture battlestations (which come with LOADS of turrets and other defensive goodies).<br />
** Since you have to capture territory to get a battlestation for defending territory... it makes a lot of sense to have more than just one on any planets that have them. The default is 2, but you can have up to 4, or make things really hard and just have one.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and others for inspiring this new flexibility.<br />
<br />
* Added a new slider setting to the capturables section of the options menu in the lobby: Citadels Per Planet<br />
** Similar to the basic battlestations, these provide defensive goodies and turrets to help defend your planets. However, since the citadels themselves are also giant fortresses in their own right, giving only one per planet seems to make the most sense for most cases. But if you want to grant yourself more, you can!<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and others for inspiring this new flexibility.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts Return ===<br />
<br />
* Quick Starts have been added back into the game, and now function again.<br />
** However, we had to create a whole new set of them, since the old quick starts were all in the old savegame format and also didn't really have settings that make sense anymore, anyway.<br />
** The order for the categories of basic, moderate, and harder is now in the order you would naturally expect (1,2,3), and then the Fun With Factions are later on. As will any other generalized quick starts be.<br />
** We have only added in three quick starts thus far, all in the basic category. The others we'll work on soon.<br />
*** One has the classic fleet as the starting situation, with a difficulty 6 AI and 100 planets on a realistic map.<br />
*** The next has the classic fleet, with two difficulty 6 AIs and a 120 planet Octopus map.<br />
*** The last has the raid fleet, with one difficulty 7 AI, and then also the Zenith Trader wandering around. Clusters microcosm map.<br />
** Thanks<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Minor Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* A variety of changes have been made to the map generation code and interface so that the number of planets allowed per galaxy is now shown as a slider, and is properly enforced at all times.<br />
** The actual map types have also had their minimum and maximum numbers of planets brought inwards some -- up from 10 in most cases to 40 for the minimum, and down from 200+ to 120-200 on most of them. For Realistic, which is particularly slow to generate right now, it has a cap of 100.<br />
** All of this should prevent some of the long-running slowness that could be encountered previously and that would lead to strangeness if it was taking 5-10 seconds to generate the basic outline of a map.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Also put in some defensive code for cases where potentially there could be an error happening in mapgen if it was aborted partway through, and thus didn't have a parent galaxy for a planet it was trying to find the neighbors for.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The escape key now works in the lobby to close it.<br />
** For whatever reason it doesn't work to close the add factions popup, but we can deal with that another time.<br />
** Thanks to dv = i ln(w0 / wf) for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix divide by 0 in PlanWave<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code to prevent errors when trying to find out the strength or contents of a ship that has a null fleet or other similar issues.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo in the Direct Waves tooltip.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new HandlePostSavegameLoadLogic method that gets called on World_AIW2 after a savegame is loaded, giving us a chance to fix any problems in it.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the DoGameStartLogic method for galaxy settings to allow for this to be called when it's a string value that has been set.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoAfterSavegameLoadLogic method for galaxy settings to allow for these to do fixes to existing savegames that might have some issue.<br />
<br />
* When the "Ally To AI" option is on, now any allies of the AI will automatically ally with you as well. So this means AI Instigators, etc, become your friends as well.<br />
** This also retroactively fixes itself in existing savegames.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo that was causing the warden difficulty to come before the warden type in the lobby settings.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking a faction in the add faction window now adds it without you having to click it and then click ok.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the factions tab of the lobby where if you were clicking between two factions of the same type (for example, marauders), then any dropdowns used by those two factions would not be properly updated to the real values of the new faction when you click from the other faction.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Until now, if savegames in the old pre-0.850 branch were attempted to load in the new game, then it would just silently do nothing. Now it throws up a visible error telling you that the savegame is an out of date format.<br />
** Thanks to BandDrinks for the savegame that led us to finding this.<br />
<br />
* The test chamber, which was broken during the lobby upheaval, is now fully functional again.<br />
** Interestingly, for some reason you can control both your units and enemy units. Nifty, I guess?<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with clusters microcosm map types where it was trying to get a setting to display that wasn't actually used in that map type.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the list of "things in my fleet" to not include command stations and some other things like that.<br />
** Normally that already wouldn't be showing, but if you had switched the kind of command station on a planet, then in particular it would show the other types in a way that was not helpful.<br />
<br />
* The scrap units hotkey (and a variety of other hotkeys that should not have been active) no longer work in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The lobby now properly shows the human-readable text names for things in dropdowns on the factions tab. This makes them way more clear.<br />
** Additionally, the lobby now shows tooltips for individual line items in dropdowns on the factions tab if those have been set up for the table in question.<br />
*** This is super useful for the starting fleet for the player, and the AI types for the AI, etc.<br />
<br />
* The AI Difficulty table now has a description field which tries to explain what each difficulty level means. This is now shown in the lobby tooltips for those.<br />
** Note that warden and hunter fleet difficulties don't show anything yet.<br />
<br />
==== Ability To See What Command Station Fleets Consist Of Before Creating Them ====<br />
<br />
* For fleet centerpieces that you can construct from the sidebar and which have non-procedural fleet designs attached to them (for both of these categories, the command stations are the only things at the moment), you can now see what their constructed fleet will be like once they are created.<br />
** Basically, the upshot is that for command stations you can now see what their fleets would be before you create them. That's... kinda important info! And was causing people to not know that essentially they could get some extra military firepower by using the military command station, for instance.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.862 Lobby Overhaul, Knockback, Nanocaust, and the Final Battle ==<br />
(Released May 29th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add Notification for any Raid Engines that are alerted. Untested, but hopefully it works?<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it<br />
<br />
=== Complete Lobby Overhaul ===<br />
<br />
* The entire lobby has been redone from scratch, and now works much better as well as having a more visually-pleasing style, and fitting a lot more information in in a less-overwhelming way, and being more modder-friendly than before.<br />
** There are some bits that still need fixing up, please see here for the known todo list at the moment: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=20151<br />
<br />
* The map configuration now actually gets saved into your local settings file so that it's the same the next time you load back into the lobby.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" (those on/off switches on the Options tab in the lobby) have been removed, and a new system under the hood has been added which allows for us to do boolean or integer data in a much more robust fashion.<br />
<br />
* The Wave Composition, Wave Warning, Threat Waves, Cross Planet Waves, Direct Waves, Reconquest waves, and Shark A and B settings are no longer on the AI directly, but are instead under Options in the lobby.<br />
** This allows for those to be more clearly set apart as advanced options, and also makes it so that when you have multiple AIs they all share these particular pieces of behavior (which is in general desired for a variety of reasons).<br />
<br />
* For the settings for factions, and the settings in the Options tab of the lobby, EVERYTHING is no longer dropdowns. Now there are integer sliders, bool checkboxes, and so on.<br />
<br />
* Previously it wasn't possible to mod in custom fields for factions and have them display in the UI without also altering the lobby code. Yikes! Now you can directly just add stuff in the xml and it shows up, same as with the settings elsewhere.<br />
<br />
* In the faction xml, the team colors no longer have special secondary custom field entries. This was duplicative and confusing, and previously was just done in order to make the ui lobby code simpler. We have a better way now.<br />
<br />
* The AI Hunter and Warden fleets no longer show up in the lobby as distinct entries. Their small amount of data is now under the main (now singular) AI faction that they are related to.<br />
** Since we want to have multiple AIs, but not endless clutter, it's very convenient for UI purposes to have the AIs just show as one line item per AI with their hunters and wardens wrapped into one entry.<br />
** This doesn't actually change the reality of underlying gameplay, but each hunter or warden looks to the AI that is most recently preceding them in the list of factions in order to get their settings.<br />
** It's possible in some circumstances (from well before now) for a warden to be getting some donations from some AI faction that it wasn't originally tied to, and that's fine. All of that still works, even though the original settings from the lobby came from one specific AI faction.<br />
<br />
* The warden and hunter factions now inherit the central color from their preceding AI faction (that they are initially tied to), and then have their own custom trim color.<br />
** Previously, all the hunter and warden factions were showing themselves with the same colors as the first hunter or warden faction, which is no longer a thing.<br />
** This is particularly useful for civil wars with the AIs, since now you can tell whose wardens and hunters are whose, and thus why they are fighting.<br />
<br />
* Ever hit a point while working on some code where you go "how did this ever work in the first place?"<br />
** Well, things like the Starting Fleet selection for players were one of those things. Clearly it worked, and worked well, but things were so sprawling and have changed so much that the method for making it work is entirely different now (and hopefully easier to follow for anyone who wants to set up "table subsets" in the future.<br />
** This was probably another example of some custom code in the old lobby that was redirecting some values from the more generic case to a more specific case. But now that all the data is xml-driven, that old lobby code was missing and so hence likely the confusion. Now it can be just directly driven, at any rate, which is great.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the nanocaust where it would start throwing errors after you win the game.<br />
<br />
* Setting the color of the player faction now fully properly works in the lobby.<br />
** Not only is it using the nice color-picker interface for all that stuff, but it's actually updating the display and the game, versus before it was just only ever using your values from your local profile. It still defaults to that, but you can now override that.<br />
<br />
* The debug setting for setting more than one AI type up in the lobby has been removed. You can simply add more AI types directly now. Hooray!<br />
<br />
* As part of all the lobby changes, you can now have any number of factions that you wish to in a galaxy without running out of room due to the way the interface is set up.<br />
<br />
=== Nanocaust Buffs ===<br />
<br />
* Give the Nanocaust stronger defensive fleets when the Hive is under attack. <br />
* Give the Nanocaust more income.<br />
* Created ships start in Attacker_Full. <br />
* Nanocaust ships should not start patrolling until there are no enemies on the planet<br />
* The Nanocaust is not allowed to kill Command Stations until it has a significant advantage on a planet<br />
** Prompted by discussions with Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the a bunch of the Nanocaust's weapons weren't firing due to some missing XML<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
=== New Ship Mechanic ===<br />
<br />
* Knockback (translocation for AI War veterans) has been put in the game!<br />
<br />
* The knockback mechanic has two methods of functioning:<br />
** The first calculates the knockback direction based on the angle between the ship that fired the shot and the shot that hit (aka directly towards or away from your ship) and functions with all types of weapons: single target, laser, self-centered AoE (tesla ships), and enemy centered AoE (Seige frigates).<br />
** The second calculates the knockback direction only for secondary targets hit by an AoE (non-laser) weapon. Ships will be pushed or pulled towards the point where the shot hit, making enemy ships group up together to make other AoE effects more potent.<br />
<br />
* Each method works with both pulling ships towards, and pushing ships away from the target.<br />
<br />
* Knockback is currently only limited by mass. There is a maximum mass that will be able to be knocked back, and the closer a ship is to that maximum mass, the less knockback the ship will take (down to a minimum of 50% of the listed knockback). The equation for this is Effective Knockback = Knockback * ( 1 - ( Ship Mass / (2 * Mass Limit ) ) )<br />
** As an example: If a knockback had a strength of 1000 and a mass limit of 4, a fleet ship of 0.2 mass would take 975 knockback, and a guardian of 4 mass would take 500 knockback<br />
<br />
* Ships are immune to knockback if they are: Too heavy, are protected by a bubble shield, are projecting a bubble shield, are currently tractored, are immobile (turrets), or are immune to damage.<br />
<br />
==== For Modders ====<br />
<br />
* XML tags are as follows for creating ships with knockback:<br />
** knockback_to_ships_mass_tx_less_than="Mass Limit" - Needed for knockback to function at all, sets the max mass that will be affected<br />
** base_knockback_per_shot="Base Knockback" - For markless and mark 1 ships, this is the knockback that the shot will deal. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** added_knockback_per_shot_per_mark="Added Knockback" - For mark 2 ships and up, this is how much extra knockback is added to the shots. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** knockback_at_target_location="true/false" - Setting this to true means that AoE weapons will make ships be pushed or pulled away from the center of the AoE. Defaults to false. Must have a defined AoE on the weapon for this to work.<br />
<br />
* C# methods<br />
** int EntitySystem.CalculateKnockbackPowerAgainst( GameEntity_Squad Target ) - Returns 0 if the weapon has no knockback effects, or if the ship is immune. Otherwise return the knockback from the equation above.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.TakeKnockback( int KnockbackAmount, float angle ) - For custom knockback effects, this method ignores any convention of towards or away, and just pushes the ship at an angle that you want. This method has no immunity checking in it currently, so make sure the target is actually mobile, not bubble shielded, and not tractored.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.AddKnockbackSourceForFramePlan( int KnockbackAmount, EntitySystem FiringSystemOrNull, GameEntity_Shot ShotThatHitOrNull, bool KnockbackAtTarget, ArcenSimContext Context ) - If KnockbackAtTarget is false, log the source of the knockback from FiringSystemOrNull.GetWorldLocation() and power from int KnockbackAmount. If KnockbackAtTargetis true, check that the ship this is called from is not the same ship that ShotThatHitOrNull hit, then log the source from ShotThatHitOrNull.Target.Ref.WorldLocation and the power from int KnockbackAmount. Get's called by TakeDamage automatically.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Antagonized Dyson Sphere rebalance. <br />
** Every so often the Dyson Antagonizer will level up and increase the income of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere. To compensate, the initial strength of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere will be weaker<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with Democracy<br />
<br />
* Increase the Macrophage's base income<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the comments<br />
<br />
* Instigators are now allied to the player in Friendly AI mode<br />
<br />
* Tweak the anti-minor-faction wave code to make sure the waves are all at a minimum size. Also increase the anti-minor-faction waves against the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to Oval for pointing some more code paths out<br />
<br />
* Keep the Main Menu Music in the Game Lobby; don't switch to 'in-game' music till you really start the game<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the request<br />
<br />
* On difficulty >= 7, the AI will start dumping most of its budget into the Hunter Fleet when you are attacking the AI Overlord or an adjacent planet<br />
** The feeling I get is that the actual AI Overlord combat isn't as exciting as it could be, so hopefully this will be more interesting.<br />
<br />
==== Mines ====<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mine types from 1 minimum, 2 maximum, to 2 minimum, 3 maximum in "Minelayer" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mines in "Minelayer" and "OtherDefenseFocus" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Stations now have 20 Paralysis Mines instead of 10 normal Mines.<br />
** Existing Stations in save games will still have their old Mines in addition.<br />
<br />
* Area Mine damage 20,000 -> 2,000, hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Differentiates it from normal Mines.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Stops it from paralysing an absurd amount of ships.<br />
<br />
* Area and Paralysis Mine explosion radius 500 -> 1,000.<br />
** These mines had a tendency to detonate on the first target that came in range, and not hit much around that. This should hopefully let them get more out of each detonation.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine paralysis time 8s -> 12s.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Parasite damage 20 -> 60, reload time 6s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Paralysers now have the correct target evaluator and should be better at actually paralysing.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboat cost_for_ai_to_purchase increased 25%.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers should now be shot at automatically, if nothing else is really around as a target.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Doubled the health of Logistical and Military Command Stations.<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagship health increased 25%.<br />
<br />
* Guard Post metal cost increased 10x.<br />
** Solely so Metabolisation grants you more metal from them.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of "Spire Core" Tech.<br />
<br />
==== Translocation ====<br />
<br />
* Ark One now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 2000, increases by 500 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Stations now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 3000, increases by 750 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station reload time 6s -> 2s, shots per salvo 6 -> 8, damage 1,300 -> 800.<br />
** Allows it to use Translocation more effectively. Is also a damage upgrade.<br />
<br />
==== Reinforcement ====<br />
<br />
* Removed the increased turret limit that AI planets with guard posts get.<br />
<br />
* Slight increase to the bonus strike craft a planet can reinforce per guard post, 25% extra --> 30% extra<br />
** This still lets the AI build up a "wall", but strike craft are different from turrets in that there's more gameplay to them (i.e. they become threat if you outnumber the AI too much)<br />
** Thanks to the Discord for the talks, Puffin for posting on the bug tracker.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories could produce ships beyond a fleet's cap if you were fast forwarding during construction.<br />
<br />
* Put periods at the end of all the Descriptions of minor factions and map types for consistency<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Probably fixed the bug with marauder outposts causing savegames to break. Have not tested it, but found a definite bug in the code (one variable being serialized twice but deserialized only once) and fixed that, so unless there is also a second bug in this area it should be good to go now.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Hunter Fleet budget from Instigator bases wasn't being spent <br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where normal waves weren't sending<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* If you have 0 hacking points and haven't finished the hack, the hack should now fail instead of giving you negative hacking points<br />
** Thanks to x4000 for the mantis ticket, but I assume someone else originally reported the problem (on Steam?)<br />
<br />
* Paralyzing a ship with a cloaking device no longer gives it full cloaking points once it's unparalyzed again. Particularly infuriating with the Raid starter fleet, the Cursed golem stuns for just enough time to have ships recloak before the next shot fires.<br />
** Minor downside - If you manage to stun ships with an AoE effect (Nanoswarm is the only ship capable of doing this off the top of my head), it will no longer be briefly unstealthed. Very minor since this situation happening is unreliable at best.<br />
<br />
* Marauder Mark 3 Outposts once again spawn Raiders<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Avoided a bug that would temporarily break save games once the game version rolled around to 1.0<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "Singular Freaky Surprises" map generation item for real this time. Golems should be a common appearance for Golemite AI now, and rare (1 / 1001) for other AI types again.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI wasn't seeding its full compliment of Strikecraft on most planets<br />
** This is a giant buff to the AI's initial defenses<br />
<br />
== Version 0.861 Strength Of Remains==<br />
(Released May 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Added a new PlannedWaveOptions struct that is great for sending specific groups of options to the PlanWave() function without it having a million optional parameters.<br />
** This also lets us have specific static Create() methods set up that have just the parameters that we want to set, which reduces the chances of bugs via typos or misalignments.<br />
<br />
=== Gameplay Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* When "Ally to AI" mode is selected, the player gets vision of all planets at the beginning of the game<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* Ships that get unloaded from fleet centerpieces now inherit orders such as wormhole move commands and behaviors such as pursuit mode.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Turrets and ships that are remains, not claimed yet, crippled, or in the process of being built are now not shown as strength in either galaxy view or local view.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and Trillioneyes for noting that this made it hard for players to judge at a glance when the AI is outnumbering them.<br />
<br />
* Cross planet waves now display the source planet of the wave to match the other wave types.<br />
<br />
* Improved the feel of dropdowns by making it so that you can click the dropdown a second time to hide it, just as you can in most other applications in the world.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that caused things that produced multiple types of drones (certain AI guard posts, AI drone guardians) to produce only 1 drone at a time and at a reduced rate.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Anti-Player Zombies were also hostile to the AI. Note that this fix only affects newly created game, existing games will still suffer from this bug.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a probable fix to exceptions that could happen inside UpdatePositionAndSize() on the tooltips. This is almost always indicative of some worse problem, but it's worth having this not compounding the problem at least.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the most recent report of this.<br />
<br />
* If there are errors during map generation (sometimes this is "valid", in the case of things like too many factions for the available planets), it now pops up a harmless but hopefully-informative error message log and doesn't just start the game in an invalid state.<br />
** Long-term obviously we want it to not be in a position to generate an error like this, but realistically modders can do all sorts of things and we need errors to happen gracefully.<br />
** Have tested this and it works as expected. However, it requires that all errors during mapgen use a new method which is Engine_AIW2.Instance.LogErrorDuringCurrentMapGen() if it would previously have used ArcenDebugging.ArcenDebugLog( Verbosity.ShowAsError ) or equivalent. If there are any remaining cases of the latter, then those would not get caught by this new code.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting the issue.<br />
<br />
* Previously there was a bug where if you set the number of planets in the lobby, but then just hit Start Game without hitting Generate Map first, it would not actually use the correct number of planets.<br />
** This was... kinda old, kinda-new. If there isn't enough room to seed whatever factions you have selected, it's now super duper fast to change the number of planets and hit start game and see if it works, etc. Without slowing anything else down in the lobby responsiveness in general.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where if you had one faction selected and then changed the faction, the colors would not update properly for them in the lobby.<br />
** This was not a problem limited to just the colors, and it probably was display-only in terms of problems, and it doesn't solve the issue with the human player colors, but this is still nice to have fixed.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The various custom data for the individual map types (how many arms on the octopus, etc) now all do a much better job of actually retaining and showing their proper values, and never have a stale view on the interface itself.<br />
** This was another old and new problem, but is now fixed for both cases.<br />
** Thanks to hawk and BadgerBadger for the original reports.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug in the TextMeshPro dropdowns where if one was in a sub-panel and opened, then clicking another one to open the other one would not close the first one. It led to much visual confusion.<br />
** Why exactly this was happening is actually a bit of a mystery, but we just gave the dropdowns some memory of "dropdowns that think they are still open," and those all close themselves when a new dropdown is clicked. Problem solved.<br />
** Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, there was an extra custom field definition for the human player colors compared to the other faction colors, and this wasn't really needed now and probably just confused things.<br />
** So removed and consolidated that, although it didn't fix the sync issues with human player colors not being settable.<br />
<br />
* Integrated revised versions of the Steamworks .so files for linux, and the related files for OSX as well.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for chasing down what needed to change on Linux; please let us know if it still isn't showing you as logged in properly in the new builds in either of those two OSes, because that would likely mean that something didn't get copied properly in our build scripts.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.860 The Lobby Ate My Factions?? ==<br />
(Released May 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Raid Engines could trigger a null reference if set off by the Dark Spire<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the event that for some reason the game tries to queue a GameCommand with an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 (this seems to happen from time to time during the game and now once in the lobby), it will complain at the time of it trying to queue it, and give a stack trace from there, and not actually do the queuing of it.<br />
** This should help us figure out when and why these things are occasionally happening. It's probably related to a pooling error of some sort, but it's hard to be sure. If the commands are valid at this point and then later have ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 when being read back, then we know we have a different problem entirely and can approach that from another way. Either way we'll start having more info soon on this rare and elusive error.<br />
<br />
* Put in a second place where we now early-assign the ExecuteOnFrameNumber when GameCommands are created. This may then later get reassigned in OnServer_CheckForSendingServerBatchMessageToClients, which is fine, but this should hopefully prevent those rare issues where a command falls through the cracks and has an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 for some reason.<br />
<br />
* Math fixes from WeaponMaster:<br />
** Fixed claim repairing being way out of wack, causing 500,000 metal cost Arks to be built in less than a second by a single engineer.<br />
** Also fixed self construction metal flow healing, metal now heals for a ratio of hp:metal like claim and repair flows now.<br />
** Also made it so self construction metal flows (and the assist construction flows helping it) heal shield too.<br />
** Note: it's possible that things are now wildly too expensive to claim, now that you actually have to pay the metal for them to claim them. If that's the case, please let us (Puffin?) know, and we'll adjust their claim costs.<br />
<br />
=== More Lobby Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Improved the lobby error messaging when it can't find a custom field for a map type so that it now says what it was looking for. Helpful for anyone making custom map types.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the Simple map type where it was trying to look at a setting for the realistic map type (and then not even use it) and thus was throwing an error now that the settings are per-map-type rather than being stored in the global central settings file.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the "remove a faction" bit of code, it now throws a cleaner and more informative error if for some reason it's out of range. It doesn't fix the problem, but should help us fix the problem in the future if we don't find it in the meantime.<br />
** Thanks to Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The long-range planning cycles (background threads) are no longer run when you're in the lobby.<br />
** This probably makes next to no difference to anything, but might make a few things slightly faster or even avoid some potential issues in the future.<br />
<br />
* Some changes have been made to make the dropdown selection changes more synchronous (instant) rather than on a slight time delay. This allows for a few things to be controlled a bit better... in theory.<br />
<br />
* Wow, a whole heck of a lot of wrappering and rework has been done on dropdowns to make it more clear when and how data is being set.<br />
** We were actually still having the same problem with factions getting erased as soon as they were added in the prior build, along with some other known issues like dropdown stuff getting out of sync quickly that we did know about.<br />
** All of this is traceable back to how the dropdowns handle data updates to themselves, and it's another question of "how did this ever work?" This one was a Chris area, not a Keith one, just in case anyone gets the wrong idea that any of the early code problems were all from one source (far from it).<br />
** Issues fixed:<br />
*** still couldn't add more factions<br />
*** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
*** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
** Remaining known issues:<br />
*** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct.<br />
*** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby, although it's not causing errors per se.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.859 Lobby Raid ==<br />
(Released May 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
Note: We no longer plan to break savegames going forward from here. Looks like that won't be needed, and it would break a bunch of bug reports. So hooray!<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Mobile Support Flagships now show that they are building things in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the analysis of this problem<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Objectives (in the intel tab) for capturing battlestations and flagships now shows the supported units<br />
** This was annoying me<br />
<br />
* Both of the modal popup types (the OK window and the Yes/No windows) now support scrolling text, aka way more info than before. Before if the text got too long, it would just cut off.<br />
** This is useful for all sorts of things, such as if we want to have things like header items that you can click (AIP display, for instance) that would give you a readout of a bunch of new details about the state of all the AIs (salvage amounts, reprisal status, whatever else we feel like).<br />
<br />
* There is now a "tall" version of the modal "OK dialog" that is able to tell you info. This is particularly useful for info dumps versus just a quick notice regarding whatever it was going to tell you.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a variety of fonts that were too small, particularly for dropdowns, in the lobby in recent beta versions.<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Allow the Dyson Sphere to free itself if it was reconquered. Otherwise you have to babysit the Dyson Sphere once you free it<br />
** Note this may cause the AI and Dyson Sphere to fight more often, since the AI is apt to try to recapture it repeatedly. May need further tweaks<br />
<br />
* The AI will now wait until a wave is "strong enough" before sending it, rather than potentially sending very small or empty waves<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Allow the Nanocaust to kill Black Hole Machines, since they were otherwise an excessively effective counter to the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting this, including Mosrael<br />
<br />
=== New Features/Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Add a "Ally player to AI" option in the game lobby.<br />
** This prevents you from playing the game normally, and is intended for people who want to play the game in Sandbox mode, watching the AI fight various minor factions, or an AI Civil War (or both)<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines function and are in use again.<br />
<br />
* Like we have had description_appender_dll and description_appender_type for quite some time, we now also have per_second_custom_logic_dll and per_second_custom_logic_type.<br />
** The former calls void AddToDescriptionBuffer( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntityOrNull, GameEntityTypeData RelatedEntityTypeData, ArcenDoubleCharacterBuffer Buffer ) on a IGameEntityDescriptionAppender.<br />
** The new one calls void RunEntitySpecialPerSecondLogic( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntity, ArcenSimContext Context ) on a IGameEntityPerSecondSpecialLogic.<br />
** This allows us to have all sorts of crazy AI watcher units, including AI Eyes or whatever else, that run some completely custom logic once per second. It's easy for modders to define, etc, etc.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Don't allow drones to generate salvage<br />
** Suggested by Democracy<br />
<br />
* Player engineers are no longer able to repair friendly zombie ships.<br />
** A previous change to make zombies attrition every minute was effectively just a metal sink because they were still able to be repaired.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where hydra head ships (that spawn from hydras such as Stingray Hydra) weren't properly attritioning or being set to pursuit mode.<br />
** They will die faster thanks to the attrition working now, but hopefully be more useful as they'll chase enemies automatically.<br />
** For modders, this can be enabled for any ship by defining self_attritions_X_percent_per_second_if_parent_ship_not_on_planet="X" and adding the tag always_self_attritions="true" to your ship. Doing this for any ship except those spawned from another ship dying is kinda pointless though.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Factories and Support Fleets were spending less metal than intended when producing more than one type of ship at once.<br />
<br />
* Fix a logic problem with neutral planet hacking which prevented you from being able to Watch-Hack a neutral planet<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Factories will now only produce strikecraft and frigates for fleet centerpieces that are fully claimed.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a TextMesh Pro setting to "disable warnings," the builds of the game will no longer complain about missing glyphs in fonts that don't need them.<br />
<br />
* The debug output code for what a GameCommand contains now has its line breaks fixed up so that it's actually legible!<br />
** Also some options have been put in to make it output a bit more intelligently, ie only saying what it is doing and not all the empty things it isn't doing.<br />
<br />
=== Various Fixes and Changes to Zombie Fleets ===<br />
* There is now a defined minimum and maximum amount of zombie ships that get randomly sent out when zombies decide to raid another planet. This is currently set at 30 and 50 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The group of ships that get sent out when deciding to raid a planet is now randomized. Previously the ships that got selected to raid were always the first ones created on the planet, now the group that gets selected is chosen randomly.<br />
<br />
* Zombies that are in the process of going through a wormhole ("Raiding") are left out of patrol/raid logic so they don't get conflicting orders.<br />
<br />
* Planets that have less than 0.05 strength of hostile units on them (basically only a warp gate and command station) are considered not hostile and so zombies will run their patrol/raiding logic.<br />
<br />
* Zombies now correctly lose only 1% of their hp per minute. Previously, ships with high shields were losing much more hp per minute.<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Guts Revamp (Visually No Improvements Yet) ===<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the inner guts of how the lobby keeps track of changes that you're requesting, and how it then goes about updating and syncing the game and the UI, respectively.<br />
** It's a lot more responsive-feeling now, although we can get it even better than this. And it also provides a basis for us to be able to make this properly visually better soon.<br />
** This also fixes a number of problems that have existed where people in multiplayer making changes at the same time would have conflicts and lost data.<br />
** Essentially this is now doing differentials of changes rather than wholesale copies, and it keeps track of a separate "setup as per the lobby" that only the lobby can touch, and a "long term settings" that the game reads from later on.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a number of things with the map type sub-controls so that it is now fully modder-friendly, and multiplayer-safe.<br />
** You can now mod in you own map type sub controls without having to edit the central files (which of course would be overwritten next time there's a release).<br />
<br />
* Made the game way more robust when it comes to having a map set up that doesn't include any factions for whatever reason.<br />
** It's possible to make this happen in the lobby code if you mess up other things, and it's much easier to just have this be robust so that we can see the real errors.<br />
<br />
* A variety of the map types now have much easier-to-digest names for their options, and all map types now have proper spacing between the words in their names and their options.<br />
<br />
* A new settings option has been added to the Debug section: "Write Lobby Setup Changes To Log"<br />
** If something strange is going on with the lobby, in multiplayer or otherwise, this is a way for the log to have a variety of data sent about what changes are being requested, and when.<br />
<br />
* New options for writing the full contents of a GameCommand have been added, to get all the details of what's in each list being sent, etc. This is now used a variety of places that can benefit from that extra clarity (all error-reporting-related or otherwise debug stuff).<br />
<br />
* GameCommands have been expanded to allow for a third RelatedString, which is needed by some of the new lobby stuff.<br />
<br />
* Automatically-created controls (such as in dynamic interfaces like the lobby) now can have a string control code sent to them along with the two integer control codes.<br />
** This again is needed for the lobby, and makes some of the new modder-friendly map stuff possible.<br />
<br />
* Some data during mapgen was previously stored in the Factions object, and others in ConfigurationForFaction in the WorldSetup object, and still others off in settings, etc.<br />
** The game now properly stores all that data inside the WorldSetup object, so that it can be copied around and separate versions can be read at various times (for display versus for mapgen asynchronously, etc), and so that it plays nice with multiplayer.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen logging now includes a new entry for ControlledByPlayerAccounts_DuringGame, which is now split between Factions (for ingame) and the WorldSetup (for the lobby), as noted in the above note.<br />
<br />
* A ton of debugging data about the state of the WorldSetup objects, and the basic faction data as well, can now be exported via either ToString() or WriteDetailsToStringBuilder().<br />
** This lets us actually look inside and see what is happening, which is kinda relevant!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the initial fleet not being serialized properly in the WorldSetup.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section of the settings menu: "Show Debug Details Button In Lobby"<br />
** When enabled, a 'Debug Details' button appears in the lobby, which you can click to have it pop up all the relevant information about the current setup from a very low-level debugging style.<br />
<br />
* Some changes Chris has wanted to make for a VERY long time are now in under the hood in the lobby. Basically the game now only does a "partial" generation of the map whenever things change in the lobby, which means that the map generation is now vastly faster than before.<br />
** But as part of this, it has to go back and do the full generation of the map based on the final data when you actually click Start Game, and it now does that, too. This also has the benefit of being safer in terms of making sure things are ultra consistent with whatever the UI says when the game actually starts.<br />
<br />
* When you are changing things in the lobby that don't change the map topology _as it is visible in the lobby_, such as factions and conducts and faction options, it no longer causes the map to regenerate itself.<br />
** This feels more responsive by far, and in multiplayer (or if we get any super slow-to-generate maps in the future) it will have an amplified effect.<br />
** But also... this mysteriously fixes the problem we were having in the last few builds where you couldn't add factions.<br />
<br />
* The game now includes an implementation of DiffLib (https://github.com/lassevk/DiffLib), which it uses to calculate the differences between Setup states in the lobby export at the moment. Though certainly one imagines there could be other uses for this in some sort of other in-engine analysis data in the future, whether by us in some bowels of the UI for looking at enemy data, or something modders cook up.<br />
<br />
* Several lobby fixes, including to where we were setting the local player's color so that it wasn't getting out of sync. For multiplayer lobbies this will later need to be expanded further, but that's a task for later and not a huge deal right now.<br />
<br />
* '''Known lobby issues:'''<br />
** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct?<br />
** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby<br />
<br />
== Version 0.858 Hotfix: The Lobby... Ate My Galaxy? ==<br />
(Released May 9th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed the Vanguard Hydra Head benefiting from Heavy Tech instead of Light like their parent unit.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug in the prior version that threw invisible harmless errors while loading the game because it was trying to find the settings for the galaxy map before the settings had been properly loaded.<br />
<br />
* Guardians will now have a chance at spawning with waves. If maxGuardianTypes is larger than 0, a random value between 0 and maxGuardianTypes is chosen as the minGuardianTypes. Random bags of anyGuardians are chosen until the minimum is reached.<br />
** Right now guardians only get added if the strikecraft fail to completely fill numDifferentShipsToSpawn. This can be changed easily by removing the comparison ( chosenUnitTypes < numDifferentShipsToSpawn ) in both the if statement and the while loop.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug introduced in the prior build where if you changed anything in the lobby or even clicked to the factions tab of the lobby, then you'd get control of a ton of planets and be under fire on all of them and probably lose the game instantly as well. Very amusing in small doses, but that's quite enough, thanks, game. ;)<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, WeaponMaster, Gerard, Mosrael, and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.857 The AI Strikes Back... Hard ==<br />
(Released May 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* The name of the currently playing music track is now shown in the Escape menu, for people like me who can never remember the titles<br />
** Prompted by music nostalgia from Puffin and Democracy in discord<br />
<br />
* There are now Achievements for winning in Civil War mode<br />
** Untested, like most of the other Achievements<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now be less afraid of distant enemies<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now consider enemy forces when choosing how to route to a target, so they don't accidentally suicide into a heavily defended planet on the way to somewhere else<br />
<br />
* The AI now has an "overconfidence ratio", where on lower difficulties Threat will overestimate its strength when choosing whether it's strong enough to attack. This makes it more aggressive, but also more likely to lose when it attacks<br />
** Finding ways to differentiate the AI difficulties is good<br />
<br />
==== AI Civil Wars ====<br />
<br />
* An AI will only give resource to to its own Hunter and Warden Fleet(s)<br />
<br />
* The AI Civil War now includes Warden and Hunter fleets. Each AI's warden/hunter is now hostile to other AIs and other Hunter/Warden Fleets.<br />
<br />
==== AI Homeworld Battle Changes ====<br />
<br />
* If an AI homeworld is attacked:<br />
** AI Threat ships on the homeworld will fight to the death<br />
** Ships Guarding planets near to the homeworld will become Threat. The higher the difficulty the more planets will be turned to Threat.<br />
** Threat ships will converge on the homeworld. Threat already waiting against a strong target will just join the Hunter fleet<br />
** That AI's Hunter and Warden Fleets will immediately converge on the homeworld<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a number of people for noticing the AI homeworld battles could be dull, including Nameless Terror from Steam. Thanks to StarKelp for a helpful save game to let me test this.<br />
<br />
==== Changes to AI Reinforcement ====<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft were being counted as turrets when loaded in a guard post, limiting the amount of turrets the AI could rebuild<br />
* Fixed a bug where the strikecraft currently on an AI planet were calculated incorrectly, allowing the AI to infinitely reinforce strikecraft if it never built guardians<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft inside the AI Command Center were not being counted as guard strength for reinforcement<br />
** These bug fixes improve more defensive AI types like Turtle, as these two issues combined usually meant that the AI could never reinforce strikecraft or turrets<br />
<br />
* The AI can now reinforce an extra 25% strikecraft and Turrets per living guardpost on alerted planets<br />
** AI planets are alerted when there is a human command center adjacent to them<br />
** Destroying guardposts on planets next to human planets is now much more important, as they can reinforce to be much stronger than they started out as if left untouched<br />
<br />
* These are large changes that are mostly untested, let us know if this ends up making the game too hard or frustrating<br />
<br />
=== New Settings Options For Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Galaxy Camera setting: Extra Background Hexagon Intensity<br />
** If you would like the background to be more stylized hexagons, then you can turn this up.<br />
** Nobody was really asking for this, but Chris had mixed feelings about his defaults and so figured why not.<br />
<br />
* The previous amount of bloom on the galaxy map was a bit on the high side, with an intensity of 2.06. That has been reduced to a new default of 1.4.<br />
** However, a new setting allows you to configure it between 0.4 and 4, which are two fairly extreme ends of it.<br />
** New galaxy camera setting: Bloom Intensity<br />
*** How glowy would you like the galaxy map to appear? More looks more computer-screeny, but can be distracting depending on your contrast settings on your monitor.<br />
** Thanks to Badger and danny for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== New Debug Commands ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to decrease AIP<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to kill all AI units and structures on the currently viewed planet<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== When a flagship of yours gets crippled... ====<br />
<br />
* Having a Flagship crippled by the AI now gives the AI a nice burst of Salvage, enabling them to power up reprisal waves. This is intended as a penalty for losing Flagships.<br />
** Different flagship types generate different amount of salvage. Officer flagships generate more than Support or Transport, for example. The Regenerator Golem will generate much less salvage than other flagships<br />
** The AI will generate less salvage if it cripples a flagship on a neutral planet (but still some)<br />
*** All the tunables are in XML for this<br />
<br />
==== When you don't have enough energy... ====<br />
<br />
* Claimables that would cost you more energy than you have available now can't be claimed, and it shows that in their tooltip.<br />
** Previously it could just claim stuff and throw you into negative energy.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Similarly, if you don't have enough spare energy to create something out of a factory (strikecraft, frigates, whatever) then it will only build up to 100% and then will stop and not actually emerge.<br />
** Same with drone production; it won't produce the next drone, but just will stick at 100%.<br />
** In both cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Any units that are currently trying to self-construct, and you don't have enough energy for them (or negative energy in general) will completely stop constructing (unless they either don't consume energy or produce it).<br />
** In the relevant cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== AI Overlord Phase 2 ====<br />
<br />
* Now uses a Plasma Overdriver in place of the old Plasma Torpedo, affecting everything in a large radius.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Bolt damage 4,000 -> 6,000, shot count 40 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Fusion Bomb damage 30,000 -> 50,000, added 2x bonus multiplier vs targets of mass >= 5.<br />
<br />
==== Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Guardians on AI planets.<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian Fusion Bomb Bypass 0.6 -> 0.9.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian damage 350 -> 450.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian damage 1,000 -> 300, shot count 1 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Temperamental Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Fragmenting Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% for Tantruming Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tantruming Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Fragmenting Guardian Shard health increased 50%, damage 800 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian damage 1,200 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 220 -> 330.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Guardians now have a bonus multiplier vs albedo >= 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Guardian damage 3,500 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Increased health of Pike, Nucleophilic and Grenade Launcher Dire Guardians to match the others.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guardians, excluding Forcefield - still increased.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guardian shot count 5 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian explosion size 300 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Dire Pike Guardian damage 6,000 -> 4,000, shot count 3 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian shot count 3 -> 6.<br />
<br />
* Dire Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 1,300 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* AI Hunter / Killer shields 1,000,000 -> 2,000,000, Fusion Bomb shot count 25 -> 35.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for an AI Hunter / Killer to be chosen in place of a Dire Guardian.<br />
** This thing spawns as Mark 5 if it does, so be really careful.<br />
<br />
==== Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Guard Posts excluding Forcefield.<br />
<br />
* Increased health by 25% of Forcefield Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10, reload time 4s -> 3s, range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Sabot Guard Posts increase their bonus multiplier with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Guard Post damage 480 -> 240, shot count 8 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 1600 -> 2,200.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for non-Swarmer AI planets to have a Swarmer Guard Post.<br />
<br />
* Increased frequency a bit of Forcefield Guard Posts (as well as Forcefield Generators).<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Dire Sabot Guard Post damage 3,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guard Post shot count 6 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Parasite Guard Post damage 6,000 -> 3,000, shot count 12 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Spider Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 2,000, shot count 12 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 8,000 -> 10,000, shot count 3 -> 6, range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Gravity Guard Post damage 12,500 -> 2,000, reload time 1s -> 2s, shot count 1 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
==== Drones ====<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, damage 4,000 -> 8,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
==== Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Golems (Player and AI).<br />
<br />
* Increased health of all Arks.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% of all Spire Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Combat Factories.<br />
<br />
* Increased shields by 25% of all Citadels.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette shields 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Molotov explosion size 500 -> 650.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot base damage multiplier 3x -> 6x.<br />
<br />
==== Science, Tech and Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced Upgrade Costs of Battlestations and Citadels a bit.<br />
<br />
* Starting Science 20,000 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Science gained from Spire Archive Extraction 5,000 -> 8,000.<br />
<br />
* Increased secondary response strength of some AI hacks.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cap multipliers on Transport Flagships a bit.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a tooltip typo that incorrectly identified the StrikeCraft version of the Intragalactic Coordinator as increasing the turret cap.<br />
<br />
* Only explore new planets when a Player kills an command station. Otherwise the Nanocaust and Civil War were giving tons of free vision<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations can now build multiple energy collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting, and puffin and ptarth for debugging assistance<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug causing fleet centerpieces to not cost any metal to claim.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the metal cost to claim capturables, this was causing most capturable things to cost less metal than intended. <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hunter Fleet was refusing to enter defended planets<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the internal drone construction logic that was previously present in the 0.850+ branch, but which was really only rearing its head on the new internal versions. Curious.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the seeding of SingularFreakySurprises where the chance for a golem to appear was being rolled once per galaxy instead of once per planet.<br />
** No more galaxies full of golems.<br />
<br />
==== Trying and Failing To Fix The Lobby ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the lobby regenerates the galaxy map is now slightly less direct. Rather than just directly updating things every time any dropdown value changed or similar, it now queues up those changes cumulatively and then applies them all 100ms after the last change.<br />
** This is because we can have situations where one dropdown changes, causing others to change, and that was causing repeat and often incomplete commands to be sent.<br />
** This was what we thought the disappearing-factions bug from the last few builds was, and we assumed it had to do with the dropdowns handling onValueChanged differently. That may be the case, but we can't really see how that's the case from a code review.<br />
** So this does seem to help with not missing things like some of the smaller secondary data for factions for instance, but it wasn't the complete solution we had hoped it would be.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, put in some defensive code to prevent certain errors when the game is trying to show a row for a faction that is out of bounds.<br />
** We get a lot more info about what went wrong when this is happening, at least. These errors are also no longer silent, but instead pop up a good error message with a useful stack trace.<br />
<br />
* Split the internal CodeDirectiveTag int on the ArcenUI_CreateElementDirective struct into CodeDirectiveTag1 int and CodeDirectiveTag2 int.<br />
** The purpose of this is so that we no longer have to do any crazy bitshifting to get the data out of a single integer for the faction index and field index in the lobby. This approach was mathematically clever, but had legibility issues at bare minimum.<br />
** Various parts of the lobby were incorrectly reading the data back as just faction index with no bitshifting going on, and maybe that was correct for those fields (??), but we're not really sure and that lack of sureness is not worth a tiny bit smaller struct.<br />
** This may or may not fix some bugs, but at least things are clearer.<br />
<br />
* Did NOT manage to fix the lobby with all these various changes.<br />
** But have managed to make ourselves wonder how it ever functioned at all.<br />
** Simply opening the MORE options next to a faction will change what is available in there, fun fact. That broke as heck, and probably isn't completely new.<br />
** Going through all this is, on the plus side, giving us a vastly better idea of how we want to rearchitect the lobby from a technical standpoint while keeping as much of what is there as possible. It looks like the "new lobby" is going to be a feature for 0.900-era AI War 2, simply because of all this.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.856 Clever Girl ==<br />
(Released May 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Ships that are in the process of loading into the fleet centerpiece no longer collide with other ships when near the centerpiece; faster loading with less micromanaging required.<br />
<br />
* Beam weapons now optionally support maximum_number_of_targets_hit_per_shot in the XML.<br />
** If the max is defined, ships hit past the maximum split the damage of the maximum equally between all ships.<br />
*** As an example, if you had a 10,000 damage beam with a max of 2 targets and it hit 4 targets, each target would take 5,000 damage only ( 2 max / 4 hit ).<br />
<br />
* Tweak the text for some hacks to fit the text in boxes.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators now cost AIP when the AI kills them<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror on steam for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The AI is now allowed to send waves against Unowned but defended planets in Civil War mode. The AI also gets buffs to its "anti-other-AI-planet" waves in civil war mode.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy now have an Objective to destroy them<br />
<br />
* Changed the way science hacking scales to be more intuitive<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it.<br />
<br />
* When transferring units between factions, clear any previous orders and set the units to be in Attacker mode. This was causing issues when transferring units to the Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having crippled flagships on a planet could sometimes cause hacks to fail<br />
** Someone complained about this but I don't remember who it was.<br />
<br />
==== Improved AI Attack Coordination ====<br />
* When the AI chooses targets for the Threat Fleet, it has a mild preference for attacking planets with critical player structures like Zenith Power/Metal Generators and Intra-Galactic Coordinators<br />
** The tunables for how strong that preference is (as opposed to going for more poorly defended targets) is an XML tunable per AI type<br />
<br />
* The AI now takes into account incoming wave strength when considering whether it is strong enough to attack a target when a wave is < 20 seconds out<br />
** This should allow Threat/Hunter ships to coordinate attacks with incoming waves when appropriate<br />
<br />
* When calculating whether a planet is a good target, the Hunter/Warden fleets now also include allied ships on their way to the target, as well as those currently at the target. <br />
** More coordination improvement code<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboats should now actually decloak.<br />
** Thanks to Mac for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Gravity effects cannot reduce a units speed below 20%, up from 5%.<br />
** This is to stop being able to stack Gravity and effectively replicate Tractor Beams.<br />
<br />
* Target priority lowered for Tachyon Sentinels and Arrays.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY for reporting the bullet magnets these were.<br />
<br />
* Decreased the time for AI Threat to join the Hunter Fleet, from 15 minutes at all difficulties, to starting at 10 on Diff 1, lowering by 1 for each Diff higher, maxing out at 3 minutes on Diff 8, 9 and 10.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.855 Galactic Markings ==<br />
(Released April 30th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for waves. The hovertext now shows the Target planet name in the colour of the planet's owner, and the planet with the warp gate in the colour of the faction sending the wave.<br />
** Thanks to Ptarth for making sure I did this right<br />
<br />
=== Hacking Improvements And Science from Neutral Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new hacking mechanism to allow extracting Science from neutral planets. It currently costs 5 AIP as well as a few hacking points. Performing this hack will cause the AI to launch a wave at you.<br />
** The AIP is part of the "AIP for taking a planet". So if you killed the command station there's actually no AIP cost (since you paid it when killing the command station). If another faction destroyed the command station then it will cost 5 AIP, but if you eventually capture the planet it will only cost 15 AIP when you capture instead of 20.<br />
** Note that this allows for you to collect Science much more quickly than normal by killing the command station and then doing this hack before capturing the planet, at the cost of some hacking points and the AI getting a bonus attack at you.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, DD the GerbilStrangler, Nameless Terror, themouthofsauron, x4000, Puffin and Apthorpe for useful discussion<br />
<br />
* If a Flagship becomes crippled mid-hack, the hack fails. Also Crippled Flagships are no longer allowed to start hacks.<br />
<br />
=== Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map's bloom settings have been updated a huge amount, giving the entire scene a bit of a computer-screen glowy vibe.<br />
** The blue hexes in the background have been adjusted and the scanline effect is now less noticeable, as part of this, though. It was just a bit too much visual distraction.<br />
<br />
* All of the roman numerals for mark levels have been switched to a more thematic sci-fi type font.<br />
<br />
* All of the graphics for planets on the galaxy map are now more consistent in size, and generally smaller, as is the selection radius around the one you're viewing right now.<br />
<br />
* The positioning of all the font stuff on the galaxy map has been changed around a lot, to be tighter around the planets but no longer ever overlapping with the overlarge planet icons (that no longer are overlarge).<br />
** In general this keeps things more compact and hopefully also more legible.<br />
<br />
* The little icons for "important ships at planets" are also now a bit smaller and more compactly-placed under the planet on the galaxy map.<br />
** They should still be plenty legible, but no longer oversized compared to some of the planet stuff they are essentially orbiting.<br />
<br />
* As you zoom out on the galaxy map, the planets (and their text and icons) no longer stay quite as large as they previously did, instead shrinking down more.<br />
** On most screens this should remain legible, while at the same time keeping them from overlapping.<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.001" to galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.0007" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalVisualConstants\CMP_VisualConstants.xml file.<br />
<br />
* The amount of time the icons and text now stay next to planets on the galaxy map have also been changed dramatically, so that they remain around until almost the last possible amount of zoom (and it's kinda useful having a super far zoom that gets rid of that clutter, at least at first thought).<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="1500" to galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="2000" and galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1300" to galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1700" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalConstants\KDL_VanillaConstants.xml file.<br />
** Particularly with how it's easier to see at a glance what the mark levels of planets are, and if you have current intel on them, this final-decluttered stage seems particularly useful. If you disagree, there are actually sliders in the options for changing it so that it declutters sooner or later.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Add a mechanic to allow anti-AI zombies to self-attrition over time. Currently set to 1% self-attrition per minute. This isn't very fast, and your engineers will repair them, but it's something?<br />
** Done after seeing some games where HeartHunter seems to have zombified the entire Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Reduced the power of Mark 5, and greatly reduced the power of Mark 6 and 7.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels should have more Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Beam Cannons and Plasma Turrets in "Monochrome Turret" designs.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Frigates in "Frigates With Support" designs.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Mass Driver damage.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem shots per salvo 80 -> 50.<br />
<br />
* Player Botnet Golem damage 750 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Changed the scaling of most Tech Upgrade costs to somewhat match what they used to be before Fleets.<br />
** Some are cheaper, some are more expensive, and some just have the Marks evened out.<br />
** This is something that will probably always be a bit off somewhere, but hopefully this is an improvement.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Turret range 10,100 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon and Heavy Beam Guardian range 15,000 -> 12,000, reload time 4s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Allow far more Anti-AI zombies to leave their current planet whenever that event occurs.<br />
<br />
* Mugger does a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Array range 2800 -> 4200.<br />
<br />
* Doubled count of Tractor Arrays in almost every player-available source.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator shields 250,000 -> 350,000.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Generator shields 150,000 -> 500,000.<br />
** Extreme, but these are apparently tiny roadbumps currently. They're rare, so this shouldn't be obnoxious.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator size increased.<br />
<br />
* Shield Guard Post shields 90,000 -> 150,000.<br />
<br />
* Focused Gravity Generators and Gravity Guardians now only slow things below engine_gx 14, rather than 15.<br />
** There were a few units that should've been resistant to this but weren't due to a minor error.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestations will now always have Minefields as well as Engineers, instead of just Engineers.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix some issues with the science hovertext, where it was still listing planets even after you'd taken all their science.<br />
<br />
* Handle the case where a player might have Overspent building a unit. This can happen if a player was building a unit after spending X metal, saves the game, then changes the metal cost of the unit to < X via XML and reloads the game.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Updated the Steamworks integration library that we use (and the Steamworks dll/so/dylib files from Valve) to their latest versions.<br />
** More details are here: https://github.com/Facepunch/Facepunch.Steamworks<br />
** On windows, we can confirm that now it actually shows you as being logged in properly, and also lets you see the proper main menu visuals rather than a blank space background.<br />
** To check on your OS that this is working, please look in the bottom right hand corner of your screen on the main menu and it should say "Logged in as [your username]." If it says "Not logged into Steam" or similar, then achievements won't be working properly for you later on. And in general it's something we'd want to know about.<br />
** Mostly this is a compatibility thing with the newest version of Unity, so far as we can tell, but we also have some new capabilities that we might flex at some point in the future.<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators for turrets and strikecraft should now work properly.<br />
** On any ship, there is now an is_strikecraft="true" flag, and an is_turret="true" flag that you can apply in order to have them be considered strikecraft or turrets for these (and later potentially other) purposes.<br />
** We didn't use the special_type field because it's possible that these things might be strikecraft or turrets and something else at the same time, and the case of being a strikecraft or being a turret isn't "special" enough to warrant the special_type field usage.<br />
** Note that it's also possible that some of these will be both is_strikecraft="true" and also have a special_type="Drone". In those cases, it won't give the ship cap bonus regardless of the is_strikecraft="true" being there. So drones don't have to un-set that, in other words.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Invert Mouse Zoom" setting in the All Cameras section.<br />
** Normally when you spin the mouse wheel forward, you zoom closer; backwards zooms you away. This lets you flip that functionality. OR, in the case that your hardware or OS is inverted for whatever reason, this lets you correct it to work like everyone else.<br />
** There is a bug in Unity 2019.1 on linux machines that causes mouse scrolling to be inverted, so this lets us work around that: https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/linux-input-dot-mousescrolldelta-returns-reversed-values-in-linux-player<br />
** Note that this won't help with inverted scrolling with dropdowns and other scrolling areas, unfortunately.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.854 Garbage... Collected! ==<br />
(Released April 26th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Known issue: in the bottom right corner of the main menu, it says you're not logged into Steam even though you are, and also if you are logged into Steam the backdrop for the main menu might be just stars instead of the usual colorful thing with ships flying by. We'll be upgrading our Steam integration dlls next build, which should fix that. Hopefully it causes no other issues.<br />
<br />
* Known issue: the intra-galactic coordinators for turrets and strikecraft do nothing right now. We wanted to get this build out asap, since it's beta anyway.<br />
<br />
=== Quality of Life and Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Player mobile defensive ships in planetary fleets now start in FRD mode<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Hovertext for incoming wave notifications now colours the target planet name for ease of reading<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Science in the resource bar now shows the planets science is being extracted from and the amount of science remaining for each.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Ship AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to targeting logic from WeaponMaster, where the code was accidentally prioritizing the worst possible targets.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Add some new Zombifying targeting code, where ships with zombifying guns will prefer to attack things they can zombify<br />
** Thanks to Jonesmz for the suggestion and WeaponMaster for the code<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* If the top unit of a cloaking Stacked Squad dies, the next ship to spawn inherits its cloak state. So if you've decloaked it, killing the top unit doesn't allow the next unit to recloak.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix some typos in the Experimental: Civil War conduct text<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix typo on Encapsulated map type description<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Intra-Galactic Coordinators were increasing the unit cap for Energy Collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some debugging code to catch a null reference exception in the Warden Fleet Long Range Planning code<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for making us aware of a problem in this area<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Flagships that are crippled can no longer pick up units for transport. Flagships that were transporting units and become crippled now unload all their units immediately. This fixes a few ways players could abuse the Crippled mechanic.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Split Intra-Galactic Coordinators abilities. Instead of buffing all ship caps, there are now three, one for each of Turrets, Frigates and Strike Craft. Note that each Coordinator now gives a bigger buff.<br />
** Note that this doesn't work for strikecraft and turrets yet in the current build, we just didn't have time.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleet Centerpieces should now all Rebuild Remains.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting confusion in this area.<br />
<br />
* "Light" and "Heavy" Tech Upgrades cost more at higher levels.<br />
<br />
* "Disruptive" Tech Upgrade costs slightly more at all levels.<br />
<br />
* Battlestation, Citadel and Ark Tech Upgrade costs reduced.<br />
<br />
* "Spire Core" Tech Upgrade cost reduced a bit.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate reload time 9s -> 12s, damage 25,000 -> 20,000.<br />
<br />
* Tamed Macrophage metal cost increased to 2 million, energy consumption increased to 25,000.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Scrubbed Abomination metal cost increased to 350k.<br />
<br />
* Muggers and Brawlers now cost their proper amount of metal - 300k - instead of 3 million...<br />
** Muggers sure lived up to their name.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting this! <br />
<br />
=== AI Threat Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Thanks to ptarth for a great save game that led to all these changes<br />
<br />
* The AI now has a per-AI Type tunable, RatioOfFearOfRemoteEnemies, which informs how seriously the AI takes into account your forces on planets near the planet it is attacking. This reduces the AI's tendency to be terrified of nearby large player/nanocaust forces.<br />
<br />
* The AI is now capable of having Threat that it uses only against minor factions. There was a longstanding bug preventing this from working correctly. This threat is "Dumber" then general purpose (aka "anti-player") threat.<br />
** Treat threat specifically against a player as "general purpose"<br />
<br />
* Improve the way the AI handles Threat adjacent to the player home planet.<br />
** If the Threat is Waiting against your home planet (since you have fortified it too heavily to attack) and there are much easier targets, it will prefer to take your other planets out first rather than just building up a giant fleetball.<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to units keeping track of the fact that they are Threat. Failing to do this was confusing the AI's Strength Counting, leading to the AI believing it was weaker than it should have been<br />
** When Threat gets an order to attack another planet, make sure to stay in Threat behaviour.<br />
** Fix a bug where Retreating AI ships would sometimes lose track of the fact that they should have Threat behaviour.<br />
** Copy Orders when splitting a stack (via the Split GameCommand or when the top unit in the stack dies) to preserve Threat behaviour.<br />
<br />
* Also improve debug hover tooltip for squad orders/Threat behaviour and improve some code commenting/readability<br />
<br />
=== Unity Engine Upgrade (To 2019.1 - Now With Incremental Garbage Collection!) ===<br />
<br />
* Upgraded the game to Unity 2019.1.0f2! The prior version was on 2018.2.0 or something along those lines, so this is a big jump.<br />
** The really big improvement is time-sliced garbage collection: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-incremental-garbage-collection/<br />
*** Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhfzzLyG7_w<br />
** This also has numerous bugfixes, and lets us upgrade from a VERY old version of TextMeshPro to the newest version, which in turn fixes a variety of bugs relating to text, blurry text, textboxes, etc.<br />
*** That said, as part of this, we knew this was going to happen, but it breaks ALL the references to any sort of text-based thing inside of any of our unity projects.<br />
*** But we kind of needed to go ahead and have this done before we started in on a bunch more UI updates or else it was just going to be creating even more work for ourselves in the future.<br />
** There are also a variety of stability improvements to the unity engine in general, and a few performance improvements. I think that Linux machines will see the biggest boost.<br />
*** There are some new capabilities that we can in theory use in the future, too, and nested prefabs are an amazing thing for sure. But we're not really needing those bits in this specific project right at the moment.<br />
** Oh and this does upgrade us to the latest version of the post processing stack v2, as well, which means probably better performance and some edge bugfixes for some folks in that area, too.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so we've been using the mcs.exe compiler for the last two years, and it turns out that doesn't support the newer versions of C#. It would have been nice if that had been more clear.<br />
** Instead, when we were updating our TextMeshPro component or a few other things -- or trying to, anyway -- we would instead get mysterious "System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: "Void System.Array.Reverse(!!0[])" compilation errors. Good luck googling that, almost nobody has that.<br />
** The solution is to STOP USING MCS.EXE, and instead use csc.exe. That's the new Roslyn compiler that Micrsoft created and unity is using for the newer C# 6.0+ features.<br />
*** The !fun! part about that is that all the syntax is different, and also it requires references to... a whole bunch of dlls that are the "reference dlls" instead of the "runtime ones."<br />
*** If you ever find yourself referencing a dll called System.Private.CoreLib.dll, or anything like that, STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING and try a different dll.<br />
**** Even though the compiler just told you that what you need is in that dll, it's actually lying.<br />
**** Actually what you need is in... good luck figuring that out!... but probably it's in the REFERENCE version of System.Core.dll or similar. It has nothing to do with "netcoreapp" or "netstandard," unlike the few non-unity-related references to this on the internet would have you believe. That's unrelated to unity, and is just a fun thing on some web servers and various other software.<br />
**** What the heck is a "reference dll" in terms of what the compiler needs? Well, it's a fuller version than is used at runtime, I suppose. I haven't explicitly seen that said anywhere, but that seems to be the general feeling I'm getting. Why they needed this split I'm not sure, but I'm guessing different compiler flags or perhaps the ability to have different per-platform versions. Something like that.<br />
**** Where do you find those reference dlls?? Ha! Good luck with that. Some of them seem to be in the Roslyn compiler folder... except not really, some of them have way too small of sizes. Others are almost certainly in your [UnityInstallLocation]\Editor\Data\Managed\UnityEngine folder, but there again it's not perfect.<br />
***** Generally you're going to find yourself searching around inside the unity install folder, and you might even find yourself (if you're on windows) searching around inside C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.6.1\ or whatever your equivalent is. Nicely packaged for you? NO.<br />
** So that explains one of the big mysteries that Keith and I have been scratching our heads on for a couple of years now.<br />
*** But even with that "solved," I couldn't get all of the aspects of LINQ working, and some of our third-party networking code uses LINQ, so I moved that into an external dll that will get loaded at runtime. That's more efficient anyway, but annoyingly indirect.<br />
*** All of the network code has been open-sourced by the original authors anyhow, so that actually will work out extra well for us when we get to that point. But in the short term it's another pain in the rear we didn't need.<br />
<br />
* One bonus of all this upgrading of unity-stuff is that the editor is no longer complaining about our external dlls being something that will crash the editor and so something they refuse to load. That's... always a plus. And is related to the whole compiler saga.<br />
<br />
* Okay, nested prefabs from the latest versions of unity are actually indeed insanely useful and we're starting to use those more than we otherwise might have.<br />
<br />
==== Complete Overhaul Of All Fonts ====<br />
<br />
* ALL of the fonts in the game have been reworked (in terms of how they are imported into TextMeshPro and thus how they look in general).<br />
** And a bunch of new fonts have been added to the game as options for us to use in various contexts.<br />
** And we've completely redone what fonts we are using in almost all contexts as it is.<br />
** There was a lot of complaining about the fonts not feeling properly militaristic, or otherwise being non-thematic, and hopefully this helps.<br />
<br />
* The background story is again its own window and scrolls rather than is paginated, but this time is a lot more condensed, uses an improved version of the more-recent rewritten version, and uses strategic coloration to make it easier to read quickly.<br />
<br />
* The little notification icon/panels at the top of the screen now show up with a new font (as with most other parts of the game), but this is a particularly good font for condensed/confined places. It should let you read more things without them trailing off too ellipses, while it also not looking tacky in terms of how it's crammed in.<br />
** Also, the TextMeshPro upgrade itself seems to do a better job of choosing when to go to ellipsis instead of just drawing the raw text of whatever it is. So some of the planet names that were drawing ellipses very much too soon now won't.<br />
<br />
* As an aside, it's quite possible that the following issues are present somewhere in the game now, and we'd love to know about it:<br />
** Some sort of text not wrapping properly or being outright invisible, or cut off.<br />
** Some sort of text section making it impossible to click something near it, or picking up clicks from way further away than it should have.<br />
** Some sort of text section having the wrong font, or being misaligned in a subtle or not-subtle way.<br />
** We tried to correct all these that we could find, but bear in mind that this was a couple of dozen interfaces that we had to edit BY HAND for this version, so we probably missed something.<br />
** Honestly this was another reason we did this now, during the beta period, versus during a non-beta time. Thanks for being our guinea pigs to all the testers helping on this!<br />
<br />
* Given that we're changing so many of the fonts, and may choose to do so even more as feedback rolls in, we've now codified the in-code font-sizing a bit in a new FontSizes class.<br />
** Essentially size 12pt in font A might be waaaay larger or smaller than 12pt in font B. So we needed a way to normalize the offsets from the defaults of whatever we decide makes sense with a given font.<br />
<br />
==== Various Changes to our Post Processing Stack ====<br />
<br />
* Oh, I'm sorry, did we say we were going to be using the new unity Post Processing Stack V2? Blah, that really doesn't play nice with what we wanted to do.<br />
** Instead we're now using Beautify again, stripped down into performance mode but using it for vingnetting and tonemapping. We continue to use amplify bloom for the bloom effects, because messing with that again would be... insanely time consuming.<br />
** Overall this does mean there's a subtle shift to the look of the game yet again -- and, wait, no we're not using that now, either. Sigh. We'll figure out the tonemapping at some point, but frankly our general lighting is doing the heavy lifting on its own.<br />
<br />
==== Splitting Some Network Code Off Into Its Own Area ====<br />
<br />
* A bunch of the networking code has been offloaded into its own dll now, which we're able to more easily update as needed.<br />
** This actually makes our iteration time on that sort of code faster in the future.<br />
** In the process of getting this working, we managed to waste about two hours trying to figure out why the entire game was broken (and it was a one-liner typo). Fun!<br />
<br />
== Version 0.853 An Officer And A Bunch Of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 22nd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Only the offensive (strike and officer) type of fleets are now auto-assigned numbered hotkeys.<br />
** If people want to manually assign hotkeys differently in the future, they can (when that interface is in place), but this really is the most likely use case most of the time.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Command stations can once again die to remains.<br />
** This means that if you have a battlestation or a citadel on the planet, then they can rebuild the command station for you automatically just like remains rebuilders would have done once upon a time. Yay automation!<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes, Badger, and Nameless Terror for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Ability To Scout With Nanites Properly Works (And Related Visual Effects) ===<br />
<br />
* Unlike all the other versions since 0.850, you can now click over to planets that you have never explored.<br />
** This lets you actually use the Explore With Nanites hack, which is kiiiinda important, honestly. Or at least it's important to a lot of people, depending on playstyle.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and others for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The visual effect for viewing a planet where you have stale intel (but have seen it before) was before a bit confusing and a bit much.<br />
** Much as Chris liked the matrix-y effect, that has been ditched and things are a lot more Factorio-like in terms of just being darkened and grainy.<br />
** The effect is subtle enough not to be irritating, but to be definitely noticeable. Given the sidebar notes Stale Intel, and things don't look super duper crazy in terms of the visual distortions, hopefully we don't need any bigger onscreen messages to explain what is happening to players.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, Nameless Terror, and RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* There is a NEW visual effect for viewing a planet where you have never even explored before.<br />
** Through the distortion here you can barely even read the wormhole names, and all you can see are the planet graphics and wormhole graphics (not even metal spots, etc).<br />
** This one is heavily stylized, but is so TV-like and the sidebar is utterly empty and saying "you have never explored here" and similar that hopefully it's really clear what is going on.<br />
** This is needed simply because we're allowing players to click into planets that are unexplored so that they can do the nanites hack against them to explore them.<br />
<br />
=== New Background Story ===<br />
<br />
* A new and brief, paginated story has replaced the longwinded scrolling-based "background story" section of the main menu.<br />
** The old story was complicated and no longer really accurate to the game. This does mean all those character portraits that Chris created are now completely gone from the game, but such is life. The initial pre-game story is super simple and that's kind of how it always has been. We want the rest of the story, what there is, to be based on what happens during your gameplay.<br />
** The new story reads:<br />
*** After an 800-year civil war between humans fighting amongst the stars, they finally birthed a force that would end all human wars forever: Artificial Intelligence.<br />
*** Quickly eclipsing the humans in power and taking control of most of their automated forces, the AI nearly wiped the human race from the face of the galaxy. Only scattered pockets remain, hiding amidst the scattered wreckage from the civil war and the AI-led extermination that followed.<br />
*** You are in command of the last substantial remaining human military force. It is so small that the AI is either unaware of it, or just doesn't care.<br />
*** Potentially coincidentally, something outside the galaxy seems to have distracted the AI far more than humans ever did.<br />
*** You must grow your forces, capturing and reactivating fleets from the old wars... but you must be careful not to grow so strong that the eye of the AI turns back toward you.<br />
*** Gain just enough power, capture just enough fleets, take back just enough planets, that you can destroy the massive structures known as 'AI Overlords' and end this new war before the AI is even fully aware it has begun.<br />
*** If you are too greedy, if you make yourself too threatening, if you let the AI realize you might be a true threat... expect us all to lose everything.<br />
*** You must use discretion, avoid distraction and temptation, and wield your forces like a scalpel. Take risks, be bold, but don't try to be a conquerer.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Removed the "build remains rebuilders" intel tab entry, since that is outdated.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The strength of waves that are incoming should now be correctly stated, whereas before it was not since we switched the AI costs and strengths to be two different things.<br />
** Some internal variables have also been renamed to be more clear.<br />
** This has not been tested, so it might still be wrong.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new capturable_can_seed_at_all="false" flag, which is now applied to the Cloaked Ark One and the Agile Cursed Golem.<br />
** These two entities should no longer seed at all in the galaxy, since they were only ever supposed to be granted via the starting fleet choices anyhow. This won't fix existing savegames, but if you see them in new savegames as something you can capture, please do let us know.<br />
** Thanks to vinco and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases should now seed at more appropriate distances from you.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding and fixing, and reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where you could not select the starting fleet without it always just defaulting back to classic.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for the fix, and HeartHunter7 and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes so that if you have invalid/mismatched options (custom or otherwise) in the lobby, it will now complain about them properly and let you know that things are failing.<br />
** With this we found that the team colors for Instigators and the AntagonizedDysonSphere were not working properly, for instance.<br />
<br />
* Attack warnings in the top bar should now properly show stacked ship counts when you hover over them.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Some complicated code fixes from WeaponMaster have been put in place to hopefully solve the "multi-shot doesn't function when there's an enemy fortress or other super important item present" issue. Please let us know if this doesn't fix it, or any other strange cases wind up happening, but things seem okay from some limited testing so far.<br />
** Big thanks to WeaponMaster for the fix, and to KMan_Gladiator for the initial report!<br />
<br />
* Fixed some internal bugs with "last second we saw a planet" that was causing some oddities in the local tab's reporting of what you could see of enemy strength, etc.<br />
<br />
* The local tab summaries now include strength and ships that are inside other ships, aka drones and reinforcements not yet deployed, etc. It's way more accurate now.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips in the local tab were showing the strength values as being 1000x what we show them elsewhere in the UI. Oops, fixed.<br />
** This bug is old as the game itself, more or less. Wow.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting this right as we also discovered it!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where in the post-0.850 builds you could get too much intel about various other planets if you clicked to them in the first 2 seconds of gameplay. This wasn't as big a deal until we changed it so you can click to unexplored planets.<br />
<br />
* The little "battle at a planet" notification cards at the top of the screen now properly show all the ships that are inside other ships, making it so that their ship counts now match that of the sidebar (which is itself only newly correct in this version).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the incoming wave notifications had strength values that were laughably tiny and wrong. It was only tallying the strength of the first ship of each type, which meant that if there were 1000 ships in a wave, it was 1/1000th the value it should have been.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Strike Fleets vs Officer Fleets ===<br />
<br />
* There was previously a general "mobile combat" (MobileCombatFleetFlagship) category for fleets. This has now been split in two:<br />
** MobileOfficerCombatFleetFlagship - this is the style that we had before, where the centerpieces are either an Ark or a Golem. These are big centerpiece fleets that have small and medium craft but also something big and scary at the center.<br />
** MobileStrikeCombatFleetFlagship - this is new, and is just basically a transport with a "super meh" fusion bomb weapon at the center. Basically this is meant to be the big groups of your ships that are moving around doing the most of the fighting, and the transports are there for... transport! And for ships to pop out of during construction.<br />
<br />
* There are now EVEN MORE fleets seeded around the galaxy for you to find, although many more of them are the "strike" kind of combat fleets instead of the "officer" sort.<br />
** This gets back to the main playstyle for most people from earlier version of this game and from the base game; having big centerpiece units is great, but let's not overdo it. And for those who don't prefer that kind of gameplay, they can entirely skip it.<br />
<br />
* The number of certain types of Arks and Golems that can be seeded has been drastically reduced from what they were before (those that are part of fleets, not lone ones).<br />
** You should still see almost as many of these types of fleets as before, but a greater diversity of them. And in general way fewer armored golems, for instance.<br />
** On really large maps, you will find that you're maybe not getting quite as many of these as you once were, though.<br />
** The ultimate goal is for these to feel more rare and powerful over time, and a lot of them are seeded a bit further away, now.<br />
<br />
* The "Drone" specialtype has been split into DroneGeneral and DroneFrigate.<br />
** This lets us better use the multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_drones and multiplied_nonfrigate_ship_cap_for_drones xml entries when relevant.<br />
** Most stuff is just DroneGeneral, though, as it is.<br />
<br />
* We now have two new entries, multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_mobile and multiplied_strikecraft_ship_cap_for_mobile.<br />
** These let us make fleets larger or smaller based on what the centerpiece is, separate from the fleet design itself. This is intended specifically for the officer and strike fleet types, to let us have them share the types of fleets but to let the non-officer fleets be larger in general.<br />
** Note that officer fleets and non-officer fleets are NOT intended to be balanced with one another (officer fleets are more powerful, naturally), but the officer fleets are more rare and more powerful as well as more expensive in general.<br />
<br />
* There are several variants of tranport flagships, which all look the same and have the same name, but which seed at different frequencies and have much larger frigate, strikecraft, or some mix of the two caps.<br />
** The idea is that if you want really huge fleets of smaller ships, then these are where they come from.<br />
** The balance of all this new stuff is very untested, but the seeding of them seems to work at the very least.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring these various changes.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Overloader Combat Factory speed boost increased from 20% to 40%.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels that roll the OtherDefenseFocus design (i.e Tractors, Tachyon, etc) now have Turrets as intended.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation shields increased from 350k to 500k.<br />
<br />
* Shifted Strength values around (mainly Guardians are lower).<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleets should now always have at least two unit types.<br />
** Finding a Fleet with just one unit type was rather bad, and kind of doomed that Fleet to being relatively useless.<br />
** This was especially bad if it happened to the one adjacent to your Homeworld.<br />
<br />
* Most units for the AI now cost twice as much for it to purchase.<br />
** Guardians and Turrets cost 50% more, Frigates cost 33% more.<br />
** At the same time, the starting AI defenses are increased to make them roughly the same, as that seemed mostly okay, it was mainly the sheer wave sizes people were getting.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Armored Golem hull into shields.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the inspiration.<br />
<br />
* Economic and Military Command Stations store 300k metal instead of 100k, Home Command stores 2.5 million instead of 2 million.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for mentioning a problem here.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate durability upgraded a fair bit, the "Railcannon" variant has a 50% damage increase on the Railcannons, and the "Laser" variant loses the damage bonus in place of simply firing a lot more shots.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes and ptarth for bringing the issues up.<br />
<br />
* Citadels have some weapon boosts.<br />
<br />
==== Speedier Flagships! ====<br />
<br />
* Player Golem Arks speed doubled.<br />
<br />
* Ark speed increased to 1400.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Player Arks and Spire Frigates move 50% faster after entering a planet for 5 seconds.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Decloaking Capabilities For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories now spawn with Combat Sentry Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Engineers For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new category of ship_cap_group for fleet memberships, this one called Civilian.<br />
** Turns out that we just completely forgot to add in the ability to generate more engineers via battlestations and citadels, that that was most definitely supposed to be a thing.<br />
** This won't affect existing savegames, but you should be finding caches of engineers that you can construct along with your battlestations all over the place now in new games.<br />
** The idea isn't to increase the ship cap for engineers on a given planet by adjusting the planet itself (unless you want to change command station type), but rather by which types of stations you put there, and what engineering caps they have. That was always the plan with fleets, but was just a complete oversight.<br />
** The reason for the new Civilian category is so that we can have caps of engineers (and later maybe a mix of something else) that is separate from the OtherDefenses, turrets, and whatever else. Basically to let them not compete with other types of defenses while still being added new.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== No More Mysterious Metal Increases As Marks Go Up ====<br />
<br />
* There is no longer any added metal cost to having higher-mark units.<br />
** Some may lament this, but this was the only downside to increasing the mark of units, which is otherwise an all-positive thing to do. It was such a sharp negative that you could actually tank your economy without warning.<br />
** The first game made good use of this because you could choose to build cheaper low-mark units at any time, and then more expensive high-mark units later, and the higher metal and energy costs, as well as lower ship cap, were all deterrents to the higher marks being overly relied-upon. That was an interesting system, but we moved away from that well over a year ago, if not more, when we combined all the ships of yours into being the highest mark of whatever their line is.<br />
** This new system is one that does stress your metal reserves less, probably, but you're gaining so many more ships over time (by capturing more fleets) that you're still going to need more metal later in the game than what you start with. It's just due to increased ship counts in this game, not due to your units suddenly and unexpectedly costing more.<br />
** Thanks to Karhax for reporting the root issue here.<br />
<br />
==== No More AIP Increases From "Too Many Fleets" In A System ====<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the "too many fleets at a planet" logic entirely, at least the current version.<br />
** It simply felt punitive and un-fun, and there was no version of that style which was likely to be fun. Nonetheless, we still just commented it out for now so someone can build something on that if desired in the future. We are also going to be working on some things to prevent players going absolutely nuts with how they stack things, but they won't be so opaque or so likely to unexpectedly bite you.<br />
** Thanks to basically everyone playing the betas for complaining about this. Honestly that didn't hugely surprise any of us, but the discussion it sparked was interesting. In particular thanks to Nameless Terror, Ecthelon, themouthofsauron, Karhax, and probably some folks we missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.852 Directness Is Better==<br />
(Released April 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Rather than being markless, Sentry Frigates are now mark 1 but only get upgraded by the fleet itself upgrading (which isn't a working mechanic yet, it's coming!)<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for noticing this.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Tooltips setting option: "Show Weapon Activity Details"<br />
** If enabled, then each weapon in your tooltips shows you a bunch of info about how long until it reloads, why it didn't fire most recently, and other such info.<br />
** Previously this info was just always shown, but now it's off by default.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips -- for player ships or anything on the build sidebar -- now tell you if the ship is unable to be upgraded, or what techs upgrade it if any do, or if they are of the sort that only upgrade when their fleet itself upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reminding us just how important this is, although we were already going to do it.<br />
<br />
* One crippled mobile fleet flagship among several functional ones could previously erroneously prevent you from building command stations. Fixed.<br />
** Additionally, now battlestations/citadels are able to build command stations, not just mobile fleet flagships.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== AI Reconquest Command Stations ===<br />
<br />
* There once was a specialtype of "NormalAICommandStation." This has been removed, and split into:<br />
** AICommandStationOriginal, which is used in the majority of cases.<br />
** AICommandStationReconquest, which is used for cases where the AI reconquered a planet.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "AI Reconquest Command Station," which is now what the AI will seed after taking back a planet during a reconquest wave.<br />
** This acts just like the original command stations of the AI, with the following exceptions:<br />
*** It has twice as much health and shielding.<br />
*** It doesn't have any confusing messages about AIP going up if you destroy it (that already wasn't the case, but the interface made it sound like it did).<br />
*** It can't be hacked for science extraction. Go build your own command station there if you want that science, sonny.<br />
*** It doesn't grant any scouting intel when destroyed, so you can't use any exploity type of behavior to let the AI take a planet back and then destroy the reconquest station in order to get more scouting intel AIP-free.<br />
** Note that in existing savegames, any existing command stations the AI put there because of reconquest will still be of the original sort. So you won't see this until the AI does a reconquest wave in this version or newer.<br />
** Fun fact, the humans-don't-autotarget-this rules are still the same here, for now at least, but this can be changed in xml if we really want to. We left this not because of an AIP cost (which is why the original has it), but because there might be a very valid reason you want to let the AI keep the planet (aka them wasting reinforcements on a planet that has been neutered). So having your ships go into auto-kill mode would probably break some valid advanced strategies.<br />
** Thanks to BadgerBadger, TechSY730, and Exlium for suggesting and reporting various issues that led to this.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Rallying Out, Direct Orders Inheritance And Position In ===<br />
<br />
* All concept of ships rallying to... anything... is now gone. It was annoying and full of edge cases that would cause players to have their fleets not behave how they wanted them to as refleeting was in progress.<br />
** Now all ships that are created for a fleet by a factory now pop straight out of the fleet centerpiece, with all the orders from the fleet centerpiece (including stance).<br />
** This gets around some of the most annoying logistical issues, and because the centerpieces of the fleets are so large it makes enough logical sense to not cause huge amounts of cognitive dissonance. Putting gameplay first, this is the only thing that really solves our age-old (literally like a decade old) problem.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 and others for reporting, although here again we were already leaning in this direction because of our own frustration.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.851 Drones And Economies==<br />
(Released April 19th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Player Command Station Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the economic command station description:<br />
** Economic variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variant gives greatly improved metal and energy output, but lacks the ability to directly defend itself very well. It doesn't even have any means of decloaking enemies directly. Planets with these should either be protected by a powerful citadel or battlestation, or so far back from the front lines that they are safe.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The matter converters and energy collectors were higher on the logistical command stations, and now that has been swapped with the economic command stations.<br />
<br />
* Logistical command stations now come with 20 mines built in, and also two focused gravity generators. More stuff to help them be more tricky and dangerous directly.<br />
** They also now get 2 forcefields while the military variants only get 1 instead, swapping those two.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the logistical command station description:<br />
* Logistical variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at finding cloaked enemies, tractoring enemies, and even laying traps (mines!) for enemies. Beyond that it's kind of a halfway point between the military and economic drives of its peers. They also get two forcefields where their peers only get one, and way more engineers.<br />
<br />
* Military command stations now get 5 beam cannons and 15 ambush turrets, making them by far the most able to defend themselves without the help of a battlestation or citadel.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the military command station description:<br />
** Military variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at defending itself, and perfect for dangerous border planets. It also gets the most factories, making it probably the best way to resupply your fleets near the front lines.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The lost spire frigate faction has now been properly removed from the game.<br />
** We had already folded the functionality from that into the main game itself, so the faction was pointless and just broke things if you enabled it. If you enabled it in your savegames, then those savegames are probably now broken.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding issue where if we removed game settings from the game, then old settings files that were loaded in would complain about UnrequestedXMLAttributes.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that are owned by no faction (aka not claimed yet) should no longer have their cloaking devices function until they are claimed. Tested and works as expected.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The seeding logic for NormalPlanetNastyPicks, SpireArchives, and CivilWarTriggers was... nonsensical? The code did some kind of strange things.<br />
** It should now work properly and not do things like putting spire archives on AI homeworlds.<br />
** It also now logs what it is doing to the mapgen logger if you have that turned on and want to see what it is doing.<br />
** We've not tested this at all.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with beam cannons where they were being upgraded by the Melee tech instead of Splash.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where it would register a double-click if you were clicking too rapidly between different parts of the screen. Mice are fast! Now if you've moved the mouse more than 10px, it doesn't consider it a double-click. Probably. We need to test that.<br />
** Fully fixed (and verified the fix) to the double-clicking stuff.<br />
** Thanks to Bobtree, Talkar, Kaleopan, and Exlium for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "MISSING LOCALIZATION: AIPChangeReason_FleetConcentration" bug.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* It is now possible to explicitly set up in the xml that units cannot be stacked. Use the tag cannot_be_stacked="true".<br />
** This also now automatically happens on all AI guardians (dire and regular), drones (that got exploity), lone golems, and NPC centerpieces.<br />
** All of the marauder raiders and similar can no longer be stacked because of the tag, to prevent issues with them.<br />
** Astro Trains also can no longer be stacked, since that's just odd.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where drones were never being set up properly on drone controllers at all (hive golem, etc).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories would help with drone production.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that was preventing drones from ever being deployed even if they were internally created. Fun with boolean inversions!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a whole nest of bugs where drones that were a part of non-drone-specific fleet types could never be spawned by their spawner.<br />
** Aka this was breaking things like hive golems, but drone producer guard posts would have been fine (though that bit is untested).<br />
<br />
* Fixed some issues with the drone caps getting higher when the mark level of the drone controllers was higher. It should be the same ship cap for those drones regardless of cap, unlike with regular non-drone ships.<br />
<br />
* The data and tooltip info for AIs unlocking new ship types has been removed, as that mechanic actually isn't a thing anymore.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Irritation Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* AI guard posts that are no longer on AI-controlled planets now lose their cloaking. This also just seemed like a needed thing to avoid an annoying bit of cleanup you otherwise have to do. Typically they would be sitting around doing nothing, since all their defenders fled. Tested and works as expected.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking fleet leaders (centerpieces, flagships, command stations, whatever) now selects or deselects all the stuff in their fleet, rather than all the things of their same type.<br />
** For individual ship types, like fighters or whatever, it works like it always has.<br />
*** HOWEVER, when it comes to individual ship types, it no longer considers spinoff units (Daggers, etc) something to select along with the main unit type that you might have clicked. Sharing a common ancestor is no longer good enough for the selection stuff to work that way, particularly given the ludicrous number of variants we now have.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 for suggesting the change to double-clicking on centerpieces.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips now specify how many undeployed drones there are inside an entity.<br />
** Additionally, you can see the construction percentage on each drone that is getting created inside.<br />
<br />
* In preparation for some upcoming changes, the Ships tab has been renamed to the Local tab, and says "At Local Planet" instead of Ships up at the top.<br />
<br />
* On the fleets tab, it now has a new piece where it will show the hotkey assigned to that fleet, if there is one assigned.<br />
<br />
* You still can't manually assign hotkeys to fleets, but hotkeys are now automatically assigned to fleets as you acquire them early on in.<br />
** This is something we want to have happen so that the use of these hotkeys is encouraged by the large numbers of people (including some of us on staff) who never bothered to use them in the past.<br />
** But obviously prior to 0.900 we want it to be something you can control directly, too.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Dire Guard Posts no longer increase AIP on death.<br />
** Was intended to mimic the AIP Floor increase from Classic, but didn't play well with the random Post count and multiple AIs.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlords Tachyon system is a bit shorter range and decloaks at half the speed.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where this was a major roadblock - more than intended.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida and Shredder Guard Posts fire every 3 seconds instead of 1.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where a Tethuida was actually far scarier with the gun than intended - it's meant to use the drones, mainly.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation and Rorqual Hegira Ark have much larger forcefield radius now.<br />
** Things are bigger in general, so you weren't able to fit as much as you used to under these.<br />
<br />
* All Citadels except Interceptors now have a weapon range of 10,100.<br />
<br />
* AI requires higher AIP before increasing its tech level.<br />
** Used to be, starting from Mark 2: 150, 300, 450, 600, 800, 1200.<br />
** Now is, starting from Mark 2: 225, 450, 675, 900, 1125, 1350.<br />
*** The AI no longer pays more for higher Mark units, and so it was having very large power spikes relatively early on.<br />
*** Although, Mark 7 is actually triggered not much slower than what it used to, so really annoying the AI is still going to hurt a lot.<br />
<br />
* All Battlestations shield points increased to 350,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.850 The Arrival of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
''We are breaking '''all''' the savegames again, sorry about that. This series of updates leading up to 0.900 should collectively be the last time '''for real''' for real, although we've said that before. It's not our practice to do this sort of thing at all, typically, but this game has been going through a lot more pre-release evolution than most of our titles have. The old savegames won't even make sense in the new version, really.''<br />
<br />
* This got super long and we wanted to show what we were working on as we went, so we wound up also having this: [[AI War 2: 0.850 Raw Chris Changelog]]<br />
<br />
* And in general if you're not clear why we're doing all this, then here's a really long document that explains it: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/16dJvDOWckK4vfnW2Mwut7wv2OF_bCn17XuspBlPBymQ/edit#heading=h.wkf7np25ov5 AI War 2 - Unit Construction / Fleets Rework].<br />
** Although we went much further than the document laid out, moving into territory like making the AI planets more unique from one another, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Misc ===<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres will remain antagonized much longer after hacks.<br />
** More hacks against a Dyson Sphere will increase the antagonization time.<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI to spawn Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy. Only Dyson factions with high enough intensity can spawn antagonizers.<br />
** Antagonizers affect all Dyson Factions, so if you've enabled 3 dyson factions, the AI will spawn antagonizers for each dyson faction, and you have to kill all the antagonizers before they will become friendly again.<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers follow similar spawning rules to Instigator Bases; they need to spawn close to the player at lower AIPs, and at high AIP can spawn anywhere.<br />
** To compensate for this, the Dyson's income has been slightly buffed.<br />
<br />
* Gives some units unused voice lines, and the Dyson ships the Zenith voice.<br />
** Engineers and other similar civilian ships now actually talk!<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map now has more of a "military screen" style look to it again, although this doesn't yet apply to the actual icons and lines and so on. But it has that same sort of scanline effect and whatnot as in the first game, though more involved now and fancier with some hexagons, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts and Tutorials Gone for Now ===<br />
<br />
* The old quickstarts have all been moved to QuickStartsOld, since they no longer function with the new system in general.<br />
** Because of the way Steam updates work, the QuickStarts from now on will be loaded from QuickStarts2 instead, which is presently empty and needs to be for the next little while. But at least it won't be throwing errors when players try to start quickstarts in the new build.<br />
<br />
* The pre-existing tutorial has been completely disabled, since it is probably nonfunctional in general and tries to teach you a lot of things that are no longer relevant. We're going to be majorly redoing that in the future, but for now we don't want people accidentally going in there.<br />
<br />
=== Fleets Added ===<br />
<br />
* Fleets are a new concept in the game, which are basically collections of ships in one of a few different categories. The AIs and NPCs don't really use these, per se, although there's nothing stopping them from doing so. But on the player side, this basically is now the central grouping of units for your stuff, and you use these offensively and defensively. You can get waaay larger ship caps than before, but each group is... well, automated as well as being a distinct flavor unto itself.<br />
<br />
* The concepts of destruction points and Ark Upgrade Points are both gone, and replaced by Fleet EXP instead. This works similarly to both of those other things, in that if your fleet centerpiece is on a planet with an enemy ship that dies to your forces, then that fleet gains some EXP. More for big-ticket items.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of logic for how fleets are selected and moved around, which was previously related to control groups, is now in place.<br />
** The logic for how to assign fleets to keybind indices (fleet groups, essentially) for now is going to be clicking-the-interface-only, since that's really confusing in keybinds. We may wind up reintroducing keybinds for this at some point in the future, but more likely would be a better interface for organizing fleets into the keybinds directly, since this would avoid the confusion factor for players.<br />
** The big sticky spot for confusion is people thinking they're making a control group of ships, when really it is of fleets, in essence. Even this explanation is confusing. ;)<br />
<br />
* The various things that you can purchase from the Zenith Trader are all now planet-bound, even if they are normally mobile. They go into the fleet of that planet, and are on permanent station-keeping there.<br />
** In theory we could later have something that can let you purchase new ships for mobile fleets from the Zenith Trader or otherwise, but that would need a new UI and new general mechanics. That would be fun, but in terms of replicating the experience of the Zenith Trader thus far, here's how it needs to work for this part.<br />
<br />
* The various kinds of command stations now each come with their own hand-designed fleet styles, which are of the type that just use the max cap of each type they can have inside of their categories. That way they are always predictable per type, but you get more forcefields with a military command compared to economic, etc.<br />
** Things like minefields and the gravity generators don't go with any of these, but rather have to be gotten via Battlestations.<br />
** When it comes to factories, some of the command station types grant more factories per planet than others.<br />
<br />
* The Battlestations in general are set up, although most of them just seed randomized template-based fleets. The Ensnarer one has an example instead of a specific type of fleet that it uses in place of a template.<br />
** Bear in mind that there are several different ways to set up how a fleet leader (Battlestation or mobile) might have its fleet design created, and if none of them are set up then you'll have a lonely empty fleet. Right now the game doesn't warn the designers about that.<br />
** In general there is a looooot more that could be done here in terms of making new and unique things, but right now the procedural fleets themselves are enough that probably that's not a big priority.<br />
<br />
* The general strikecraft and frigates are all now set up so that they'll populate some interesting different procedural fleet designs in (currently) 9 different overall flavors. But even within those 9 flavors, there's a huge amount of variety likely to be found.<br />
<br />
* The game now actually seeds the Battlestations and fleet flagships, and makes sure that they have their fleet designs populated right from mapgen start.<br />
** First it tries to seed 1 item with tag "MobileCombatFleetArkOrGolem" on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed 1 more two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least eight more, but up to 1 per 25 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** It's possible that it won't have enough types or will run into blockages, and that's A-OK to happen.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 Battlestation (based on the SpecialEntityType directly) on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least five more, but up to 1 per 50 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** In both cases, if it couldn't seed a thing closer in, then it will retry with it further out. This is mostly only relevant for snake maps and other things with very few direct and secondary connections from planets.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 item with tag "MobileSupportFleetFlagship" on a planet two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least two more, but up to 1 per 150 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** The reason it uses the SpecialEntityType directly for Battlestations is because that's the most direct thing. For the other two categories, those both have a MobileFleetFlagship type, and so those tags help specify a bit more if they are regular (and thus more common), or are "support" (and thus less common and further out).<br />
<br />
* The Battlestation special entity type has been split into two: BattlestationBasic and BattlestationCitadel.<br />
<br />
* The MobileFleetFlagships special entity type has been split into three: MobileCombatFleetFlagship, MobileSupportFleetFlagship, and MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship.<br />
** The third in this category is for the things that don't have a fleet with them, namely right now the spire frigates.<br />
<br />
* The seeding for battlestations and mobile fleet flagships has been updated, as you might guess.<br />
** The existing logic for mobile fleet flagships now applies to MobileCombatFleetFlagships, and MobileSupportFleetFlagships still also work the same.<br />
** The existing logic for battlestations now applies to BattlestationBasic.<br />
** MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship is now seeded "kinda wherever" and is both rarer but also no longer counts against the normal combat fleet flagships.<br />
** BattlestationCitadel is following the general pattern of the basic battlestations, but with the following differences:<br />
*** It only ever seeds one on a planet, not two at a time.<br />
*** It seeds one within 2 hops of a player starting planet if possible.<br />
*** It then seeds a smaller number of citadels out in the galaxy, mixed between the middle-distance and far out. These are in addition to the basic battlestations, not in place of them.<br />
** With all this, there's a better sense of control of what exactly the player can look forward to out there, but also in general there are yet more capturables out there, and they can continue to be balanced in their niches: we can add more lone wolf stuff without swamping the main mobile flagships, and we can add more citadels or regular battlestations without affecting their relative mixes.<br />
<br />
* The various MobileSupportFleet flagships now are able to get upgraded from Mark1 to higher marks based on their fleets being upgraded. They have no techs that benefit them directly.<br />
** This fixes an issue with them referencing an Engineer tech that was nonexistent.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each faction as their "loose" fleet.<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just used for all their ships, more or less, and doesn't really get used for much. Drones don't go in there, but that's it. Actual useful fleets can be created as-desired in the future, but for anything not using something specific, it uses this.<br />
** For the players, there is a PlayerLoose fleet, which is basically "remainder units" that are not in a fleet. Odds are that this won't be used, but it's an overflow valve in case we have a truly odd case or potentially even a bug that we want to fail more gracefully.<br />
*** Oh! Actually, we are using this now for ships that are being captured via zombification. So there you go, a use for it already.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each PlanetFaction as their "fleet of that planet."<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just a reference to their parent loose fleet from the faction itself.<br />
** For the players, these are unique fleets that are what the command stations go into and put their stuff into.<br />
*** It's entirely possible for a command station of a player to die, but in those cases the fleet must live on.<br />
<br />
* When the game creates a new ship/structure, it now REQUIRES that the appropriate Fleet.Membership be passed into it.<br />
** This solves all sorts of bugs where fleet membership was never being set previously.<br />
** In the case of fleet leaders or ships that create drones, it ignores this membership, however, and creates and populates its own fleet.<br />
<br />
* Added a whole bunch of ways to calculate the strength and health percentages of fleets based on their type, which is more complicated than you might think.<br />
** For command station fleets, or the battlestation ones, it's based around the total power out of what you've DECIDED to build (and what has died to remains or is hurt or whatever).<br />
** For drones and mobile fleets, it's out of the total things that would be auto-built, since you get no decision-making in whether to fully stock those fleets or not (aside from keeping them away from docks).<br />
** This is surprisingly complex when it comes to things like the ships being transported in fleets, or undeployed drones, etc, etc.<br />
<br />
* A new destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command xml tag has been added.<br />
** This is used only in a really narrow set of circumstances: it was a planet that a human player controlled with one kind of command station, and they now have a different kind of command station there.<br />
** Basically, different types of command stations give you different numbers of engineers, basic turrets, energy collectors, etc. This prevents you from having too many left over after you switch from a military to an economic command station, for instance; there were all sorts of games you could play with that to exploit things.<br />
** What this does NOT do is destroy units after your command station has died on a planet; in those circumstances, whatever is there continues to live on until you build a new command station. Presuming you rebuild as the same type, nothing gets destroyed.<br />
** This flag is also explicitly NOT on certain units like the human home forcefields and the various things you get from the Zenith Trader. They will frequently be over-cap (since their command station type doesn't always include it but you might have bought it separately), and so these are always assumed to be valid.<br />
** Confusing? Basically this just shuts down an exploit and doesn't affect much else.<br />
<br />
==== Docks Sidebar Tab Gone, Fleets Tab Added ====<br />
<br />
* The docks tab is gone, and a new fleets tab has taken its place.<br />
** The fleets tab has a bunch of sections which show first your fleets at the current planet, and then all of your fleets in the entire galaxy, by category, after that.<br />
** The categories, in order, are:<br />
*** Current Planet<br />
**** A quick view of all your fleets at the current planet.<br />
*** Mobile Combat<br />
**** The most versatile of your fighting forces: generally intended for offense, but quite able to come and defend your own planets as need be.<br />
*** Mobile Support<br />
**** Unusual supporting fleets that are able to either act as a force multiplier for your offensive or defensive fleets, provide remote supply on deep strikes, or perform surprising other secondary duties.<br />
*** Lone<br />
**** Unusual single 'lone wolf' massive ships that forego having attending ships in exchange for a simply awe-inspiring amount of direct power. Use them offensively or defensively, as you see fit.<br />
*** Battlestations<br />
**** General battlestations that are useful for either defending your planets or for setting up offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Citadels<br />
**** Citadels that are much stronger versions of your general battlestations, packing a huge punch in their own right as well as providing access to defenses for your planets or for offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Planet Cmd Stations<br />
**** Each command station you have on a planet has a small force of mostly basic, utility, or economic nature. However, if you've made purchases from the Zenith Trader or found other unique capturables throughout the galaxy, you might have some fixed-position weapons of surprising power here, too.<br />
** For the time being, the tooltips over the actual fleets just shows the tooltip for their centerpiece. This won't always be the case; they'll later have their own unique tooltips that are more informative.<br />
** For the time being as well, clicking these does nothing but show you a message saying that the fleet management interface is coming soon.<br />
** The individual fleet entries show the name of the fleets, their health percentage, their total ships out of their EFFECTIVE ship cap (for the stationary things, that's out of what you've deployed), their planet name, and their total effective strength if they were fully powered at the level that is chosen for them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new specific tooltip for the fleets in the fleet sidebar.<br />
** This gives a lot of the same info you could already see on the centerpiece's tooltip, but in a slightly more focused and condensed format.<br />
** You can also now right-click to center your view on the centerpiece and select the entire fleet. The tooltip now tells you this. You can also hold shift to select multiple fleets quickly by doing this, as you would have with selecting control groups previously.<br />
<br />
* Given that the fleets in the fleet sidebar can be shown twice -- once for their current planet, and once for their other category -- we decided to add some color to the ones for the current planet to set them apart. This helps to keep it clearer visually what is happening.<br />
<br />
==== Hand-Designed Fleet Capabilities ====<br />
<br />
* Normally it's nice to only have... one way to do things when setting up the XML, right? I mean, that's the most clear thing, eh?<br />
** However, in a few cases it is sometimes nice to be able to have parents talk about their children, rather than children always being the ones talking about their parents.<br />
** This is most notable for hand-designed fleet templates, where we don't want auto-modded stuff to be added in a bunch.<br />
** Thankfully, we can do both things, with both coexisting and neither acting in exclusion of the other.<br />
*** Basically, NORMALLY, you should definitely still use the fleet_membership nodes on ships in order to get them into fleets. This is more modder friendly and more flexible in general.<br />
*** THAT said, now you can also define ship_membership nodes in the fleets themselves, which basically are just the inverse of a fleet_membership node. They say all the same things, but say "a specific ship is being added to my fleet," versus the other way around with a ship adding itself to a specific fleet.<br />
*** This is now in use in a new CMP_StartingFleetDesigns.xml file, which uses a new design_logic of InitialPlayerFleet.<br />
**** Basically: we want to have 5-7 starting player fleets that are hand-designed including what their centerpiece is as well as what their ship compositions are. This lets players start off the game with something they are excited about, and move forward with whatever they find procedurally generated after that.<br />
<br />
==== "Control Groups" Are Gone ====<br />
<br />
* Fleets basically handle the same thing. But better. Some of the interface for this won't be until an upcoming build, though.<br />
<br />
==== "Supply" From Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new IsConsideredOutOfSupplyOfParentFleetCenterpiece bool, which is calculated based on ships within a human mobile or defensive fleet not being on the planet of their centerpiece.<br />
** This is done separately because that way it can only be calculated once per second, which is a lot more efficient.<br />
** This then gets used by things that are checking to see if ship systems are disabled -- aka guns, engineers, etc. These ships can still move, but they're neutered on purpose.<br />
** If the centerpiece is itself kind of hobbling along half-dead, it's okay because the ships are still able to draw supply.<br />
** For the stuff that is either considered "loose" or part of a command station's fleet, these things don't have the concept of supply at all, because their fleet leaders can legitimately be destroyed permanently and they need to still function. Or the loose ones don't even have a fleet leader.<br />
** The goal of the fleet leaders thing is to keep the mobile fleets, and the Battlestation stuff, remotely in the same area as one another. You can't start segmenting your fleets and sending them off to fight WAY off, only raiding neighboring planets. This is for balance purposes more than anything else, and is similar in reasoning to the old Supply concept from AIWC. Funny how things like that come back around!<br />
<br />
==== Squads Removed ====<br />
<br />
* Intra-Squad Formations have been removed, as have the concept of squads, the counts of "visual things per subsquad," and so on.<br />
** The whole "squads" idea was mainly to have more ships without having more ships, and that just wasn't working out for a variety of reasons. Now it's just ships instead.<br />
* large_ship_scale_multiplier has been removed, so that all marks of a starship or whatever are now the same size. This lets us define them in ways that are best for being able to see them without them getting too stupidly huge.<br />
<br />
* Various parts of the game referred to "squads" and "ships" as separate things, and there were internal mechanics for repairing lost ships in a squad, etc.<br />
** That's all gone now, but there are some code remnants (to say the least) that still refer to squads. If you run into anything in the front-end (aka actually in the game) that mentions squads, we'd appreciate a heads up so that we can correct that.<br />
** There ARE still visual groups of many of the smaller ships (V-Wings, etc), which is because those are just a single "3d model" made out of several smaller 3d models at this point. We can go back and correct that later, or we can leave it; we're kind of on the fence.<br />
<br />
==== Rallying Ships From Factories to Fleet Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* IF a mobile fleet of yours is on a planet with a factory, or on an adjacent planet, then the factory now produces ships for it as fast as it can.<br />
** In the interest of fairness, a given factory divides up its resources evenly between every possible ship that it can build for every fleet in range, and works on them all at once. So there are no queues, there is no order to set, there's just whether or not you accelerate the factories with engineers or not.<br />
<br />
* The various types of "ships rally to X location after construction" are now gone, with instead all the ships from docks rallying to their fleet centerpiece, whereever that may be.<br />
** This is highly automated and much more the default thing we want to have happen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of bugs with ships rallying to their fleet centerpiece (which is the only type of rally that now exists).<br />
** They should rally to where the centerpiece either is or is heading, and they'll stop rallying once they get very close to where the centerpiece is.<br />
** They stay in rally mode, continually updating their destination, until they reach the target. Initially the target can only be on the planet they are on or an adjacent planet, but it's possible that the target will move even further away while they are chasing it, and they should adjust to follow. That has been tested except when moving more than one planet away while they chase.<br />
** Note that you can't set the rallying directly at all, unlike prior versions of the games. Factories just make whatever is needed in order to bring a local fleet up to full fighting force, and those things automatically rally to their respective fleets. "Local" means on this or an adjacent planet.<br />
** On arrival, the rallying ships should take up the disposition of the ships that are at the other end, but that remains to be seen if that works as the interface for that bit isn't there yet. If you see problems with us, please do let us know.<br />
<br />
==== Procedural Fleet Names ====<br />
<br />
* The fleets for most fleets now have default names that are pulled from folders [FleetNames_Mobile_P1]+[FleetNames_Mobile_P2]. If anyone reading wants to add to these after this build is out, that's certainly welcome.<br />
** This wasn't a high priority item, but Chris needed a small mental break when starting the morning. ;)<br />
** These can be renamed later by players.<br />
<br />
==== AIP Penalties for Fleet Clustering ====<br />
<br />
* If you put too many ships from too many fleets on one planet, basically the AI notices, gets scared and angry, and the AIP starts increasing over time. It warns you about this.<br />
** You're allowed to have WAY more units in this version of the game compared to any prior one, but if you go putting them all one one or two planets the AI is going to kick back... hard. That whole "guerrilla warfare" bit goes out the window if you advertise your presence like that.<br />
<br />
* The fleet concentration AIP penalties will now only kick in at 3 fleets on an AI planet, and 5 on a player planet, rather than 2 and 4 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "too many fleets on a planet" code works has been reworked a fair bit, but not tested:<br />
** It now looks at all the human ships that are part of a mobile (flagship) fleet or a battlestation/citadel fleet. Before it was just looking at the fleet centerpieces, meaning you could have your centerpiece hide on an adjacent planet and send its ships in and the AI wouldn't notice.<br />
** It also now only looks at the ships that are actually on the planet, and not the total strength of the fleet. The strength must be at least 2 in order for it to care at all about it for these purposes. If you send in 10 fleets of strength 1 -- or a slice of them that is strength 1 -- then it won't care.<br />
*** This latter thing will probably encourage all sorts of bad behavior, but we'll figure that out in the future. For now it should feel more natural in general, but it will likely need further iterating.<br />
<br />
=== AI Behaviour Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The AI will now be less worried about distant mobile enemy forces.<br />
* The AI will no longer mistakenly count Guard units as Threat in some code paths<br />
* Make some improvements to hunter/warden fleet routing logic<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the Hunter/Warden save game<br />
<br />
* Each AI faction now has its own Hunter/Warden fleets. The units of each Hunter/Warden will just show as "Hunter Fleet" or "Warden Fleet", but there will now be multiple fleets acting independently. The goal of this is to make those fleets much more flexible in how they deal with enemies.<br />
** Only one Hunter and one Warden are visible in the game lobby. The other hunter/wardens will copy the colours but not the settings of the visible Hunter/Warden.<br />
<br />
* Add a new gameplay mechanic, "AI Civil War". At the beginning of the game, Communication Nodes are seeded near all the AI homeworlds. Destroying all of them will trigger the AI Civil War by making the AIs unable to communicate with eachother. This will make all of the AI factions hostile to eachother; they will send waves at eachother, use Threat on eachother, etc, just like they do against the player.<br />
** This will significantly strengthen all the AIs.<br />
** The Warden and Hunter Fleets will remain friendly with all the AIs. They are unaffected by the Communication breakdown and are quite confused. <br />
** If there is only one AI in the game then the Communication Node will not be in the game.<br />
** "AI Civil War" mode is also available as an option to the Game Lobby, which will start the game with AI's in Civil War mode. This is for testing and sandbox purposes.<br />
<br />
* The targeting code now treats XML-based importances as more important than 'amount of damage I can do'; this makes it less likely for units to ignore Command Stations and other high-value targets in favour of fleetships<br />
<br />
* Change how overkill is calculated; only count units that are actually in range of the target<br />
** This makes ships less likely to dance between multiple targets, unable to pick which one to attack.<br />
<br />
* Don't throw away Distance to Target information when choosing a target<br />
** This also makes ships much less likely to do the "can't decide on a target" dance<br />
<br />
* AIs no longer have any concept of "unlock points," and they don't unlock new ship types over the course of the game.<br />
** This was a neat concept in AI War Classic, kinda-sorta, but in a long campaign it just meant more chaos, honestly.<br />
** The original intent was to make it so that there was a feeling of progression and the AI doing new things with new tools as you go through the game, and that is now handled far better via the ship groups instead, and the planets being more unique, etc.<br />
<br />
* When the budget for a wave is over 3k, the AI no longer randomly gets guardians added in as a thing they can buy for the wave. Instead things are more hand-designed than that.<br />
<br />
=== Map Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Several map types have been improved by Draco.<br />
** Thanks Draco!<br />
<br />
* Make the Simple and Realistic map types more interesting by fixing a dumb bug in them.<br />
<br />
* The Max/Min number of planets in the galaxy is now defined on a per-map type basis rather than a global (since some maps scale up to larger galaxies better than others)<br />
** Some map types go up as high as 500 planets, others are capped at an AIWC-like 120 planets<br />
<br />
* The previous methods for some of the map seeding of AI things are also being... phased out in some ways, and made a lot more centralized and thus flexible.<br />
** This in turn lets us make the various AI planets a lot more unique, and lets modders add to things without replacing them.<br />
<br />
* The warden special forces hideouts were previously always seeding 4, but now it's sometimes more based on the size of the galaxy being larger.<br />
<br />
* The game is now able to seed multiple entities on certain planets if we so desire, during mapgen.<br />
** As the sole use of this so far, we're now seeding two battlestations/citadels on any planets that have those, to make those a lot more attractive as targets and also thus provide more firepower for defensive purposes for players without them having to capture QUITE so many planets for each of these that they get.<br />
<br />
* Did a fair bit of rework on some of the mapgen logic where it is trying to seed things close to the player homeworlds.<br />
** A while back we had some problems where things were frequently seeding too close, so we put in code to counter that. That was in turn preventing us from intentionally putting stuff there more recently.<br />
** Now there's a healthy balance between us being able to do that while still avoiding the old bug, and in general things seem to be working well.<br />
<br />
* There was some other funkiness with it being really unlikely to seed certain things very near to you.<br />
** That has been fixed, to start with, but then beyond that it also now tries to seed half the flagships and battlestations kind of in the middle-distance for you on the map.<br />
** In general this now gives you way more options for middle-game goals for making yourself stronger.<br />
<br />
==== Limited Ship Types For Each AI Planet ====<br />
<br />
* Essentially it's super boring when there are too many types of ships all over the place on every planet for the AI. So now it does this really interesting thing where it chooses a subset/theme for each planet, and some themes are harder than others, rarer than others, etc. Now you can actually see what is there, formulate a strategy of which of your fleets is best to send, and... well, send them.<br />
<br />
* Planets now remember what specific ShipGroup out of a ShipGroupCategory they are using for a given faction. This is where the theming comes in for these planets.<br />
** For the wormhole sentinels, it's actually only seeded at the start of the game, and each wormhole is unique rather than being homogeneous per planet. So those don't get remembered.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that AIs choose their "draw bags" for how to populate a planet's guard posts, strikecraft, turrets, or whatever, has been redone; but also the same is redone for waves and CPAs and the like. It's all using the new AIShipGroups and AIShipGroupCategories.<br />
<br />
* In the tooltips, you can now see how many ships and what strength is contained inside a guard post, as you used to be pre-fleets. HOWEVER, you can also now see exactly how many of each type of ship is inside there, to see what mix the AI is using at that planet without having to go aggro a guard post.<br />
<br />
* Basic definitions for ai ship groups and ai ship categories have been implemented. These are based around the excellent document that Puffin set up on the subject, but with some changes and additions here and there.<br />
** Note that this is ai_ship_groups_i_am_part_of, and it refers exclusively to how the AI uses ships. This isn't meaningful at all to fleet design stuff for players, which is a separate topic.<br />
** This also doesn't affect minor factions, although there's nothing stopping minor factions from adopting this new pattern in the future.<br />
** At the moment this also only describes strikecraft and frigates, and not turrets or other things of that nature. Those are coming soon. Puffin, if you want to set up the other categories and groups based on this starting template, probably ignoring the "singular freaky surprises" stuff, then please feel free as it would save me some time.<br />
** The overall rule with this usage of ships in groups is that anything that is a variant of something else shouldn't be in the same group with it. This is just a design thought, not a technical restriction. Warden and Hunter fleets will wind up having all sorts of strange mixing and matching, but by keeping to this rule we will ensure that planets and waves otherwise don't have that sort of strange mixing.<br />
** You'll also notice that for the ship group categories that are specific to certain AI types, like Turtle or Cloaking-Heavy or whatever, those also include some sub-groups that are unrelated to their type, but which will provide some... well, variety. Aka sometimes instead of being a cloaking-heavy wave, it will by an anti-structures wave. Sneaky! There's nothing worse than a predictable AI type, so having some variety in what they do, even if they are thematically heavy, is good.<br />
** It's also worth noting how the "draw bags" work, in this context. Essentially the number after the things that are included say "how many raffle tickets do I put into the draw bag?" And depending on how many other total raffle tickets have been put in, that's how likely it is to come out.<br />
*** In order to allow for granularity in definitions, our default number of tickets to add is 100. That way we can say "only do this 1% as often as most stuff" by putting in 1 ticket instead of 100.<br />
*** But even there, the odds of it coming out are not 1%, because it depends on what else is put into the bag. And by very definition, what is put into the bag is something that is meant to be unknowable at design time, since it can be modded, and expanded in the future. So we simply use something like "100" to mean "regular frequency, whatever that is," and then the other numbers like "25" to mean "about a quarter as often as usual, whatever that is."<br />
*** It is worth noting that not putting too many types inside a single draw bag is probably good in MOST cases, because it means that players will be facing a planet or a wave that has some sort of coherency to it that they can plan around. I'd say that 3 types is a sweet spot for waves, but sometimes having many more or fewer types is okay. Variety being the spice of life, it's okay that many of the things drift off the "normal" design parameters.<br />
*** Overall we'll find some situations where people go "wow there's way too many xyz unit in this circumstance," and we'll deal with that as need be. But most of these groups are intended for things that are not strictly numbers-bound (aka more than a handful of forcefields on a planet is terrible, so using them in these groups would be a Very Bad Idea since it would lead to occasional bouts of player dismay).<br />
**** Most of the time, we are likely to wind up with something like "holy cow that one planet is a nest of sniper like I've never seen in my life," and we just kind of sit back and go "yep! That will happen, in extremely rare cases. Either deal with it or go around, but that's the fun of this." The prior system was leading to a feeling of samey-ness on all the various planets, and so this is meant to break things up more into various thematic niches, some of which are more rare than others due to being either annoying or scary or hard or whatever. But we still want those rare outliers to happen, because those are either the places where good stories happen during AARs, or where the player's eyebrows can shoot up as they go "I'm glad I don't have to go THERE." Or sometimes it's just going to be the Wave From Hell that surprises players before going away again.<br />
** This whole thing is going to take a lot more defining and redefining over time, but it's really well set up for having lots of ship variants and strange outliers. In a lot of ways, this is intentionally pushing planets and waves a bit more in the direction of a RogueLite, where you never quite know what you're going to find. Chris was really missing some of the sense of exploration, and this is his way of trying to capture that again.<br />
*** And note that this is completely parallel to the player fleet waves and such, so the nice thing is that the AI, other factions, and players can all be thought of using completely separate structures and in completely different terms. As it should be.<br />
<br />
* Each planet belonging to an AI now seeds a single entity from SingularFreakySurprisesAIShipGroup on each of their planets at the start.<br />
** Note that this includes a fair bit of blank space, and that if it chooses blank space that is considered A-OK. So it won't really be every planet, and the frequency is actually determined in the xml rather than the code.<br />
** This lets things like the Golemite be set up a lot more directly, and without using tags.<br />
** The ONE downside of this is that the frequency can no longer be based around things like what the AI difficulty level is. But frankly, that's something that makes the AIs feel less unique and not just easier; if the game is meant to be easier, the player should still be facing the unique foes of that AI nonetheless.<br />
*** As part of this, the explicit seeding code for the Golemite to seed its golems has been removed, and it now uses the new central xml-based function.<br />
*** Note that, if we want to, there's nothing stopping us from using both the old method and the new one at the same time. The new one is mainly a convenience that makes for some powerful new xml-only modding capabilities that don't need to touch C# to add cool stuff to an AI.<br />
<br />
* Guardians now have their own AI ship groups, like Strikecraft, and are similar to them. Did the same for Royal, and it uses those for the wave and reinforcement ones as well, so interestingly it can vary what Guardians it has, or roll the same thing in Reinforcements and Guardians separately and really focus on one thing, or even have almost every kind, with an emphasis on this set, etc.<br />
** Just didn't like how planets were always a mess of Guardians. Sometimes they still will be, but that's a rare "Oh dear" thing.<br />
<br />
===== How The AI Guards Wormholes Is Way Cooler =====<br />
<br />
* The Stealth Wormhole Sentinels have been set up as something that only show up rarely, now that scouting is going to be working differently. This is useful for making planets feel a lot more varied, and not all planets so hard to sneak your stealth ships into.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Basic Minefield Wormhole Sentinels, possibly against our better judgement, to let a tiny minority of wormholes actually have mines around them that players can stumble into.<br />
** Since these should only really show up once, with the AI not rebuilding them, this should be an interesting thing for the player to run into well under 1% of the time. Thanks to Puffin for suggesting this; this should provide for some interesting traps without being too frustratingly common.<br />
<br />
* Actually jacked up the default NobodyHereWormholeSentinels draw bag count to 1000, and the StealthWormholeSentinels to 50, so that the 1 of BasicMinefieldWormholeSentinels is EVEN MORE RARE. Hopefully players run into one or zero minefields during a given campaign, thus making it more exciting.<br />
** Of course, if someone wants to make a minefield-heavy AI type, that is straightforward to do, now.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, there are now 5 different kinds of wormhole sentinel setups that are based around using tractor arrays and turrets, tesla turrets, gravity weapons and pike turrets, and whatever else.<br />
** These are also in the minority in terms of how frequently they will seed, but are way more common than the minefields and should make it so that some of the wormholes are a lot more interesting to face, now.<br />
** This gets back a bit more back to the original design of the original game, which is only possible now because of how some of the scouting changes will interact with the game here. We had had to move away from this because of tedium of automated scouting in other circumstnaces.<br />
** There are still quite a few wormholes that won't be directly defended at all, and it's possible for us to set up way more wormhole defensive types as desired in the future; these are mostly a proof of concept.<br />
** Note that with the sentinels at wormholes, the idea is that these will exist from the start of the game and never get upgraded or reinforced, unlike what happens at guard posts.<br />
<br />
==== Revamped AI Types Based On New Seeding Styles ====<br />
<br />
* Set up new "singular freaky surprises" that includes how golems are seeded for the Golemite now, and actually gives a very rare chance that some regular planets will sometimes have an AI golem.<br />
<br />
* The Vanilla AI type has been renamed to "Full Ensemble," referening the fact how it is basically the most well-rounded AI type that presently exists. It has the most varied surprises up its sleeves.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Simple Ensemble AI variant: Like the full ensemble in most respects, but minus some of the more esoteric ship variants. There's plenty going on here, but not quite so much craziness to discover as you explore.<br />
<br />
* The Starfleet Commander AI type has been removed, as now all the AIs kind of do what it was doing before. It no longer stands out as unique.<br />
<br />
* The Everything AI type has been removed, as it was kind of redundant now, and wouldn't have made for coherent gameplay anyhow.<br />
<br />
* Added in a completely untested new Thief AI type that was kinda-sorta defined previously but seemed to be missing, nonetheless.<br />
<br />
* Also added a completely untested new Zombifier AI type that uses a bunch of zombifying ships and other nasty things. It was kinda-sorta previously defined but again still seemed to be missing.<br />
<br />
* In general there were very few AI types removed, and instead they are all just a whole heck of a lot more vibrant, and we actually added a few.<br />
<br />
=== Hacking changes ===<br />
<br />
* Science Extraction hacking will now show the total cost for the remaining science on the planet in the tooltip<br />
** Requested by Ecthelon on Steam<br />
* Hacking has been feeling a bit too easy these days, so include AIP when calculating how strong the hacking response should be for hacks against the AI.<br />
** The formula is now NewHackingResponse = oldHacking Response + (oldHackingResponse * AIPMultiplier * CurrentAIP)<br />
<br />
* Add the Sabotage hack<br />
** This will kill a random NormalPlanetNastyPick structure on a planet. Many people have asked for this. <br />
<br />
* Allow hacks to be done against planets, not just structures<br />
* Allow hacks to be done without a local hacker on the planet<br />
* Allow the AI to launch an attack against the player after hacking is completed<br />
** These can be set on any hack with an XML tag. So all the previous hacking mechanics can continue to function as usual, but new options are now available.<br />
<br />
* Mercenary Beacons can be done without a local hacker on the planet. They are also nearly instant to complete.<br />
<br />
* Hacking the dyson sphere in order to download a ship design SHOULD now actually work, although it works differently from before.<br />
** Rather than unlocking a new ship line in general (type Dyson Defender), it now adds a permanent cap of 2 more dyson defenders to whatever the hacking fleet is that just did the hack. So it's a way to buff up the particular fleet doing the hack with some sweet new dyson tech that you get to keep forever.<br />
** In general this can now serve as a model for other types of the same thing that we can do, although there's a question mark of course as to whether this actually works since we've not tested it. But it's neat and should be useful in general for the future.<br />
<br />
* The hacking for the dark spire wraiths now works like the dyson hacking.<br />
<br />
=== Bug Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the entity hovering ui where it was incorrectly identifying energy overdrive as an attack penalty<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Zenith Trader (Traitor!) was allowing the AI to buy way too many goodies<br />
** Thanks to lots of people for reporting this, including Jannik2099 and Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when handling GameCommands<br />
** Thanks to jannik for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where v-wings were having damage multipliers based on buildings lack of engines<br />
** Thanks to weaponmaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Correctly flag the "Download Dyson Sphere Ship" hack as unavailable after that hack has been completed<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where vengeance generators were warping in already vulnerable to damage<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and zeusalmighty for the reports<br />
<br />
* Add an Objective for hacking the Spire Archive<br />
** Thanks to settemio for the reminder<br />
<br />
* Only seed one spire archive per AI<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the report<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive isn't invulnerable to all damage, meaning it properly dies after being hacked.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Spire Archives now show on the galaxy map.<br />
<br />
* The Superterminal now explodes after the hack finishes, instead of using a kludgy and bug prone mechanism to prevent it from being hacked multiple times<br />
** Thanks to Lifestrider and zeusalmighty for bug reports<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the settings menu for multiple AI types<br />
** Thanks to coldrage101 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug where the HRF Raiders were never spawning because of a typo in their tag.<br />
<br />
* Fixed that issue with the fullscreen resolution not being settable in recent internal builds.<br />
** Note that there is still some issue that may make you need to alt-f4 the program after changing between fullscreen resolutions or fullscreen to not-fullscreen, but it then shows up properly after that. I expect an upgrade to the unity engine, due in the next month or so, will probably fix that one part. And that one part probably isn't new. But the new part that was broken is now fixed.<br />
<br />
* The game now properly unpauses itself after you close the escape menu, if it paused itself going into there.<br />
<br />
* Units that are stacked, or units that are in transports, now cost energy the same as they do when they are outside of their hosts.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Renaming And Visual Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Cleaned up all entity names, from in the past when they changed function (i.e LaserTurret to NucleophilicTurret).<br />
* Also cleaned up and standardised all the entity system names, and cleaned out a few that were redundant.<br />
** This should make it a bit cleaner to work with in future, as there's no weird cases of there being a WidowGuardian, which is really the Paralysis Guardian, but it shows up as the Widow in all the internal files!<br />
<br />
* The Widow Mine is now the Paralysis Mine, and the Grenade Launcher fleetship is now Grenade Launcher Corvette - seeing as it has the Corvette icon and all.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Frigates are now Sentinel Gunboats.<br />
** Anything in future, like Lightning Torpedo Frigate will use the term Gunboat instead.<br />
<br />
* Fleetships are now called Strikecraft, and Starships are now called Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Space Docks are now simply called Factories, Mobile Space Dock is Mobile Factory, and the Starship Constructor doesn't exist at all now.<br />
** Both Strikecraft and Frigates come out of the same building.<br />
<br />
* Not a rename, but a recolour. Human Resistance Fighters and Marauders have a primary green that shows up better in game, and matches what it is in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Advanced Factory is now the Intra-Galactic Coordinator.<br />
** It's just a thing that increases your ship caps, essentially.<br />
** The ship_cap_multiplier actually works now in the new system. It won't increase the caps for anything with a cap of 1, though, just FYI. It also can't be used to reduce the cap.<br />
<br />
* Mentions of Shields such as the Shield Frigate, Shield Generator etc are all Forcefield now.<br />
** Apparently we were using both in kind of random places?<br />
<br />
* As Squads are removed, all the Strikecraft models are much bigger, with a single one taking up the same space the full squad used to!<br />
** In addition, things like Frigates, Command Stations, Turrets, etc are all bigger. Almost everything, really.<br />
<br />
* All icons in the game are displayed a bit higher above their entity. This gets them out of the way a bit, hopefully not too far that it's difficult to know what they're for.<br />
** With this and the above change, you can actually see the models a bit!<br />
<br />
=== Ship Variants ===<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Harasser" variant of the MLRS Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Porcupine" variant of the Pike Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ablative Troll" variant of the Ablative Gatling.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Dagger" variant of the Raider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Gunbot" variant of the Autocannon Minipod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Velociraptor" variant of the Raptor.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Stalker" variant of the Eyebot.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Tripper" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Railpod" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Pulsar Punk" variant of the Pulsar Tank.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Aggressor" variant of the Agravic Pod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Mirage" variant of the Space Plane.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Hydra" variant of the Vanguard.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Zapper" variant of the Inhibiting Tesla Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Terrier" variant of the Spider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Molotov" variant of the Grenade Launcher Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ranger" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Medic Gunboat" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Absorber" variant of the Vampire Claw.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Thief" variant of the Etherjet.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Paralyser" variant of the Stingray.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Cluster" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Nanoswarm" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Persuader" variant of the Parasite.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ripper" variant of the Warbird Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Brawler" variant of the Assault Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Devastator" variant of the Siege Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Siphoner" variant of the Shield Frigate.<br />
<br />
* The Hydra is now the Vanguard Hydra, and there's a new Stringray Hydra type to keep it company.<br />
** The Stingray version is markedly more strong in the sense that it subdivides but doesn't have worse stats. It's a quick bit of variance for planets or waves that are replicant-heavy.<br />
<br />
* Also added a Parasite Hydra to round it out even more, although made them thankfully lexss frequent.<br />
<br />
* Added Ghost Grenade Launcher Corvette and Ghost Concussion Corvettes, to round out the ghost strikecraft category a bit.<br />
<br />
* A new Station-Keeping Assault Frigate has been added to the loadout of military and home command stations (2x each), and logistical command stations (1x each).<br />
** As with the pike turrets that all the command stations now have, this gives you some more defensive options without having a fleet or a battlestation around.<br />
** Unlike the turrets, these don't require any placement planning, since they are mobile and able to roam around and hit enemies. Seemed like this would get around a variety of frustrating situations that even having turrets would not solve.<br />
<br />
==== New Variants For Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Cloaked Ark One variant, and this one is ONLY available via a new "Cloaked Fleet" (CloakedStartingFleet) that players can get in the lobby at the start of the game.<br />
** This offensive fleet is one of the first that players can choose from, and it's powerful and invisible and likely to make them feel quite powerful.<br />
** Led by the Cloaked Ark One, this has Raptors, Agravic Pods, Gunbots, and then Warbird Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Mugger variant of the Assault Frigate that gets parasitism (this needs to be tested).<br />
** This is ONLY available via the new "Parasitic Fleet" that players can choose at the start of the game.<br />
** The parasitic fleet in general is weak and small by comparison to others when it comes to direct firepower... but of course they create a bunch of zombies to work for them. Uh, and yeah there's a Botnet Golem at the center. So weaker might not be accurate after all.<br />
** Led by the Botnet Golem, these have 60 Parasites and 2 Muggers. This is by far the smallest ship cap fleet you can start with... until you start creating zombies.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Classic Fleet that players can start with.<br />
** This classic mix isn't good at any one particular thing, but is well-rounded against any foe. The forcefields just make things even better.<br />
** It's V-Wings, Fusion Bombers, Concussion Corvettes, and then a Forcefield Frigate, with the centerpiece being an Armored Golem.<br />
** This is a nod both to the first game as well as the classic starting loadout of ships in this game itself, which is now absent.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Raid Fleet for the starting player options, which also has a new "Agile Cursed Golem Ark" that is the Cursed Golem but with way faster engines.<br />
** The whole purpose of this fleet is being able to rapidly move around faster than any other purely offensive fleet in the game.<br />
** It also includes a new "Turbo Stingray" ship that is a faster version of regular Stringrays, and then Velociraptors and Daggers, which are normally already super fast.<br />
** All of these things share the same base (very high) speed except for the last and obligatory part of the fleet, Raid Frigates. These are able to move EVEN FASTER, and so can go off on their own away from the main body if you so desire.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Doorkicker Fleet" as another starting fleet option.<br />
** Mostly focused on crowd control, but with siege frigates along to punch giant holes in large targets when required.<br />
** Basically this is the taking the idea of the Attritioner archetype, but giving one bit of counterbalance to it. Led by a black widow golem, this has MLRS Corvettes, Grenade Launcher Corvettes, Inhibiting Tesla Corvettes, and then Siege Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== New Battlestation Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Revealer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tachyon Array.<br />
<br />
* Gravitic Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Gravity Generator.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has greatly improved shields that extend out around itself.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has very powerful engineering capabilities.<br />
<br />
* Ensnarer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tractor Array.<br />
<br />
==== New Citadel Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Metabolic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing many weak shots that turn targets into resources on death.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of high power Agravic Bombs.<br />
<br />
* Inhibitor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of shots that reduce enemy weapon output.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires multiple paralysis shots.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing small bursts of bolts that zombify victims.<br />
<br />
* Interceptor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, packing multiple railcannons that shred fast moving targets.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Tesla-class structures (Guardians, turrets, etc) now reduce incoming damage from far away by 99% instead of 100%. This allows the targeting code to identify Tesla units as potential targets (instead of ignoring them as if they were Invulnerable). Units in FRD (and minor factions) should now be able to actually attack Tesla turrets.<br />
** Many people have complained about this, including TechSY730 and Democracy.<br />
<br />
* Ark Energy Overdrive is removed for now. Find another place for it (likely in a changed form).<br />
<br />
* Sniper damage bonus requirement reduced from speed 1200 to 1000.<br />
<br />
* Sniper: Starting bonus multiplier 5x -> 8x.<br />
<br />
* Space Plane gets the damage resistance to anything beyond range 4600 instead of 5600 now.<br />
** Basically you have to be closer to it to do full damage. Also means that when using Pursuit, they try to stay beyond that.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units have half the shots per salvo, but reload in half the time.<br />
** Helps them retarget more often.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units get their damage bonus at 30% enemy hull remaining, instead of only 20%.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette, Grenade Launcher Corvette: Mass 0.21x -> 0.3x.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard: EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Raptors, Autocannon Minipods, Space Planes, Agravic Pods, Vampire Claw, Raid Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Eyebot, Stealth Guardian: Albedeo increased to 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette, Sentinel Gunboats, Snipers, Siege Frigate, Tritium Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Tritium Guardian, Concussion Guardian, Plasma Guardian: Armour reduced to 40.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette: Shields 2,800 -> 1,800, EngineGx 8 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Claw: Armour 40 -> 70, Life Leech reduced from 1.5x to 1x.<br />
<br />
* Raptor: EngineGx 7 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Raptor Hull: 2900 -> 1900.<br />
<br />
* Stingray, Etherjet, Metabolizing Gangsaw: EngineGx 7 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette only applies reload penalty to armour below 60.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate: Damage 2500 -> 25,000, spreads it among targets instead of hitting 10 for full damage, range 10,100 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard, Pulsar Tank (main gun only): Range changed to 4200.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard: Speed reduced to 400.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette: Hull 1,000 -> 1,400, shields 1,000 -> 1,600, EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Armour increased to 110.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Shields 2,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
* Etherjet: Damage 30 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Turrets have a similar damage bonus to Ablative Gatlings now.<br />
** Makes them a bit more interesting, and also some room for other changes.<br />
<br />
* V-Wing: Hull/Shields changed from 500/3500 to 2000/2000.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette: Armour 50 -> 70, range 8,000 -> 6,000, shields 200 -> 800, speed 700 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot: Hull/Shields 1,000/1,000 -> 800/800, armour 50 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod: Armour 50 -> 70.<br />
<br />
* Dark Spire get a bit less energy if they're the ones that killed something.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian: Armour 90 -> 50, albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian: Hull/Shields changed from 20,000/20,000 to 10,000/30,000, EngineGx 12 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian, Paralysis Guardian: Speed 1,400 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian: Range 15,000 -> 8,000, Armour 90 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Guardian: EngineGx 13 -> 7, Armour 90 -> 110, range 8,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian: Albedo 0.4 -> 0.3, EngineGx 14 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guardian: Armour 50 -> 70, EngineGx 14 -> 7, range 8,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Guardians now have Cloaking, but attack half as fast.<br />
** Stealth Guardian now has a friend that it shares a group with.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Plasma Turret.<br />
** Closer to Heavy Beams than the rest.<br />
<br />
* All Turrets except Beam and Plasma have 10% lower health, but 15% greater damage in exchange.<br />
** Turrets felt like they slap the enemy to death slowly while outlasting everything. This is minor, but speeds it up a tad.<br />
<br />
* Slow the increase in cost for Science hacking multiple planets<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Minefields are now all one use. Damage increased for normal and Area mines to compensate, Paralysis mines have a longer effect as well.<br />
** This fixes numerous problems with them, including somehow surviving and the AI being confused, being repaired mid-combat, overkill or Military Command Station boosts having weird effects, etc.<br />
** Also lets us put damage bonuses on more cleanly without worsening any of those previous problems.<br />
<br />
* Marauders have a per-outpost cap on the Raiders they can produce. Unfortunately, stacking causes raiders to lose information about their spawning outpost. As a backup, also introduce a global cap on the number of raiders that the marauders can have.<br />
** This should dramatically tamp down the power of high intensity Marauders late game, especially in sandbox games.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Hunter/Killer.<br />
<br />
* AI Co-Processors reduce AIP by 20 more when all destroyed.<br />
<br />
* Player Golems are much weaker now, but can be upgraded alongside Arks. AI Golems have minor upgrades.<br />
** With enough upgrades, the player ones will match then surpass their previous forms.<br />
** Initial testing of Golems as Flagships was...amusing.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos starts with the zombifying weapon already usable.<br />
<br />
* Arks are a bit faster, have a bit less health and a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate can be upgraded as well, has some weapon and health changes and has three versions of itself now.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Guard Posts and Forcefield Generators are now actually in use again, as rather rare finds.<br />
** Connected to this, AI Turrets are in a tighter spread around whatever they defend, so they actually sit in the forcefield instead of uselessly outside.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord Phase 2 should actually come after you on that planet now.<br />
<br />
* Mercenaries spawn at Mark 1 now, and level up with the players tech level.<br />
** They're also a bit weaker to compensate for that.<br />
<br />
* Carrier Frigates are, unfortunately, gone. For the player, Drone producers must be a Fleet Leader, instead of a random Frigate or whatever in it, to avoid having nested fleets.<br />
** Potentially it can return in a fashion as a Fleet Leader in future.<br />
<br />
==== Crippled Status ====<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Mobile Fleet Flagships are now automatically something that cannot ever die, per se -- instead they become "crippled" when their health is less than 10% of its maximum value.<br />
** This solves a whole heck of a lot of problems that we otherwise have, such as where ships should rally to, and it also avoids the "corpse run" problem. <br />
*** If there are lone golems that players are capturing that die to remains, or other similar things that are not fleet leaders in that way, then those can still be a source of corpse runs, so it's not like that mechanic went away. It's simply not being a major focus for these types of ships.<br />
*** For a while, we were having things like Arks (which fall into this new category) automatically warp back away to some sort of safe space, but that's no longer a thing, which is good.<br />
** Their weapons and other systems all go offline when they have less than 10% health now, which is actually a pretty new limiter on them since it gives them only 90% of their health in which to work, although there's no longer the risk of them dying if you're not paying attention. But for balance purposes it's worth noting that we may wind up needing to beef these out slightly.<br />
** Enemy ships will consider them an uninteresting target if they are already crippled. It's possible that actually shots won't do any more damage when hitting them and they are crippled, which if so is a bug I need to fix later. But them not bothering to target the enemy seemed to be the most important thing for now. If you have a savegame with shots not damaging these ships, then please let us know.<br />
** It's also possible that there will be some edge cases where these things actually DO die rather than being crippled, in which cases repro saves will be very welcome.<br />
** Mobile fleets with a crippled centerpiece now have an effective remaining cap of 0 for all the ships that factories might be sending to them.<br />
*** This makes it so that factories won't supply new things for them anymore until there is an un-crippling of the centerpiece. Otherwise there's no reason to bring said centerpiece home for repairs, it's just this strange invincible vessel to which lots of ships rally.<br />
*** The metal spent on partial construction of ships is not refunded, but rather is stored at the fleet and as soon as the centerpiece is un-crippled things will come back online and resume wherever they were.<br />
** Note that if any ships are set to reverts_to_neutral_on_death="true" in xml while being of one of these two types, that really won't matter because they should never die. So those should probably be removed.<br />
<br />
==== Costs of Repair vs Construction ====<br />
<br />
* We recently (in this giant build group) redid how the repair costs were working for ships, and it's unclear how that changed things cost-wise compared to what the costs used to be (the costs as they used to be were super unclear).<br />
** What IS clear is that we changed it to just be the equivalent to rebuilding the unit, aka repairing it 50% is the same as building half a new unit. This was by design and we didn't think much about it, but it is definitely something that was eating through metal prodigiously.<br />
** What's also clear is that we were charging this FULL amount for repairing shields, health, and engine health -- ouch. So really if you were at half engine health, half shield health, and half hull health, you'd spend 150% of what it would cost to just build a new unit. Not good! We'd much rather encourage repair in general.<br />
** We now have a variety of dials in the xml external constants to affect the percentage of the full metal cost that it will cost for various repair types:<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_hull_points: 50% cost for repairing hulls.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_personal_shields: 20% cost for repairing personal shields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_bubble_forcefields: 75% cost for repairing bubble forcefields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_engines: 10% cost for repairing engine damage.<br />
** This should make things quite a bit less constrained on the player income-wise (it was feeling pretty tight at certain points in the early game because of your much larger forces), and also encourages reuse rather than just refleeting.<br />
<br />
==== Costs For AIs Purchasing Things ====<br />
<br />
<br />
* There is a new field, cost_for_ai_to_purchase, which is an integer that replaces the old_strength values.<br />
** This is now what AIs use to purchase units, and it is separate from how strong the unit is seen as.<br />
** This is problably way out of balance for now, but it at least is something we can tune directly from now on.<br />
** "Strength" in the game is now properly only used for evaluating, well, how strong something is. Aka how the AI acts, or as information for the player.<br />
** This is NOT something that goes up by mark level anymore, unlike before, and that's by design as well. The AI should be able to afford equal numbers of ship type X on a mark 1 or a mark 4 planet. That's how things were in AIWC, but it was oddly not at all like that here.<br />
<br />
* There are a bunch of other related changes to making the game use the CostForAIToPurchase field instead of the Strength field -- and remember that this is on the TypeData rather than the ForMark data, and that this is by design.<br />
** This is probably buggy as eff. There's a ton of code in this area, written by a bunch of people over a long period of time. So AIs will probably wind up making some pretty strange purchases for a little while, until we find and fix whatever bugs there are, aside from the inherent data issues.<br />
** Nonetheless, now was the time to go ahead and make this change, because it was a fundamental deterrent to us being able to balance what the AI builds separately from how strong the AIs and players view a unit as being. And that was one primary driver behind all things being a very similar cost-to-benefit ratio, at least on paper... and ongoing headache for Puffin, with that. The headaches won't end because of this change alone, but they will shift to a new sort: balancing each of those two things independently of one another ("does the strength stated for that unit seem to match how scary the AI and players should think it is?" and "does that cost an appropriate amount for the AI in most contexts, or is it too cheap or too expensive for them?").<br />
** But in the short term, this will be extra complicated by the fact that the math probably has some bugs in it because probably some things that should be using the new AI budget stuff are still using the strength data. I would be shocked if that's not the case, despite looking at it very carefully until I was cross-eyed.<br />
** And then the other question of "how much should this cost" is now out of date compared to what the strength values were, so even if the math is all perfect we're going to have bonkers data for a bit. That part I do leave to Puffin for the most part, sorry about that. ;)<br />
** As a general design note, both the players and the AIs have been having fewer ships than I would prefer, thus far. For players it was because of the way the ship caps were -- pre-fleets. For the AIs, it was because of the way they were being "charged more" for higher-mark stuff when looking at their own budgets. At the start of the game, a mark 3 planet and a mark 4 planet should have the same relative amount of budget spent, but one gets better stuff from it. Previously, unlike AIWC, the mark 4 planet was getting charged a premium and so felt anemic by comparison to the mark 3 planet.<br />
*** This may in turn wind up with the AI having waaaay too many ships for a while, but if we pack those into the guard posts as contents that are not deployed yet, that should have zero performance impact. And it will be good for the humans who suddenly have a lot more firepower at their disposal. Overall the goal coming up is for everyone to have a whole heck of a lot more shooty things, but having them more spread out so that the mega-battles aren't individually any larger than they are now. It will take us a little while to get that part perfect, so please bear with us.<br />
<br />
* TryToSpendBudget_CPA has had some updates to how it deploys ships from itself, since the way it stores ships is different from the start. This may or may not cause demonic fumes to erupt, so let us know.<br />
<br />
* UnlockShipLineForAI() has been removed, as AIs don't work that way anymore, either.<br />
<br />
=== Achievements ===<br />
<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with each AI type enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with some of the Minor factions enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with various galaxy sizes<br />
* Add Achievements for controlling a given number of planets in a game<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have > X Metal/Energy/Hacking points"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Kill > X units", "Lose > X units" and "Kill > X && Lose > Y units"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have a campaign X hours long"<br />
** Note that the above types of Achievements can be added to the game with only XML changes<br />
** TODO: Add a UI to show the player which Achievements have been earned<br />
<br />
=== Science/Tech Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete rework of how techs function. They are no longer tied to individual ships like before, but rather there are actual technologies that are named and that benefit a variety of ships.<br />
<br />
* Ark Upgrade Points and Destruction Points are both confusing and have been removed from the game as a concept.<br />
** But never fear, something very similar with a clearer name and purpose is being added back: Fleet Experience Points.<br />
<br />
* The initial techs have been added, and applied to ships and turrets and whatnot.<br />
** This is, at best, a first pass for now. However, there are are present 14 distinct techs that you can upgrade that are more ship-abilities-focused, and which are generally shared between strikecraft, frigates, and turrets. This is the general intended design, even if exact matchings aren't correct or ideal right now.<br />
** The costs here are also potentially bonkers for real-world use. Additionally, there is a maximum number of times a given tech can be researched, and that is usually set at 4 right now, kind of arbitrarily. That does NOT mean that the max tech level of a ship is 4, however.<br />
*** Ship tech levels are a combination of all the techs that benefit them (some have more than one), as well as any upgrades to the tech level of their specific fleet. So some are much easier to get to a VERY high mark now, whereas others are almost impossible to do.<br />
** There is now a new UpgradeMeFromFleetOnly tech that isn't shown on the menu, but which we use in cases where we want to denote that this IS something we can upgrade, but only at the fleet level rather than the ship level.<br />
*** This is used for things like command stations, engineers, economic production units, and forcefields. That makes these things a lot more location-dependent in terms of how high quality your ships of those sorts are. This should be pretty interesting, actually, and it takes them out of contention for the main science upgrade costs more.<br />
** Overall the goal here is fewer science upgrades happening, but each one having a much larger impact. We may have gone too far in that direction with this first setup of the data, but at this point it's all an xml-based issue.<br />
** Note that all of these techs are based around upgrading all the ships that you have that subscribe to this tech via tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and that crosses fleets.<br />
*** This should benefit mercenaries, although that hasn't been tested.<br />
*** We did base this loosely around Puffin's classes/roles document, but this is meant to be... slightly both more and less granular than that document, and to be multi-categorized in many cases. So your document is still relevant (mainly for fleet design), but it's just semi-related to this specific use.<br />
** It's also worth noting here that some ships/turrets/whatever have multiple tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and those are going to go up in tech quality FAST by comparison to their peers. Assuming that players unlock techs synergistically. So some of the ones like the Light, Heavy, etc, might need to be a lot more expensive than they are right now.<br />
*** As noted already, the balance here is a bananas basic proof of concept right now, and I'm sure broken in a thousand ways. The only purpose of me throwing this together at the moment was to give a proof of concept unified design philosophy to look at, even if details are really wrong. This gives Puffin and others a chance to actually make it make a lot more sense while I move on to work on other things.<br />
** Note that the EXP concept doesn't come into play at ALL with these sorts of techs. These are purely science costs. The EXP is fleet-based stuff instead, and may not cost any science at all (fleets that auto-upgrade would be nice). But also spending some science on a specific fleet's upgrading would be nice, so that's something that will likely be possible. How that works at the planet level is still TBD, I have two different possible models for that and haven't been able to choose between them yet.<br />
** Also please note that for an individual ship/turret/whatever type, there's no risk of it going above its max mark level, which is either 7 or is explicitly defined as something lower, or is markless. If it subscribes to 2 techs that each have 1 upgrade, it would naturally be mark 3, unless it's capped at mark 2 in which case it will sit at mark 2. And if its fleet is also upgraded 3x, then it would be mark 6, unless it was capped lower.<br />
** A general note: This overall tech system has way fewer decision points than the old one, which is good because that makes them actually something that you can contemplate. However, as a byproduct of that, you'll often get some secondary stuff upgraded that you cared less about, and that actually provides opportunities for you to make new use of them in interesting ways if you so choose. Also also, you're a lot more likely to have really wide mark level disparities between parts of your empire (different planets and fleets), which is more in keeping with the first game albeit from a completely new angle. This is exciting.<br />
** Another general note: the overall ship caps per fleet will only be whatever they are, but the idea is to have larger effective ship caps for players by the late game because of a proliferation of fleets. In some cases in the late game you'll also have some fleets that are incredibly technologically superior to the AI, and other fleets that are incredibly behind the times. How this exactly plays out will be interesting to see from players, but in a theoretical sense there's nothing wrong with that; we may just have to adjust some balance dials over time to keep things from being TOO extra weak or strong, and/or to make the AI really reactive to overly-advanced forces if those exist. Here again this is an opportunity for more gameplay, rather than a real challenge in a negative sense.<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for science has been improved to be more accurate and also more descriptive:<br />
** Spend Science to unlock higher-level units and structures. It is gained primarily by claiming new planets and holding them for a while.<br />
** There is a limited amount that scientists can learn from what they find in each system, so you'll need to keep finding new research targets for them.<br />
** A single ship type can be upgraded by multiple tech upgrades as well as from its parent fleet gaining experience, so be sure to consider your options carefully.<br />
** More techs will appear in the tech sidebar as you capture fleets with ships that can benefit from them.<br />
<br />
* The tech sidebar is once again functional, and allows for you to unlock techs that benefits various ships that you have.<br />
** It looks and works a lot more like the hacking sidebar instead of the build sidebar, now, since the type of data it needs to show is very different. This makes it a lot more text-heavy and showing related costs and the mark levels of ships in a really clear and concise fashion. Yay! It does mean no real icons on here, though.<br />
** The tooltips for techs that you can upgrade are also now completely redone, and it shows you which ships will benefit as well as how many of them you have. It doesn't show you the mark level of the ships, because you might have several different mark levels of each ship type since they may be upgraded by fleet upgrades.<br />
** This was certainly needed in order to make the game all that playable in 0.850, but in terms of why we did it right now versus after the build menu, it's mainly because this was simpler and was therefore a nice dry run for the more complicated menus.<br />
<br />
* Ok! So we've already learned quite a bit about techs and how people will wind up using them. Clearly the new system works well, but is going to need refinement; chief among that is just how many upgrades a given line can grant.<br />
** One of the other things that was immediately most clear was that "Ark" as a technology was really not cutting it. This was way too broadly useful, and "Battlestation" was almost as bad.<br />
** First of all, these need to be more pricey, but some Arks should cost more than others, and some Arks should share techs, but not ALL Arks.<br />
** With that in mind, there's a new schema in place for various Arks and Battlestations broken out as follows:<br />
*** Ark Spirit (most basic stuff), Ark Heart (happy helpful stuff, less dangerous), Ark Armor (beefcakes you need to really pay for), Ark Fist (holy smokes these things are powerful, and thus expensive, and only have 3 marks rather than 4).<br />
*** Battlestation Shelter (protection-oriented), Battlestation Hand (grabbing or slowing enemies), Battlestation Architect (engineering or construction).<br />
** And it's worth noting that Battlestations are really oriented into those as well as the previously-were-fortresses Citadels that are way more combat-oriented, so splitting those also matters:<br />
*** Citadel Executioner (kill a lot of things), Citadel Protector (yeah, hurt them, but protect other stuff as the primary), Citadel Consumer (eat or steal the enemies).<br />
** And then there's the Spire Frigates, which really don't need to be lumped in with Arks or Battlestations or Citadels. I'm sure these will expand in the future, but for now we just have the new "Spire Core" (for all three types of Spire Frigate), and they're super expensive but can be upgraded 4 times.<br />
** The overall lesson here is that we CAN have more techs than we maybe were once thinking, particularly since they only show up conditionally. This also makes the Arks and Golems and so on a lot more unique in terms of how well they are upgraded (or not).<br />
*** This will get more crowded in the tech tab with time, unfortunately, as you unlock a lot of ships. For that reason they are now down at the end of the list below all the actual main ship lines.<br />
*** This may also hint that we want more tech lines in general for the other ships, and/or that they need some changes to their science costs, but we'll cross those bridges when we come to them.<br />
<br />
* The science intel message is now more brief in the sidebar, and more informative in the tooltip. Now everything fits.<br />
<br />
* On factions, there is now a InheritsTechUpgradesFromPlayerFactions serialized bool that should be set to true for any factions that the designer wishes to recieve all of the upgrades for the player techs.<br />
** Aka, if two players each have upgrades to Tech A, then the faction will get the largest of the two, not the combined value of them.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the (very elegant, sadly) "tech view" version of tooltips that showed all the ways a ship would be upgraded by gaining a mark level.<br />
** That was overwhelming as an amount of information, but also there's just no place where we'd actually be asking you to see that anymore. Now you upgrade techs that hit a bunch of ships at once, and so this per-ship-type comparison stuff just has no place in there anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Vision Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete vision rework. Planets are all now either<br />
** Unexplored: You have no vision of what is on this planet. You also cannot send ships to or through Unexplored planets.<br />
** Explored: You can't see exactly what's on the planet, but you can see who owns it and the sidebar works. Chris has a TODO to figure out how to show stale data/interesting visuals when you try to look at an Explored planet.<br />
** Watched: This state means "Explored and you have ships there". You can see what's on the planet, but when you no longer have ships there the planet will go back to Explored.<br />
** Permanently Watched: you always have vision here<br />
<br />
* At the beginning of the game, all Player Homeworlds and adjacent planets are Permanently Watched, and all planets 2 hops from a player homeworld are Explored.<br />
<br />
* Capturing a planet or killing an AI command station automatically Explores all adjacent planets<br />
<br />
* You can also Explore a planet by hacking an unexplored planet, as long as you have an adjacent Explored or Watched planet (otherwise you could just explore random planets around the map which seems less interesting to me)<br />
<br />
* You can Permanently Watch a previously Explored planet by hacking (but the AI will launch a small counterattack at you when you do so).<br />
<br />
* The game now tracks the specific gamesecond that entities were created, and when they entered planets, versus "how long ago."<br />
** There are helper methods for getting the familiar "how long ago" data, however.<br />
<br />
* Now that we know the last gamesecond we had vision of a planet, and the gamesecond that ships entered planets, on planets where we do not have current intel we are instead showing the effective last-known data on the sidebar, as well as actually showing the ships visually (through the distortion), even moving around if they are. <br />
** This won't show any ships that have been more newly added to that planet, though, and the sidebar notes that. So there might be a huge hunter fleet moving through there and you'd have no idea, for instance.<br />
<br />
* For planets that are completely unexplored, you cannot directly send ships there anymore, nor can you select it on the galaxy map or send your view there.<br />
** It IS still possible for your ships to path through completely-unexplored planets, for the time being, however.<br />
<br />
* Trying to make it so that player ships are completely unable to pathfind through unexplored planets is rather more than a bit of a nightmare. With that in mind, they are now simply disabled if they wind up going into unexplored space for whatever reason.<br />
** We can make this more sophisticated in the future, but for now that should handle anything exploity.<br />
** Players can use various tricks on the sidebar to click to the fleet leader heading through unexplored space to see such a planet, but they'll wind up seeing nothing there, so they gain very little. And meanwhile, the ships of the player are unable to shoot but still able to move, and enemies are able to shoot and are completely invisible to them, so that's... quite a bit of "fun."<br />
** Main thing we probably want to do at some point is get player ships to try to prefer not going into unexplored territory if at all possible.<br />
** Edit: nevermind, player ships should not be able to path through them at all. So yay! But if they do, they'll be disabled.<br />
<br />
* The "explored" status for planets has been split into "explored by natural means" and "explored by distant hacking."<br />
** This mostly doesn't matter and isn't something we're making a big deal about in most places. But using spy nanites basically is no longer a way you can expand how much your empire gains in vision every time you capture a planet.<br />
** The "explore next to explored" logic basically ignores stuff that was spy nanites. Maybe there should be a conduct later that makes it not ignore that, since that ALSO would provide some interesting strategic options, but frankly for now that seems like overkill. We shall see.<br />
<br />
* When you don't have vision of a planet, there is now a fancy distortion effect that is part grainy-tv and part slow-matrixy-refraction.<br />
** There's not a way to disable this effect, because it shouldn't be fast enough to make anyone nauseous, and there's no real point in looking at planets that you can't see anything at, anyway. This just makes it clear why you can't see those planets (the sidebar says no vision, but why did all the ships just disappear?)<br />
<br />
==== "Hard Mode" For Scouting ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Scout Adjacent Only" conduct, with the following description:<br />
** TLDR: This is harder and will make you take a lot of planets. For advanced players only.<br />
** Details: Normally when you capture a planet, all planets adjacent to ANY explored planets become explored. Unless the map is very narrow, this causes you to get exponentially more planets you can see as the game goes on. Even further than that, there is a minimum number of planets it will explore for you when you take a planet, depending on the number of planets in your galaxy, so that snake maps and other really narrow maps aren't unplayably hard.<br />
** With 'Scout Adjacent Only' enabled, it tosses all that out the window. Instead it just explores any planets adjacent to the planet you just captured. This will make snake maps almost impossible to play (so that's a bad combo), but on maps with more cross-connections it can lead to... a certain added strategic challenge. This still seems masochistic even in the best case, but have fun with that if you want.<br />
<br />
=== Removed/Revamped Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Science Labs, Hackers and Scouts are removed. Scout functions of the Sentinel Frigate and Sentry Starship are removed.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Starships are now per-planet cap, cannot use wormholes, are built directly (like turrets) and die to remains.<br />
** They're effectively Decloakers from Classic, but far more convenient.<br />
<br />
* Engineers are per-planet cap, cap reduced significantly and can't use Wormholes.<br />
** The new Combat Engineers are able to use Wormholes and are a type of Strikecraft instead.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Space Dock and Mobile Builder are not unlockable or buildable, and are instead capturables.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Builder is now the Basic Battlestation, and is capturable.<br />
** And now there are actually like 5 variants of this, thanks to Puffin.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Factory is now the CombatFactory, and is capturable.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Fortress is now a form of Battlestation called Citadels.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Remains Rebuilder has been removed, and the RebuildingRemains metal_flow has now been granted to all of the player command stations and the player mobile builders. It's no longer something that is assist-line-distance-based, nor is it something that requires a dedicated unit to run around doing things with.<br />
** This is one of those streamlining bits that people have requested for a while, but Chris in particular was noting that engineers and rebuilders need to be two separate functions (and they do). But making this instead essentially work like claimables and "just happen" solves the issue that people were complaining about without getting into territory of making the AI for the engineers likely to be bonkers.<br />
** Later we will need for all of our Battlestation types to have this, most likely, or things will get funky at times. This last is a note for Puffin.<br />
<br />
* Colony ships have been removed from the game, since that was a level of indirection that was not needed.<br />
** Similarly, hackers are gone, as are mobile builders in the classic sense.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers in the codebase are now gone. The concept of warheads, in the codebase, is now gone.<br />
<br />
* Starships are now called Frigates, including in the codebase itself. Docks are now called Factories in the codebase.<br />
<br />
* Golems as a standalone thing (for players) are now gone, as are Arks. They are now combined into being the Mobile Fleet Flagships. They are still called golems and Arks, but they're the centerpieces of your fleets at any rate.<br />
<br />
* Really key new limitation for drones, for the sake of sanity and not having nested fleets. This really only applies to player ships, in the main:<br />
** The drone producer must also be the fleet leader. So if we're talking about a player ship, it needs to be the Battlestation or Flagship of a fleet, and not something like a random Frigate as part of it.<br />
** On the AI and NPC sides, they don't really use fleets the same way normally, so anything that is a drone generator just becomes in charge of a new Drone fleet type.<br />
** This is probably going to be the source of some "fun" bugs. It will start spewing errors like crazy when this happens (once per second per ship that has this issue during gameplay), if it happens. It's possible to set this up with bad xml, basically.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for automatically building remains rebuilders and setting them to auto-FRD are both now gone, since so are remains rebuilders.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for "brave scouts" is also now gone, since scouts are also being removed and rejiggered.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers have been removed. They were not exactly exciting, and they don't make sense in the new method of AIs working with unlocked ships.<br />
<br />
* Schematic Servers (formerly ARSes) have been removed. Those also no longer make sense in the brave new world that is the new setup for fleets, etc.<br />
<br />
* The idea of CorruptedAIDesigns has been removed, as that was something that people weren't really using and it doesn't fit well with the new approach to AIs and fleets.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of stuff relating to Golems the way they used to be, including the entire Broken Golems faction, has been removed.<br />
** Golems are now another form of Ark, basically, and are capturable in that fashion.<br />
<br />
* Metal harvesters are now markless, rather than being upgradeable. This solves an issue with them being funky upgrade levels on enemy planets, and in general the ability to upgrade them is something that I was iffy about in the current system anyway. It was likely to be too powerful.<br />
<br />
* The home forcefield generator, which has existed since the first game as a last-ditch tool that you have until you lose it, is now something that you can rebuild.<br />
** It's also now markless and has its stats more directly set, so that you definitely never get more than one. It was kinda funky having it be mark 2 in this game from the start, and it also led you to having a cap of 2 instead of 1.<br />
** The whole purpose of this is so that you can rebuild it if it dies, since you don't otherwise inherently have access to any forcefield generators on your home planet at all, now. You have to put a battlestation or a citadel there in order to get a forcefield beyond the first, and depending on your playstyle you might choose not to do that.<br />
<br />
=== Capturing Planets ===<br />
<br />
* So long as you have a mobile fleet leader on a planet with no command station (enemy or otherwise), you can now capture it like you would have previously done with a colony ship.<br />
** Aka, just take any of your golems or Arks over to the enemy planet and destroy their command station and you're immediately ready to set up your own. Boom, simpler.<br />
<br />
=== UI Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Player profile stuff relating to choosing a default Ark type is now removed under the hood. It hasn't been on the front-end for quite some time now.<br />
** Note that a lot of the stuff with Arks having a story and a portrait image are thus now gone, although again this isn't new on the front-end. Arks simply have a new role now.<br />
<br />
* You are no longer asked to pick a Chief Adviser at the start of the game for your profile. That was a lot of confusion an un-needed choice on something rather trivial, and got in the way of getting you to the actual game.<br />
** Now it just has a screen for profiles that asks for a name and your default colors and that's it.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, you can no longer select a starting bonus ship type OR a starting Ark for your faction as a player. Neither of those make any sense anymore. Now there's something new:<br />
** The game now lets you choose from special starting fleets, of which at the moment there are 5 handcrafted ones. The player can choose which one they want in the game lobby, just like they could with Arks.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" are now able to, and in fact required to have, a description.<br />
** They also now have tooltips in the lobby, which show these descriptions, thus explaining what the heck they do.<br />
<br />
* The conduct for "start with planets explored" has been removed, as that's really cutting out a core part of the game now.<br />
** The scouting being so much more automated now kind of makes it a bit different from other games where you can turn off fog of war. Despite the first game having the option to turn off fog of war, that really takes out the entire flow of the game when it comes to this game.<br />
** Scouting isn't some hassle thing "that you have to do but might want to skip" anymore, but now is part of the reward structure for capturing planets, and so turning that off just would have... a lot of balance issues, among other things.<br />
<br />
* Added the following description to the Experimental: AI Civil War conduct, which is the only pre-existing conduct currently remaining. This may or may not be fully accurate:<br />
** If there are multiple AI factions, they all hate each other and will fight each other. They still hate YOU, too, but all this chaos and infighting is assumedly to your beneit. Then again, you might just find yourself in the crossfire of AIs who are getting more powerful more rapidly due to aggroing each other... so it's anyones's guess as to how long you'll last.<br />
<br />
* Working on making the tooltips for ships substantially more brief while still conveying the important information. Some of them are getting ridiculous for sure.<br />
<br />
* Added a new type of control for our settings menu, which is an integer slider. This is preferable to the textbox or dropdown for some cases.<br />
** We're now using that for the auto-build engineers, which also defaults to 2 now instead of 0.<br />
** We're also now using that for the various volume controls, which were inexplicably textboxes before.<br />
** We're also now using this for the minimum autosaves to keep, and the autosaves interval.<br />
<br />
* When planets are explored via you having just capturing a planet or whatever, it now shows a message log entry saying what planets were discovered and how many of them there were. This way it's clear that scouting is even happening!<br />
<br />
* display_name_for_sidebar has been added for entities, as it lets us give a more brief name to appear on the sidebar while still having a fuller name in tooltips.<br />
** This is optional and will just use the full name if it needs to. But if the sidebar is having bad wrapping of some text, then this should be filled with something shorter. Case in point is the home forcefield generator.<br />
<br />
* There used to be some logic about automatically opening certain windows when you selected certain kinds of ships (build menu when selecting command station, science menu when selecting science lab, etc), but since so much of that is all centralized or otherwise non-ship-related now, or all related to centerpieces, this just led to the UI kind of oddly seeming to do its own thing at times now. This has been removed.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for factories now show which fleets they are supporting, and what the status is of all the individual line items they are building for that fleet. This is super satisfying to just watch, turns out.<br />
<br />
==== Intel Tab ====<br />
<br />
* Something I talked about on the podcast is an new form of objectives, which is an idea that I've been refining since then (and had already been prior to then).<br />
** However, the "objectives" on the sidebar as they stand right now are not something I want to get rid of at all (most of them), given that they are kind of a "todo list of things you might want to do," and that's a pretty important tool to have.<br />
** With that in mind, the Objectives sidebar has instead been renamed to Intel, and over time we'll probably take out some things like the beginner tips and the primary objectives and so on. For the primary objectives we'll likely just recontextualize the same thing, but the beginner tips we'll probably fold into the new objectives (actual objectives system, separate from this intel system).<br />
** All of the really time-consuming-to-add and detailed "objectives" stuff about where we found things to capture and hack and kill, and where we should be scouting, etc, is all going to stay. It's just under the name "intel" instead, now. Really, that's what it is: information that lets you make decisions yourself, be that diverging from your main objectives or defying them or whatever else.<br />
<br />
==== Build Tab ====<br />
<br />
* The "Direct Build" sidebar has been completely reworked from scratch.<br />
** It's no longer based on icons and tiny buttons, but instead has much larger buttons in categories. This may lead to more scrolling in some cases, but it also should be way more legible AND in general the player should have fewer things that they can build at any given planet unless they've stacked a lot of battlestations and citadels there.<br />
** Each line item not only shows what type it is, but also has to include what fleet it goes with -- so if that's the planet fleet, or one of the battlestations or citadels, that is relevant.<br />
*** Why is this relevant? Well, those things can be upgraded independently, for one. And for another note, it's possible that you might choose to move a battlestation or citadel to a new planet, thus making all of their units on this planet stop functioning. So it does play into the strategy if you plan on moving around your battlestations and/or citadels (as you likely will).<br />
** These also now show the cap directly in a 0/3 fashion or similar, with it showing how many have been built out of how many are possible. It's possible that you might have more built than are possible to build, which it will show properly, but with a red warning.<br />
** It also more directly shows the cost for construction -- super useful -- and grays out the text of any entities that you have already built to the full cap so that they are not so noticeable.<br />
** This whole setup is really geared around having many fewer TYPES of things that you can directly build at a given planet, and that's the intention for the long term. We don't really want dozens of options here, but rather a smaller and more interesting selection that you can build from contextually depending on the planet.<br />
** At this point you can actually construct new direct-placement units!<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch of changes have been made to the way the tooltips look in build mode for entities, and also to how things are hovered-over in the build menu and galaxy in terms of what highlights, when.<br />
** It's stuff we'll refine further with time, but if something seems off, please let us know.<br />
<br />
* When a Zenith Trader is visiting, you'll see a bunch of stuff on the sidebar under various categories, noted in pink as being from the Zenith Trader.<br />
** This is different from past versions of the game where there was a specific category for all the Zenith Trader stuff regardless of what its function was. This actually makes it a lot easier to find things by function, particularly if the amount of wares on offer goes up a lot in the future.<br />
** For things like the Station-Keepers (Chained Dark Spire Eidolon), there is now a per-planet cap higher than 1 for these. That's pretty nifty, and it works!<br />
** Note that even if you don't have the metal for these projects NOW, while the trader is visiting, you can start the projects and pay for them over time. This is as before and is by design. The UI might be a bit confusing on this, not sure.<br />
<br />
* In the build sidebar, turrets and "other defenses" have now been properly split out. Before they were all kind of mixed together in "defenses," which got confusing.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Frigates are now part of the Station Keepers sidebar instead of Other Defenses.<br />
** This is meant to be the case for anything that is mobile, essentially.<br />
<br />
==== Hotkeys ====<br />
<br />
* The hotkey for opening the tech tab now only opens that, versus opening that or the hacking tab contextually.<br />
** Given that the docks tab is gone, the build hotkey now only opens the build sidebar directly as well, kind of implicitly.<br />
<br />
* There are now separate hotkeys for opening the hacking (H) and fleet (R) tabs.<br />
<br />
* The "split selection" keybind that was previously L in this game and the original is now semicolon.<br />
<br />
* The "Unload Transports" (U) hotkey has had its description reworked as follows:<br />
** Any mobile fleet flagships that you have selected will immediately unload any ships they are presently transporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new hotkey (L): Load Transports<br />
** Any ships that you have selected which are part of a mobile fleet will immediately get inside their flagship for transport if their flagship is on the same planet.<br />
** Note that the need for this to be separate for unload is that it will be common to have partially-loaded transports and you don't want to get into funky toggle situations with ships getting in and out when you really meant "keep getting in" or "keep getting out."<br />
<br />
* The keybind for "select all scouts" has been removed, since scouts are removed.<br />
<br />
* SelectNextUnitType and SelectPreviousUnitType have both been removed, as they were buggy like crazy in general, and also don't really make all that much sense in the new workflow of things.<br />
<br />
* Trigger Current Master Menu Action 1-12 are now gone as hotkeys, as they only worked in the escape menu (since the rest of the master menu was gone as of over a year ago) and it was using up a lot of hotkeys for something not all that useful anymore. Once upon a time this was brilliant, it just doesn't fit anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Savegame Format Revamp ===<br />
<br />
* The default serialization style for things the game saves is now Byte arrays rather than the char arrays. This will make savegames vastly smaller than before, although not as legible (as if they were before) to edit by hand.<br />
** This is great for a variety of practical reasons, but among them it causes fewer transient garbage collector allocations. And it also makes it so that large integer numbers are no longer something that make the savegame larger. Rather than one char's worth of bytes per digit in the number (1-6 bits, per UTF-8 specs), it now just has a fixed 4 bytes for the number regardless of how many digits it has.<br />
** This breaks all the previous savegames, but they were already broken anyway.<br />
** Player profiles and settings are still using char arrays so that they can be edited by hand as desired.<br />
<br />
* There was previously a "too smart for our own good" method for "compacting" integers down that were used as primary keys. This could cause all sorts of bugs when used incorrectly, and aside from known bugs that this fixes, we happened to see a few other bugs in passing as we were removing it.<br />
** Note that this was needed almost exclusively because of the char arrays serialization that we were using. Now that we're using byte arrays, this compacting is not just bug-prone it's actually not any more efficient in the first place. So it's really good to have that out of there in general.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting a particular bug caused by this.<br />
<br />
* Items that are truly deprecated, but that we still want some record of for whatever reason, are presently moved into a new GameData/Pre900Deprecated folder.<br />
** This way we still have the xml, but the game never looks at it. Normally the purpose of deprecating something is to make sure that savegames that are older can still be read in. With 0.900 we're breaking the savegames anyway, so clearing out the deprecated stuff is only natural.<br />
<br />
* As part of this release, we had switched to writing our savegames in a binary format. However, this wasn't really working fully properly because it was trying to transcode that into unicode, which in turn would sometimes complain with the "Unable to translate Unicode character XXX at index YYY" error.<br />
** This was also notably less efficient in terms of GC usage. Now we're just directly writing the binary file.<br />
** In fact, now we're writing a BuzzsawBinaryByteArray, which is 449kb where even the binary array was 3.2mb, and the char buffer was even larger.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "external data" (aka modder-type data or data that was being saved into the external projects) is saved used to be based on using a sub-serializer that then itself got written as a string back into the main serialization stream.<br />
** This was probably done as a way to isolate freaky bugs introduced into savegames by modders, but with our new serialization logging that's really no longer a worry. As it stands, the sub-serialization may have instead been preventing us from properly saving sub-data and getting it back reliably. Also it was vastly less efficient in the new context.<br />
** Anyway, given that the new context is such that doing the data saving of external data just fully inline without any wrappering is more efficient, that's now what we're doing. Based on the serialization logs, this seems to work great.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging Additions ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Savegame Serialization Logs" setting into the debug section of the game settings.<br />
** When saving a game, write WorldSerialization.txt, and when loading it write WorldDeserialization.txt -- both in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if a savegame won't load for some reason; this lets us do a diff of the two files and figure out where they are diverging.<br />
** Note that this won't help with an existing broken savegame. This will only help if you have it turned on prior to creating a savegame you expect to be broken. This is basically a way for us to test the savegame creation and load process, which otherwise can be incredibly opaque and take a lot of time to hunt down.<br />
** It's hard to understate just how big a deal this tool is. This is an area that could have us searching for hours or days for a problem, and now we can find it in minutes, potentially.<br />
*** The specific genesis of the feature was in fact Chris spending hours searching for something and not finding a solution, and finally thinking there had to be a better way. We should have thought of this 10 years ago, honestly.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Mapgen Log" field in the debug part of the settings.<br />
** When generating a new map in the lobby, write MapGen.txt in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if mapgen isn't really doing what you expect for some reason, or you just want some detailed insight into what is happening and in what order.<br />
** To hook into this as a modder for your own purposes, you simply write to MapgenLogger.Log(). If you're doing anything CPU-expensive or that involves string concatenation or similar, then you can wrap that inside an "if ( MapgenLogger.IsActive )" statement. This simply avoids slowing down mapgen at all when logging is not active.<br />
** There is some serious funkiness going on with some data being null when it should not be, and this is how we're going about figuring out when and why that is happening. But this also lets us see the results of maps that are generated without having to scan with our eyeballs all over a big map so much. Given how much has just changed in mapgen and elsewhere, this is handy, even if we didn't have an immediate bug issue.<br />
<br />
* The fleet centerpiece "repairs" no longer get dumped to the log unless a new debug setting is enabled. This was essentially just spamming the log for no good reason at the moment, but it's useful to be able to see it in some limited cases, hence the new option.<br />
<br />
* Put in a buuuunch of debugging code for figuring out where excess notifications that hang out at the top of your screen are coming from.<br />
** The tooltips for the excess notifications should now explain what the problem is.<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Early Access Starts!]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Arrival_of_Fleets&diff=35634AI War 2:The Arrival of Fleets2019-05-31T21:24:00Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Bufgixes */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== Known Issues ==<br />
<br />
* The tutorial is temporarily disabled while we redo a bunch of stuff.<br />
<br />
* Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is temporarily disabled''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.<br />
<br />
* There are a variety of ships/units that don't have final graphics at the moment, though they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
* We're in progress with a major revamp of some systems based on cumulative feedback in order to push the game even more towards the feel of the original game... despite further divergence from it at a mechanical level.<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After 3 months of Early Access and 2+ years of development, we've reached a point where we know what we want the 1.0 version of the game to look like. SO very much about this game already works well, but there are some major deficits coming into this phase when comparing this sequel to the original game. The aim of this phase is to close those gaps and make this clearly the superior product in terms of playability, fun factor, the amount of fun thinking-about-interesting-challenges you do during gameplay, and so on. <br />
<br />
There's also of course still more polish and bugfixing that we want to get done, and the lobby redo is still scheduled of course (but quick starts are an awesome alternative, and have helped us to defer a final design for the lobby as we formed up some other bits of the game first), but we're feeling really good about this final sprint toward 1.0. We still do need to also finish some graphics for the existing ships, but they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
There is some more content coming as part of this phase, kind of by definition -- fleets as a concept Change Everything in a good way -- but the focus is on taking what is a pretty awesome game with a lot of depth and pushing it to a level that we hope beats the pants off the original, finally. Stay tuned.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.863 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
=== New Lobby Settings for Controlling Gameplay ===<br />
<br />
* Added new setting to the Scouting section of the lobby options: Max Planets To Scout At Once<br />
** Depending on the topography of your map, capturing a planet may cause a TON of planets to suddenly be revealed. Rather than this getting TOO crazy and showing you the whole map after you capture one planet, this lets it be more gradual. The default is 8.<br />
** Ranges from 3 to 40.<br />
** This is a good example of the new types of things we can do thanks to the Lobby Options tab, which we couldn't cleanly do before using the regular game settings (because of multiplayer sync, and the potential for abuse with mid-game changes, etc).<br />
** Note that this is so far untested, so let us know if there are bugs.<br />
** Thanks to Mckloshiv and BadgerBadger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* A new capturables section has been added to the lobby options, with 6 different options in there that you can now tune.<br />
** This is one of the first examples of an option that affects mapgen seeding but not then the gameplay after that.<br />
** These basically let you control how many of each type of fleet you'd like to have out in the galaxy, in a multiplier-like fashion.<br />
** It also explains what all the kinds of fleets are, and what their role is in the game, so that's kind of a self-teaching moment, which is nice.<br />
** As one example, it lets you turn off basically all the officer fleets (all but one of them) by setting the multiplier for that to 0x, and you could then double or triple the number of regular fleets to compensate. This would let you have a very hero-less sort of game style, if you don't like the big centerpiece flagships being there at all. Or of course you could completely reverse it, and make it very hero-centric with only two (in that case) transport-based fleets, and instead have all the rest be officer-style.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring this addition, which lets people have more the flavor of game they want.<br />
<br />
* Added a new slider setting to the capturables section of the options menu in the lobby: Basic Battlestations Per Planet<br />
** Your command stations give very few turrets for defending themselves (except the Military variant), so in order to defend yourself you'll want to capture battlestations (which come with LOADS of turrets and other defensive goodies).<br />
** Since you have to capture territory to get a battlestation for defending territory... it makes a lot of sense to have more than just one on any planets that have them. The default is 2, but you can have up to 4, or make things really hard and just have one.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and others for inspiring this new flexibility.<br />
<br />
* Added a new slider setting to the capturables section of the options menu in the lobby: Citadels Per Planet<br />
** Similar to the basic battlestations, these provide defensive goodies and turrets to help defend your planets. However, since the citadels themselves are also giant fortresses in their own right, giving only one per planet seems to make the most sense for most cases. But if you want to grant yourself more, you can!<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and others for inspiring this new flexibility.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts Return ===<br />
<br />
* Quick Starts have been added back into the game, and now function again.<br />
** However, we had to create a whole new set of them, since the old quick starts were all in the old savegame format and also didn't really have settings that make sense anymore, anyway.<br />
** The order for the categories of basic, moderate, and harder is now in the order you would naturally expect (1,2,3), and then the Fun With Factions are later on. As will any other generalized quick starts be.<br />
** We have only added in three quick starts thus far, all in the basic category. The others we'll work on soon.<br />
*** One has the classic fleet as the starting situation, with a difficulty 6 AI and 100 planets on a realistic map.<br />
*** The next has the classic fleet, with two difficulty 6 AIs and a 120 planet Octopus map.<br />
*** The last has the raid fleet, with one difficulty 7 AI, and then also the Zenith Trader wandering around. Clusters microcosm map.<br />
** Thanks<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes and Minor Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* A variety of changes have been made to the map generation code and interface so that the number of planets allowed per galaxy is now shown as a slider, and is properly enforced at all times.<br />
** The actual map types have also had their minimum and maximum numbers of planets brought inwards some -- up from 10 in most cases to 40 for the minimum, and down from 200+ to 120-200 on most of them. For Realistic, which is particularly slow to generate right now, it has a cap of 100.<br />
** All of this should prevent some of the long-running slowness that could be encountered previously and that would lead to strangeness if it was taking 5-10 seconds to generate the basic outline of a map.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Also put in some defensive code for cases where potentially there could be an error happening in mapgen if it was aborted partway through, and thus didn't have a parent galaxy for a planet it was trying to find the neighbors for.<br />
** Thanks to UFO for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The escape key now works in the lobby to close it.<br />
** For whatever reason it doesn't work to close the add factions popup, but we can deal with that another time.<br />
** Thanks to dv = i ln(w0 / wf) for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix divide by 0 in PlanWave<br />
** Thanks to Oval for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in some defensive code to prevent errors when trying to find out the strength or contents of a ship that has a null fleet or other similar issues.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo in the Direct Waves tooltip.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new HandlePostSavegameLoadLogic method that gets called on World_AIW2 after a savegame is loaded, giving us a chance to fix any problems in it.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the DoGameStartLogic method for galaxy settings to allow for this to be called when it's a string value that has been set.<br />
<br />
* Added a new DoAfterSavegameLoadLogic method for galaxy settings to allow for these to do fixes to existing savegames that might have some issue.<br />
<br />
* When the "Ally To AI" option is on, now any allies of the AI will automatically ally with you as well. So this means AI Instigators, etc, become your friends as well.<br />
** This also retroactively fixes itself in existing savegames.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a typo that was causing the warden difficulty to come before the warden type in the lobby settings.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking a faction in the add faction window now adds it without you having to click it and then click ok.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the factions tab of the lobby where if you were clicking between two factions of the same type (for example, marauders), then any dropdowns used by those two factions would not be properly updated to the real values of the new faction when you click from the other faction.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Until now, if savegames in the old pre-0.850 branch were attempted to load in the new game, then it would just silently do nothing. Now it throws up a visible error telling you that the savegame is an out of date format.<br />
** Thanks to BandDrinks for the savegame that led us to finding this.<br />
<br />
* The test chamber, which was broken during the lobby upheaval, is now fully functional again.<br />
** Interestingly, for some reason you can control both your units and enemy units. Nifty, I guess?<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with clusters microcosm map types where it was trying to get a setting to display that wasn't actually used in that map type.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up the list of "things in my fleet" to not include command stations and some other things like that.<br />
** Normally that already wouldn't be showing, but if you had switched the kind of command station on a planet, then in particular it would show the other types in a way that was not helpful.<br />
<br />
* The scrap units hotkey (and a variety of other hotkeys that should not have been active) no longer work in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Ability To See What Command Station Fleets Consist Of Before Creating Them ====<br />
<br />
* For fleet centerpieces that you can construct from the sidebar and which have non-procedural fleet designs attached to them (for both of these categories, the command stations are the only things at the moment), you can now see what their constructed fleet will be like once they are created.<br />
** Basically, the upshot is that for command stations you can now see what their fleets would be before you create them. That's... kinda important info! And was causing people to not know that essentially they could get some extra military firepower by using the military command station, for instance.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.862 Lobby Overhaul, Knockback, Nanocaust, and the Final Battle ==<br />
(Released May 29th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Add Notification for any Raid Engines that are alerted. Untested, but hopefully it works?<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it<br />
<br />
=== Complete Lobby Overhaul ===<br />
<br />
* The entire lobby has been redone from scratch, and now works much better as well as having a more visually-pleasing style, and fitting a lot more information in in a less-overwhelming way, and being more modder-friendly than before.<br />
** There are some bits that still need fixing up, please see here for the known todo list at the moment: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=20151<br />
<br />
* The map configuration now actually gets saved into your local settings file so that it's the same the next time you load back into the lobby.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" (those on/off switches on the Options tab in the lobby) have been removed, and a new system under the hood has been added which allows for us to do boolean or integer data in a much more robust fashion.<br />
<br />
* The Wave Composition, Wave Warning, Threat Waves, Cross Planet Waves, Direct Waves, Reconquest waves, and Shark A and B settings are no longer on the AI directly, but are instead under Options in the lobby.<br />
** This allows for those to be more clearly set apart as advanced options, and also makes it so that when you have multiple AIs they all share these particular pieces of behavior (which is in general desired for a variety of reasons).<br />
<br />
* For the settings for factions, and the settings in the Options tab of the lobby, EVERYTHING is no longer dropdowns. Now there are integer sliders, bool checkboxes, and so on.<br />
<br />
* Previously it wasn't possible to mod in custom fields for factions and have them display in the UI without also altering the lobby code. Yikes! Now you can directly just add stuff in the xml and it shows up, same as with the settings elsewhere.<br />
<br />
* In the faction xml, the team colors no longer have special secondary custom field entries. This was duplicative and confusing, and previously was just done in order to make the ui lobby code simpler. We have a better way now.<br />
<br />
* The AI Hunter and Warden fleets no longer show up in the lobby as distinct entries. Their small amount of data is now under the main (now singular) AI faction that they are related to.<br />
** Since we want to have multiple AIs, but not endless clutter, it's very convenient for UI purposes to have the AIs just show as one line item per AI with their hunters and wardens wrapped into one entry.<br />
** This doesn't actually change the reality of underlying gameplay, but each hunter or warden looks to the AI that is most recently preceding them in the list of factions in order to get their settings.<br />
** It's possible in some circumstances (from well before now) for a warden to be getting some donations from some AI faction that it wasn't originally tied to, and that's fine. All of that still works, even though the original settings from the lobby came from one specific AI faction.<br />
<br />
* The warden and hunter factions now inherit the central color from their preceding AI faction (that they are initially tied to), and then have their own custom trim color.<br />
** Previously, all the hunter and warden factions were showing themselves with the same colors as the first hunter or warden faction, which is no longer a thing.<br />
** This is particularly useful for civil wars with the AIs, since now you can tell whose wardens and hunters are whose, and thus why they are fighting.<br />
<br />
* Ever hit a point while working on some code where you go "how did this ever work in the first place?"<br />
** Well, things like the Starting Fleet selection for players were one of those things. Clearly it worked, and worked well, but things were so sprawling and have changed so much that the method for making it work is entirely different now (and hopefully easier to follow for anyone who wants to set up "table subsets" in the future.<br />
** This was probably another example of some custom code in the old lobby that was redirecting some values from the more generic case to a more specific case. But now that all the data is xml-driven, that old lobby code was missing and so hence likely the confusion. Now it can be just directly driven, at any rate, which is great.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the nanocaust where it would start throwing errors after you win the game.<br />
<br />
* Setting the color of the player faction now fully properly works in the lobby.<br />
** Not only is it using the nice color-picker interface for all that stuff, but it's actually updating the display and the game, versus before it was just only ever using your values from your local profile. It still defaults to that, but you can now override that.<br />
<br />
* The debug setting for setting more than one AI type up in the lobby has been removed. You can simply add more AI types directly now. Hooray!<br />
<br />
* As part of all the lobby changes, you can now have any number of factions that you wish to in a galaxy without running out of room due to the way the interface is set up.<br />
<br />
=== Nanocaust Buffs ===<br />
<br />
* Give the Nanocaust stronger defensive fleets when the Hive is under attack. <br />
* Give the Nanocaust more income.<br />
* Created ships start in Attacker_Full. <br />
* Nanocaust ships should not start patrolling until there are no enemies on the planet<br />
* The Nanocaust is not allowed to kill Command Stations until it has a significant advantage on a planet<br />
** Prompted by discussions with Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the a bunch of the Nanocaust's weapons weren't firing due to some missing XML<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
=== New Ship Mechanic ===<br />
<br />
* Knockback (translocation for AI War veterans) has been put in the game!<br />
<br />
* The knockback mechanic has two methods of functioning:<br />
** The first calculates the knockback direction based on the angle between the ship that fired the shot and the shot that hit (aka directly towards or away from your ship) and functions with all types of weapons: single target, laser, self-centered AoE (tesla ships), and enemy centered AoE (Seige frigates).<br />
** The second calculates the knockback direction only for secondary targets hit by an AoE (non-laser) weapon. Ships will be pushed or pulled towards the point where the shot hit, making enemy ships group up together to make other AoE effects more potent.<br />
<br />
* Each method works with both pulling ships towards, and pushing ships away from the target.<br />
<br />
* Knockback is currently only limited by mass. There is a maximum mass that will be able to be knocked back, and the closer a ship is to that maximum mass, the less knockback the ship will take (down to a minimum of 50% of the listed knockback). The equation for this is Effective Knockback = Knockback * ( 1 - ( Ship Mass / (2 * Mass Limit ) ) )<br />
** As an example: If a knockback had a strength of 1000 and a mass limit of 4, a fleet ship of 0.2 mass would take 975 knockback, and a guardian of 4 mass would take 500 knockback<br />
<br />
* Ships are immune to knockback if they are: Too heavy, are protected by a bubble shield, are projecting a bubble shield, are currently tractored, are immobile (turrets), or are immune to damage.<br />
<br />
==== For Modders ====<br />
<br />
* XML tags are as follows for creating ships with knockback:<br />
** knockback_to_ships_mass_tx_less_than="Mass Limit" - Needed for knockback to function at all, sets the max mass that will be affected<br />
** base_knockback_per_shot="Base Knockback" - For markless and mark 1 ships, this is the knockback that the shot will deal. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** added_knockback_per_shot_per_mark="Added Knockback" - For mark 2 ships and up, this is how much extra knockback is added to the shots. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** knockback_at_target_location="true/false" - Setting this to true means that AoE weapons will make ships be pushed or pulled away from the center of the AoE. Defaults to false. Must have a defined AoE on the weapon for this to work.<br />
<br />
* C# methods<br />
** int EntitySystem.CalculateKnockbackPowerAgainst( GameEntity_Squad Target ) - Returns 0 if the weapon has no knockback effects, or if the ship is immune. Otherwise return the knockback from the equation above.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.TakeKnockback( int KnockbackAmount, float angle ) - For custom knockback effects, this method ignores any convention of towards or away, and just pushes the ship at an angle that you want. This method has no immunity checking in it currently, so make sure the target is actually mobile, not bubble shielded, and not tractored.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.AddKnockbackSourceForFramePlan( int KnockbackAmount, EntitySystem FiringSystemOrNull, GameEntity_Shot ShotThatHitOrNull, bool KnockbackAtTarget, ArcenSimContext Context ) - If KnockbackAtTarget is false, log the source of the knockback from FiringSystemOrNull.GetWorldLocation() and power from int KnockbackAmount. If KnockbackAtTargetis true, check that the ship this is called from is not the same ship that ShotThatHitOrNull hit, then log the source from ShotThatHitOrNull.Target.Ref.WorldLocation and the power from int KnockbackAmount. Get's called by TakeDamage automatically.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Antagonized Dyson Sphere rebalance. <br />
** Every so often the Dyson Antagonizer will level up and increase the income of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere. To compensate, the initial strength of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere will be weaker<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with Democracy<br />
<br />
* Increase the Macrophage's base income<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the comments<br />
<br />
* Instigators are now allied to the player in Friendly AI mode<br />
<br />
* Tweak the anti-minor-faction wave code to make sure the waves are all at a minimum size. Also increase the anti-minor-faction waves against the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to Oval for pointing some more code paths out<br />
<br />
* Keep the Main Menu Music in the Game Lobby; don't switch to 'in-game' music till you really start the game<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the request<br />
<br />
* On difficulty >= 7, the AI will start dumping most of its budget into the Hunter Fleet when you are attacking the AI Overlord or an adjacent planet<br />
** The feeling I get is that the actual AI Overlord combat isn't as exciting as it could be, so hopefully this will be more interesting.<br />
<br />
==== Mines ====<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mine types from 1 minimum, 2 maximum, to 2 minimum, 3 maximum in "Minelayer" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mines in "Minelayer" and "OtherDefenseFocus" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Stations now have 20 Paralysis Mines instead of 10 normal Mines.<br />
** Existing Stations in save games will still have their old Mines in addition.<br />
<br />
* Area Mine damage 20,000 -> 2,000, hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Differentiates it from normal Mines.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Stops it from paralysing an absurd amount of ships.<br />
<br />
* Area and Paralysis Mine explosion radius 500 -> 1,000.<br />
** These mines had a tendency to detonate on the first target that came in range, and not hit much around that. This should hopefully let them get more out of each detonation.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine paralysis time 8s -> 12s.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Parasite damage 20 -> 60, reload time 6s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Paralysers now have the correct target evaluator and should be better at actually paralysing.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboat cost_for_ai_to_purchase increased 25%.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers should now be shot at automatically, if nothing else is really around as a target.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Doubled the health of Logistical and Military Command Stations.<br />
<br />
* Transport Flagship health increased 25%.<br />
<br />
* Guard Post metal cost increased 10x.<br />
** Solely so Metabolisation grants you more metal from them.<br />
<br />
* Reduced cost of "Spire Core" Tech.<br />
<br />
==== Translocation ====<br />
<br />
* Ark One now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 2000, increases by 500 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Stations now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 3000, increases by 750 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station reload time 6s -> 2s, shots per salvo 6 -> 8, damage 1,300 -> 800.<br />
** Allows it to use Translocation more effectively. Is also a damage upgrade.<br />
<br />
==== Reinforcement ====<br />
<br />
* Removed the increased turret limit that AI planets with guard posts get.<br />
<br />
* Slight increase to the bonus strike craft a planet can reinforce per guard post, 25% extra --> 30% extra<br />
** This still lets the AI build up a "wall", but strike craft are different from turrets in that there's more gameplay to them (i.e. they become threat if you outnumber the AI too much)<br />
** Thanks to the Discord for the talks, Puffin for posting on the bug tracker.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories could produce ships beyond a fleet's cap if you were fast forwarding during construction.<br />
<br />
* Put periods at the end of all the Descriptions of minor factions and map types for consistency<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Probably fixed the bug with marauder outposts causing savegames to break. Have not tested it, but found a definite bug in the code (one variable being serialized twice but deserialized only once) and fixed that, so unless there is also a second bug in this area it should be good to go now.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Hunter Fleet budget from Instigator bases wasn't being spent <br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where normal waves weren't sending<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* If you have 0 hacking points and haven't finished the hack, the hack should now fail instead of giving you negative hacking points<br />
** Thanks to x4000 for the mantis ticket, but I assume someone else originally reported the problem (on Steam?)<br />
<br />
* Paralyzing a ship with a cloaking device no longer gives it full cloaking points once it's unparalyzed again. Particularly infuriating with the Raid starter fleet, the Cursed golem stuns for just enough time to have ships recloak before the next shot fires.<br />
** Minor downside - If you manage to stun ships with an AoE effect (Nanoswarm is the only ship capable of doing this off the top of my head), it will no longer be briefly unstealthed. Very minor since this situation happening is unreliable at best.<br />
<br />
* Marauder Mark 3 Outposts once again spawn Raiders<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Avoided a bug that would temporarily break save games once the game version rolled around to 1.0<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "Singular Freaky Surprises" map generation item for real this time. Golems should be a common appearance for Golemite AI now, and rare (1 / 1001) for other AI types again.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the AI wasn't seeding its full compliment of Strikecraft on most planets<br />
** This is a giant buff to the AI's initial defenses<br />
<br />
== Version 0.861 Strength Of Remains==<br />
(Released May 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Added a new PlannedWaveOptions struct that is great for sending specific groups of options to the PlanWave() function without it having a million optional parameters.<br />
** This also lets us have specific static Create() methods set up that have just the parameters that we want to set, which reduces the chances of bugs via typos or misalignments.<br />
<br />
=== Gameplay Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* When "Ally to AI" mode is selected, the player gets vision of all planets at the beginning of the game<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* Ships that get unloaded from fleet centerpieces now inherit orders such as wormhole move commands and behaviors such as pursuit mode.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Turrets and ships that are remains, not claimed yet, crippled, or in the process of being built are now not shown as strength in either galaxy view or local view.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and Trillioneyes for noting that this made it hard for players to judge at a glance when the AI is outnumbering them.<br />
<br />
* Cross planet waves now display the source planet of the wave to match the other wave types.<br />
<br />
* Improved the feel of dropdowns by making it so that you can click the dropdown a second time to hide it, just as you can in most other applications in the world.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that caused things that produced multiple types of drones (certain AI guard posts, AI drone guardians) to produce only 1 drone at a time and at a reduced rate.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Anti-Player Zombies were also hostile to the AI. Note that this fix only affects newly created game, existing games will still suffer from this bug.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a probable fix to exceptions that could happen inside UpdatePositionAndSize() on the tooltips. This is almost always indicative of some worse problem, but it's worth having this not compounding the problem at least.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the most recent report of this.<br />
<br />
* If there are errors during map generation (sometimes this is "valid", in the case of things like too many factions for the available planets), it now pops up a harmless but hopefully-informative error message log and doesn't just start the game in an invalid state.<br />
** Long-term obviously we want it to not be in a position to generate an error like this, but realistically modders can do all sorts of things and we need errors to happen gracefully.<br />
** Have tested this and it works as expected. However, it requires that all errors during mapgen use a new method which is Engine_AIW2.Instance.LogErrorDuringCurrentMapGen() if it would previously have used ArcenDebugging.ArcenDebugLog( Verbosity.ShowAsError ) or equivalent. If there are any remaining cases of the latter, then those would not get caught by this new code.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting the issue.<br />
<br />
* Previously there was a bug where if you set the number of planets in the lobby, but then just hit Start Game without hitting Generate Map first, it would not actually use the correct number of planets.<br />
** This was... kinda old, kinda-new. If there isn't enough room to seed whatever factions you have selected, it's now super duper fast to change the number of planets and hit start game and see if it works, etc. Without slowing anything else down in the lobby responsiveness in general.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where if you had one faction selected and then changed the faction, the colors would not update properly for them in the lobby.<br />
** This was not a problem limited to just the colors, and it probably was display-only in terms of problems, and it doesn't solve the issue with the human player colors, but this is still nice to have fixed.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The various custom data for the individual map types (how many arms on the octopus, etc) now all do a much better job of actually retaining and showing their proper values, and never have a stale view on the interface itself.<br />
** This was another old and new problem, but is now fixed for both cases.<br />
** Thanks to hawk and BadgerBadger for the original reports.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug in the TextMeshPro dropdowns where if one was in a sub-panel and opened, then clicking another one to open the other one would not close the first one. It led to much visual confusion.<br />
** Why exactly this was happening is actually a bit of a mystery, but we just gave the dropdowns some memory of "dropdowns that think they are still open," and those all close themselves when a new dropdown is clicked. Problem solved.<br />
** Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, there was an extra custom field definition for the human player colors compared to the other faction colors, and this wasn't really needed now and probably just confused things.<br />
** So removed and consolidated that, although it didn't fix the sync issues with human player colors not being settable.<br />
<br />
* Integrated revised versions of the Steamworks .so files for linux, and the related files for OSX as well.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for chasing down what needed to change on Linux; please let us know if it still isn't showing you as logged in properly in the new builds in either of those two OSes, because that would likely mean that something didn't get copied properly in our build scripts.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.860 The Lobby Ate My Factions?? ==<br />
(Released May 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Raid Engines could trigger a null reference if set off by the Dark Spire<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the event that for some reason the game tries to queue a GameCommand with an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 (this seems to happen from time to time during the game and now once in the lobby), it will complain at the time of it trying to queue it, and give a stack trace from there, and not actually do the queuing of it.<br />
** This should help us figure out when and why these things are occasionally happening. It's probably related to a pooling error of some sort, but it's hard to be sure. If the commands are valid at this point and then later have ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 when being read back, then we know we have a different problem entirely and can approach that from another way. Either way we'll start having more info soon on this rare and elusive error.<br />
<br />
* Put in a second place where we now early-assign the ExecuteOnFrameNumber when GameCommands are created. This may then later get reassigned in OnServer_CheckForSendingServerBatchMessageToClients, which is fine, but this should hopefully prevent those rare issues where a command falls through the cracks and has an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 for some reason.<br />
<br />
* Math fixes from WeaponMaster:<br />
** Fixed claim repairing being way out of wack, causing 500,000 metal cost Arks to be built in less than a second by a single engineer.<br />
** Also fixed self construction metal flow healing, metal now heals for a ratio of hp:metal like claim and repair flows now.<br />
** Also made it so self construction metal flows (and the assist construction flows helping it) heal shield too.<br />
** Note: it's possible that things are now wildly too expensive to claim, now that you actually have to pay the metal for them to claim them. If that's the case, please let us (Puffin?) know, and we'll adjust their claim costs.<br />
<br />
=== More Lobby Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Improved the lobby error messaging when it can't find a custom field for a map type so that it now says what it was looking for. Helpful for anyone making custom map types.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the Simple map type where it was trying to look at a setting for the realistic map type (and then not even use it) and thus was throwing an error now that the settings are per-map-type rather than being stored in the global central settings file.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the "remove a faction" bit of code, it now throws a cleaner and more informative error if for some reason it's out of range. It doesn't fix the problem, but should help us fix the problem in the future if we don't find it in the meantime.<br />
** Thanks to Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The long-range planning cycles (background threads) are no longer run when you're in the lobby.<br />
** This probably makes next to no difference to anything, but might make a few things slightly faster or even avoid some potential issues in the future.<br />
<br />
* Some changes have been made to make the dropdown selection changes more synchronous (instant) rather than on a slight time delay. This allows for a few things to be controlled a bit better... in theory.<br />
<br />
* Wow, a whole heck of a lot of wrappering and rework has been done on dropdowns to make it more clear when and how data is being set.<br />
** We were actually still having the same problem with factions getting erased as soon as they were added in the prior build, along with some other known issues like dropdown stuff getting out of sync quickly that we did know about.<br />
** All of this is traceable back to how the dropdowns handle data updates to themselves, and it's another question of "how did this ever work?" This one was a Chris area, not a Keith one, just in case anyone gets the wrong idea that any of the early code problems were all from one source (far from it).<br />
** Issues fixed:<br />
*** still couldn't add more factions<br />
*** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
*** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
** Remaining known issues:<br />
*** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct.<br />
*** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby, although it's not causing errors per se.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.859 Lobby Raid ==<br />
(Released May 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
Note: We no longer plan to break savegames going forward from here. Looks like that won't be needed, and it would break a bunch of bug reports. So hooray!<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Mobile Support Flagships now show that they are building things in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the analysis of this problem<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Objectives (in the intel tab) for capturing battlestations and flagships now shows the supported units<br />
** This was annoying me<br />
<br />
* Both of the modal popup types (the OK window and the Yes/No windows) now support scrolling text, aka way more info than before. Before if the text got too long, it would just cut off.<br />
** This is useful for all sorts of things, such as if we want to have things like header items that you can click (AIP display, for instance) that would give you a readout of a bunch of new details about the state of all the AIs (salvage amounts, reprisal status, whatever else we feel like).<br />
<br />
* There is now a "tall" version of the modal "OK dialog" that is able to tell you info. This is particularly useful for info dumps versus just a quick notice regarding whatever it was going to tell you.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a variety of fonts that were too small, particularly for dropdowns, in the lobby in recent beta versions.<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Allow the Dyson Sphere to free itself if it was reconquered. Otherwise you have to babysit the Dyson Sphere once you free it<br />
** Note this may cause the AI and Dyson Sphere to fight more often, since the AI is apt to try to recapture it repeatedly. May need further tweaks<br />
<br />
* The AI will now wait until a wave is "strong enough" before sending it, rather than potentially sending very small or empty waves<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Allow the Nanocaust to kill Black Hole Machines, since they were otherwise an excessively effective counter to the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting this, including Mosrael<br />
<br />
=== New Features/Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Add a "Ally player to AI" option in the game lobby.<br />
** This prevents you from playing the game normally, and is intended for people who want to play the game in Sandbox mode, watching the AI fight various minor factions, or an AI Civil War (or both)<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines function and are in use again.<br />
<br />
* Like we have had description_appender_dll and description_appender_type for quite some time, we now also have per_second_custom_logic_dll and per_second_custom_logic_type.<br />
** The former calls void AddToDescriptionBuffer( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntityOrNull, GameEntityTypeData RelatedEntityTypeData, ArcenDoubleCharacterBuffer Buffer ) on a IGameEntityDescriptionAppender.<br />
** The new one calls void RunEntitySpecialPerSecondLogic( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntity, ArcenSimContext Context ) on a IGameEntityPerSecondSpecialLogic.<br />
** This allows us to have all sorts of crazy AI watcher units, including AI Eyes or whatever else, that run some completely custom logic once per second. It's easy for modders to define, etc, etc.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Don't allow drones to generate salvage<br />
** Suggested by Democracy<br />
<br />
* Player engineers are no longer able to repair friendly zombie ships.<br />
** A previous change to make zombies attrition every minute was effectively just a metal sink because they were still able to be repaired.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where hydra head ships (that spawn from hydras such as Stingray Hydra) weren't properly attritioning or being set to pursuit mode.<br />
** They will die faster thanks to the attrition working now, but hopefully be more useful as they'll chase enemies automatically.<br />
** For modders, this can be enabled for any ship by defining self_attritions_X_percent_per_second_if_parent_ship_not_on_planet="X" and adding the tag always_self_attritions="true" to your ship. Doing this for any ship except those spawned from another ship dying is kinda pointless though.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Factories and Support Fleets were spending less metal than intended when producing more than one type of ship at once.<br />
<br />
* Fix a logic problem with neutral planet hacking which prevented you from being able to Watch-Hack a neutral planet<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Factories will now only produce strikecraft and frigates for fleet centerpieces that are fully claimed.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a TextMesh Pro setting to "disable warnings," the builds of the game will no longer complain about missing glyphs in fonts that don't need them.<br />
<br />
* The debug output code for what a GameCommand contains now has its line breaks fixed up so that it's actually legible!<br />
** Also some options have been put in to make it output a bit more intelligently, ie only saying what it is doing and not all the empty things it isn't doing.<br />
<br />
=== Various Fixes and Changes to Zombie Fleets ===<br />
* There is now a defined minimum and maximum amount of zombie ships that get randomly sent out when zombies decide to raid another planet. This is currently set at 30 and 50 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The group of ships that get sent out when deciding to raid a planet is now randomized. Previously the ships that got selected to raid were always the first ones created on the planet, now the group that gets selected is chosen randomly.<br />
<br />
* Zombies that are in the process of going through a wormhole ("Raiding") are left out of patrol/raid logic so they don't get conflicting orders.<br />
<br />
* Planets that have less than 0.05 strength of hostile units on them (basically only a warp gate and command station) are considered not hostile and so zombies will run their patrol/raiding logic.<br />
<br />
* Zombies now correctly lose only 1% of their hp per minute. Previously, ships with high shields were losing much more hp per minute.<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Guts Revamp (Visually No Improvements Yet) ===<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the inner guts of how the lobby keeps track of changes that you're requesting, and how it then goes about updating and syncing the game and the UI, respectively.<br />
** It's a lot more responsive-feeling now, although we can get it even better than this. And it also provides a basis for us to be able to make this properly visually better soon.<br />
** This also fixes a number of problems that have existed where people in multiplayer making changes at the same time would have conflicts and lost data.<br />
** Essentially this is now doing differentials of changes rather than wholesale copies, and it keeps track of a separate "setup as per the lobby" that only the lobby can touch, and a "long term settings" that the game reads from later on.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a number of things with the map type sub-controls so that it is now fully modder-friendly, and multiplayer-safe.<br />
** You can now mod in you own map type sub controls without having to edit the central files (which of course would be overwritten next time there's a release).<br />
<br />
* Made the game way more robust when it comes to having a map set up that doesn't include any factions for whatever reason.<br />
** It's possible to make this happen in the lobby code if you mess up other things, and it's much easier to just have this be robust so that we can see the real errors.<br />
<br />
* A variety of the map types now have much easier-to-digest names for their options, and all map types now have proper spacing between the words in their names and their options.<br />
<br />
* A new settings option has been added to the Debug section: "Write Lobby Setup Changes To Log"<br />
** If something strange is going on with the lobby, in multiplayer or otherwise, this is a way for the log to have a variety of data sent about what changes are being requested, and when.<br />
<br />
* New options for writing the full contents of a GameCommand have been added, to get all the details of what's in each list being sent, etc. This is now used a variety of places that can benefit from that extra clarity (all error-reporting-related or otherwise debug stuff).<br />
<br />
* GameCommands have been expanded to allow for a third RelatedString, which is needed by some of the new lobby stuff.<br />
<br />
* Automatically-created controls (such as in dynamic interfaces like the lobby) now can have a string control code sent to them along with the two integer control codes.<br />
** This again is needed for the lobby, and makes some of the new modder-friendly map stuff possible.<br />
<br />
* Some data during mapgen was previously stored in the Factions object, and others in ConfigurationForFaction in the WorldSetup object, and still others off in settings, etc.<br />
** The game now properly stores all that data inside the WorldSetup object, so that it can be copied around and separate versions can be read at various times (for display versus for mapgen asynchronously, etc), and so that it plays nice with multiplayer.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen logging now includes a new entry for ControlledByPlayerAccounts_DuringGame, which is now split between Factions (for ingame) and the WorldSetup (for the lobby), as noted in the above note.<br />
<br />
* A ton of debugging data about the state of the WorldSetup objects, and the basic faction data as well, can now be exported via either ToString() or WriteDetailsToStringBuilder().<br />
** This lets us actually look inside and see what is happening, which is kinda relevant!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the initial fleet not being serialized properly in the WorldSetup.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section of the settings menu: "Show Debug Details Button In Lobby"<br />
** When enabled, a 'Debug Details' button appears in the lobby, which you can click to have it pop up all the relevant information about the current setup from a very low-level debugging style.<br />
<br />
* Some changes Chris has wanted to make for a VERY long time are now in under the hood in the lobby. Basically the game now only does a "partial" generation of the map whenever things change in the lobby, which means that the map generation is now vastly faster than before.<br />
** But as part of this, it has to go back and do the full generation of the map based on the final data when you actually click Start Game, and it now does that, too. This also has the benefit of being safer in terms of making sure things are ultra consistent with whatever the UI says when the game actually starts.<br />
<br />
* When you are changing things in the lobby that don't change the map topology _as it is visible in the lobby_, such as factions and conducts and faction options, it no longer causes the map to regenerate itself.<br />
** This feels more responsive by far, and in multiplayer (or if we get any super slow-to-generate maps in the future) it will have an amplified effect.<br />
** But also... this mysteriously fixes the problem we were having in the last few builds where you couldn't add factions.<br />
<br />
* The game now includes an implementation of DiffLib (https://github.com/lassevk/DiffLib), which it uses to calculate the differences between Setup states in the lobby export at the moment. Though certainly one imagines there could be other uses for this in some sort of other in-engine analysis data in the future, whether by us in some bowels of the UI for looking at enemy data, or something modders cook up.<br />
<br />
* Several lobby fixes, including to where we were setting the local player's color so that it wasn't getting out of sync. For multiplayer lobbies this will later need to be expanded further, but that's a task for later and not a huge deal right now.<br />
<br />
* '''Known lobby issues:'''<br />
** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct?<br />
** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby<br />
<br />
== Version 0.858 Hotfix: The Lobby... Ate My Galaxy? ==<br />
(Released May 9th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed the Vanguard Hydra Head benefiting from Heavy Tech instead of Light like their parent unit.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug in the prior version that threw invisible harmless errors while loading the game because it was trying to find the settings for the galaxy map before the settings had been properly loaded.<br />
<br />
* Guardians will now have a chance at spawning with waves. If maxGuardianTypes is larger than 0, a random value between 0 and maxGuardianTypes is chosen as the minGuardianTypes. Random bags of anyGuardians are chosen until the minimum is reached.<br />
** Right now guardians only get added if the strikecraft fail to completely fill numDifferentShipsToSpawn. This can be changed easily by removing the comparison ( chosenUnitTypes < numDifferentShipsToSpawn ) in both the if statement and the while loop.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug introduced in the prior build where if you changed anything in the lobby or even clicked to the factions tab of the lobby, then you'd get control of a ton of planets and be under fire on all of them and probably lose the game instantly as well. Very amusing in small doses, but that's quite enough, thanks, game. ;)<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, WeaponMaster, Gerard, Mosrael, and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.857 The AI Strikes Back... Hard ==<br />
(Released May 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* The name of the currently playing music track is now shown in the Escape menu, for people like me who can never remember the titles<br />
** Prompted by music nostalgia from Puffin and Democracy in discord<br />
<br />
* There are now Achievements for winning in Civil War mode<br />
** Untested, like most of the other Achievements<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now be less afraid of distant enemies<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now consider enemy forces when choosing how to route to a target, so they don't accidentally suicide into a heavily defended planet on the way to somewhere else<br />
<br />
* The AI now has an "overconfidence ratio", where on lower difficulties Threat will overestimate its strength when choosing whether it's strong enough to attack. This makes it more aggressive, but also more likely to lose when it attacks<br />
** Finding ways to differentiate the AI difficulties is good<br />
<br />
==== AI Civil Wars ====<br />
<br />
* An AI will only give resource to to its own Hunter and Warden Fleet(s)<br />
<br />
* The AI Civil War now includes Warden and Hunter fleets. Each AI's warden/hunter is now hostile to other AIs and other Hunter/Warden Fleets.<br />
<br />
==== AI Homeworld Battle Changes ====<br />
<br />
* If an AI homeworld is attacked:<br />
** AI Threat ships on the homeworld will fight to the death<br />
** Ships Guarding planets near to the homeworld will become Threat. The higher the difficulty the more planets will be turned to Threat.<br />
** Threat ships will converge on the homeworld. Threat already waiting against a strong target will just join the Hunter fleet<br />
** That AI's Hunter and Warden Fleets will immediately converge on the homeworld<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a number of people for noticing the AI homeworld battles could be dull, including Nameless Terror from Steam. Thanks to StarKelp for a helpful save game to let me test this.<br />
<br />
==== Changes to AI Reinforcement ====<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft were being counted as turrets when loaded in a guard post, limiting the amount of turrets the AI could rebuild<br />
* Fixed a bug where the strikecraft currently on an AI planet were calculated incorrectly, allowing the AI to infinitely reinforce strikecraft if it never built guardians<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft inside the AI Command Center were not being counted as guard strength for reinforcement<br />
** These bug fixes improve more defensive AI types like Turtle, as these two issues combined usually meant that the AI could never reinforce strikecraft or turrets<br />
<br />
* The AI can now reinforce an extra 25% strikecraft and Turrets per living guardpost on alerted planets<br />
** AI planets are alerted when there is a human command center adjacent to them<br />
** Destroying guardposts on planets next to human planets is now much more important, as they can reinforce to be much stronger than they started out as if left untouched<br />
<br />
* These are large changes that are mostly untested, let us know if this ends up making the game too hard or frustrating<br />
<br />
=== New Settings Options For Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Galaxy Camera setting: Extra Background Hexagon Intensity<br />
** If you would like the background to be more stylized hexagons, then you can turn this up.<br />
** Nobody was really asking for this, but Chris had mixed feelings about his defaults and so figured why not.<br />
<br />
* The previous amount of bloom on the galaxy map was a bit on the high side, with an intensity of 2.06. That has been reduced to a new default of 1.4.<br />
** However, a new setting allows you to configure it between 0.4 and 4, which are two fairly extreme ends of it.<br />
** New galaxy camera setting: Bloom Intensity<br />
*** How glowy would you like the galaxy map to appear? More looks more computer-screeny, but can be distracting depending on your contrast settings on your monitor.<br />
** Thanks to Badger and danny for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== New Debug Commands ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to decrease AIP<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to kill all AI units and structures on the currently viewed planet<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== When a flagship of yours gets crippled... ====<br />
<br />
* Having a Flagship crippled by the AI now gives the AI a nice burst of Salvage, enabling them to power up reprisal waves. This is intended as a penalty for losing Flagships.<br />
** Different flagship types generate different amount of salvage. Officer flagships generate more than Support or Transport, for example. The Regenerator Golem will generate much less salvage than other flagships<br />
** The AI will generate less salvage if it cripples a flagship on a neutral planet (but still some)<br />
*** All the tunables are in XML for this<br />
<br />
==== When you don't have enough energy... ====<br />
<br />
* Claimables that would cost you more energy than you have available now can't be claimed, and it shows that in their tooltip.<br />
** Previously it could just claim stuff and throw you into negative energy.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Similarly, if you don't have enough spare energy to create something out of a factory (strikecraft, frigates, whatever) then it will only build up to 100% and then will stop and not actually emerge.<br />
** Same with drone production; it won't produce the next drone, but just will stick at 100%.<br />
** In both cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Any units that are currently trying to self-construct, and you don't have enough energy for them (or negative energy in general) will completely stop constructing (unless they either don't consume energy or produce it).<br />
** In the relevant cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== AI Overlord Phase 2 ====<br />
<br />
* Now uses a Plasma Overdriver in place of the old Plasma Torpedo, affecting everything in a large radius.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Bolt damage 4,000 -> 6,000, shot count 40 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Fusion Bomb damage 30,000 -> 50,000, added 2x bonus multiplier vs targets of mass >= 5.<br />
<br />
==== Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Guardians on AI planets.<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian Fusion Bomb Bypass 0.6 -> 0.9.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian damage 350 -> 450.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian damage 1,000 -> 300, shot count 1 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Temperamental Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Fragmenting Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% for Tantruming Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tantruming Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Fragmenting Guardian Shard health increased 50%, damage 800 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian damage 1,200 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 220 -> 330.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Guardians now have a bonus multiplier vs albedo >= 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Guardian damage 3,500 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Increased health of Pike, Nucleophilic and Grenade Launcher Dire Guardians to match the others.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guardians, excluding Forcefield - still increased.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guardian shot count 5 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian explosion size 300 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Dire Pike Guardian damage 6,000 -> 4,000, shot count 3 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian shot count 3 -> 6.<br />
<br />
* Dire Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 1,300 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* AI Hunter / Killer shields 1,000,000 -> 2,000,000, Fusion Bomb shot count 25 -> 35.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for an AI Hunter / Killer to be chosen in place of a Dire Guardian.<br />
** This thing spawns as Mark 5 if it does, so be really careful.<br />
<br />
==== Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Guard Posts excluding Forcefield.<br />
<br />
* Increased health by 25% of Forcefield Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10, reload time 4s -> 3s, range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Sabot Guard Posts increase their bonus multiplier with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Guard Post damage 480 -> 240, shot count 8 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 1600 -> 2,200.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for non-Swarmer AI planets to have a Swarmer Guard Post.<br />
<br />
* Increased frequency a bit of Forcefield Guard Posts (as well as Forcefield Generators).<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Dire Sabot Guard Post damage 3,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guard Post shot count 6 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Parasite Guard Post damage 6,000 -> 3,000, shot count 12 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Spider Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 2,000, shot count 12 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 8,000 -> 10,000, shot count 3 -> 6, range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Gravity Guard Post damage 12,500 -> 2,000, reload time 1s -> 2s, shot count 1 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
==== Drones ====<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, damage 4,000 -> 8,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
==== Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Golems (Player and AI).<br />
<br />
* Increased health of all Arks.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% of all Spire Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Combat Factories.<br />
<br />
* Increased shields by 25% of all Citadels.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette shields 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Molotov explosion size 500 -> 650.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot base damage multiplier 3x -> 6x.<br />
<br />
==== Science, Tech and Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced Upgrade Costs of Battlestations and Citadels a bit.<br />
<br />
* Starting Science 20,000 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Science gained from Spire Archive Extraction 5,000 -> 8,000.<br />
<br />
* Increased secondary response strength of some AI hacks.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cap multipliers on Transport Flagships a bit.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a tooltip typo that incorrectly identified the StrikeCraft version of the Intragalactic Coordinator as increasing the turret cap.<br />
<br />
* Only explore new planets when a Player kills an command station. Otherwise the Nanocaust and Civil War were giving tons of free vision<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations can now build multiple energy collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting, and puffin and ptarth for debugging assistance<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug causing fleet centerpieces to not cost any metal to claim.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the metal cost to claim capturables, this was causing most capturable things to cost less metal than intended. <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hunter Fleet was refusing to enter defended planets<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the internal drone construction logic that was previously present in the 0.850+ branch, but which was really only rearing its head on the new internal versions. Curious.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the seeding of SingularFreakySurprises where the chance for a golem to appear was being rolled once per galaxy instead of once per planet.<br />
** No more galaxies full of golems.<br />
<br />
==== Trying and Failing To Fix The Lobby ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the lobby regenerates the galaxy map is now slightly less direct. Rather than just directly updating things every time any dropdown value changed or similar, it now queues up those changes cumulatively and then applies them all 100ms after the last change.<br />
** This is because we can have situations where one dropdown changes, causing others to change, and that was causing repeat and often incomplete commands to be sent.<br />
** This was what we thought the disappearing-factions bug from the last few builds was, and we assumed it had to do with the dropdowns handling onValueChanged differently. That may be the case, but we can't really see how that's the case from a code review.<br />
** So this does seem to help with not missing things like some of the smaller secondary data for factions for instance, but it wasn't the complete solution we had hoped it would be.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, put in some defensive code to prevent certain errors when the game is trying to show a row for a faction that is out of bounds.<br />
** We get a lot more info about what went wrong when this is happening, at least. These errors are also no longer silent, but instead pop up a good error message with a useful stack trace.<br />
<br />
* Split the internal CodeDirectiveTag int on the ArcenUI_CreateElementDirective struct into CodeDirectiveTag1 int and CodeDirectiveTag2 int.<br />
** The purpose of this is so that we no longer have to do any crazy bitshifting to get the data out of a single integer for the faction index and field index in the lobby. This approach was mathematically clever, but had legibility issues at bare minimum.<br />
** Various parts of the lobby were incorrectly reading the data back as just faction index with no bitshifting going on, and maybe that was correct for those fields (??), but we're not really sure and that lack of sureness is not worth a tiny bit smaller struct.<br />
** This may or may not fix some bugs, but at least things are clearer.<br />
<br />
* Did NOT manage to fix the lobby with all these various changes.<br />
** But have managed to make ourselves wonder how it ever functioned at all.<br />
** Simply opening the MORE options next to a faction will change what is available in there, fun fact. That broke as heck, and probably isn't completely new.<br />
** Going through all this is, on the plus side, giving us a vastly better idea of how we want to rearchitect the lobby from a technical standpoint while keeping as much of what is there as possible. It looks like the "new lobby" is going to be a feature for 0.900-era AI War 2, simply because of all this.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.856 Clever Girl ==<br />
(Released May 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Ships that are in the process of loading into the fleet centerpiece no longer collide with other ships when near the centerpiece; faster loading with less micromanaging required.<br />
<br />
* Beam weapons now optionally support maximum_number_of_targets_hit_per_shot in the XML.<br />
** If the max is defined, ships hit past the maximum split the damage of the maximum equally between all ships.<br />
*** As an example, if you had a 10,000 damage beam with a max of 2 targets and it hit 4 targets, each target would take 5,000 damage only ( 2 max / 4 hit ).<br />
<br />
* Tweak the text for some hacks to fit the text in boxes.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators now cost AIP when the AI kills them<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror on steam for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The AI is now allowed to send waves against Unowned but defended planets in Civil War mode. The AI also gets buffs to its "anti-other-AI-planet" waves in civil war mode.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy now have an Objective to destroy them<br />
<br />
* Changed the way science hacking scales to be more intuitive<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it.<br />
<br />
* When transferring units between factions, clear any previous orders and set the units to be in Attacker mode. This was causing issues when transferring units to the Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having crippled flagships on a planet could sometimes cause hacks to fail<br />
** Someone complained about this but I don't remember who it was.<br />
<br />
==== Improved AI Attack Coordination ====<br />
* When the AI chooses targets for the Threat Fleet, it has a mild preference for attacking planets with critical player structures like Zenith Power/Metal Generators and Intra-Galactic Coordinators<br />
** The tunables for how strong that preference is (as opposed to going for more poorly defended targets) is an XML tunable per AI type<br />
<br />
* The AI now takes into account incoming wave strength when considering whether it is strong enough to attack a target when a wave is < 20 seconds out<br />
** This should allow Threat/Hunter ships to coordinate attacks with incoming waves when appropriate<br />
<br />
* When calculating whether a planet is a good target, the Hunter/Warden fleets now also include allied ships on their way to the target, as well as those currently at the target. <br />
** More coordination improvement code<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboats should now actually decloak.<br />
** Thanks to Mac for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Gravity effects cannot reduce a units speed below 20%, up from 5%.<br />
** This is to stop being able to stack Gravity and effectively replicate Tractor Beams.<br />
<br />
* Target priority lowered for Tachyon Sentinels and Arrays.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY for reporting the bullet magnets these were.<br />
<br />
* Decreased the time for AI Threat to join the Hunter Fleet, from 15 minutes at all difficulties, to starting at 10 on Diff 1, lowering by 1 for each Diff higher, maxing out at 3 minutes on Diff 8, 9 and 10.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.855 Galactic Markings ==<br />
(Released April 30th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for waves. The hovertext now shows the Target planet name in the colour of the planet's owner, and the planet with the warp gate in the colour of the faction sending the wave.<br />
** Thanks to Ptarth for making sure I did this right<br />
<br />
=== Hacking Improvements And Science from Neutral Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new hacking mechanism to allow extracting Science from neutral planets. It currently costs 5 AIP as well as a few hacking points. Performing this hack will cause the AI to launch a wave at you.<br />
** The AIP is part of the "AIP for taking a planet". So if you killed the command station there's actually no AIP cost (since you paid it when killing the command station). If another faction destroyed the command station then it will cost 5 AIP, but if you eventually capture the planet it will only cost 15 AIP when you capture instead of 20.<br />
** Note that this allows for you to collect Science much more quickly than normal by killing the command station and then doing this hack before capturing the planet, at the cost of some hacking points and the AI getting a bonus attack at you.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, DD the GerbilStrangler, Nameless Terror, themouthofsauron, x4000, Puffin and Apthorpe for useful discussion<br />
<br />
* If a Flagship becomes crippled mid-hack, the hack fails. Also Crippled Flagships are no longer allowed to start hacks.<br />
<br />
=== Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map's bloom settings have been updated a huge amount, giving the entire scene a bit of a computer-screen glowy vibe.<br />
** The blue hexes in the background have been adjusted and the scanline effect is now less noticeable, as part of this, though. It was just a bit too much visual distraction.<br />
<br />
* All of the roman numerals for mark levels have been switched to a more thematic sci-fi type font.<br />
<br />
* All of the graphics for planets on the galaxy map are now more consistent in size, and generally smaller, as is the selection radius around the one you're viewing right now.<br />
<br />
* The positioning of all the font stuff on the galaxy map has been changed around a lot, to be tighter around the planets but no longer ever overlapping with the overlarge planet icons (that no longer are overlarge).<br />
** In general this keeps things more compact and hopefully also more legible.<br />
<br />
* The little icons for "important ships at planets" are also now a bit smaller and more compactly-placed under the planet on the galaxy map.<br />
** They should still be plenty legible, but no longer oversized compared to some of the planet stuff they are essentially orbiting.<br />
<br />
* As you zoom out on the galaxy map, the planets (and their text and icons) no longer stay quite as large as they previously did, instead shrinking down more.<br />
** On most screens this should remain legible, while at the same time keeping them from overlapping.<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.001" to galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.0007" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalVisualConstants\CMP_VisualConstants.xml file.<br />
<br />
* The amount of time the icons and text now stay next to planets on the galaxy map have also been changed dramatically, so that they remain around until almost the last possible amount of zoom (and it's kinda useful having a super far zoom that gets rid of that clutter, at least at first thought).<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="1500" to galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="2000" and galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1300" to galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1700" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalConstants\KDL_VanillaConstants.xml file.<br />
** Particularly with how it's easier to see at a glance what the mark levels of planets are, and if you have current intel on them, this final-decluttered stage seems particularly useful. If you disagree, there are actually sliders in the options for changing it so that it declutters sooner or later.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Add a mechanic to allow anti-AI zombies to self-attrition over time. Currently set to 1% self-attrition per minute. This isn't very fast, and your engineers will repair them, but it's something?<br />
** Done after seeing some games where HeartHunter seems to have zombified the entire Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Reduced the power of Mark 5, and greatly reduced the power of Mark 6 and 7.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels should have more Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Beam Cannons and Plasma Turrets in "Monochrome Turret" designs.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Frigates in "Frigates With Support" designs.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Mass Driver damage.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem shots per salvo 80 -> 50.<br />
<br />
* Player Botnet Golem damage 750 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Changed the scaling of most Tech Upgrade costs to somewhat match what they used to be before Fleets.<br />
** Some are cheaper, some are more expensive, and some just have the Marks evened out.<br />
** This is something that will probably always be a bit off somewhere, but hopefully this is an improvement.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Turret range 10,100 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon and Heavy Beam Guardian range 15,000 -> 12,000, reload time 4s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Allow far more Anti-AI zombies to leave their current planet whenever that event occurs.<br />
<br />
* Mugger does a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Array range 2800 -> 4200.<br />
<br />
* Doubled count of Tractor Arrays in almost every player-available source.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator shields 250,000 -> 350,000.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Generator shields 150,000 -> 500,000.<br />
** Extreme, but these are apparently tiny roadbumps currently. They're rare, so this shouldn't be obnoxious.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator size increased.<br />
<br />
* Shield Guard Post shields 90,000 -> 150,000.<br />
<br />
* Focused Gravity Generators and Gravity Guardians now only slow things below engine_gx 14, rather than 15.<br />
** There were a few units that should've been resistant to this but weren't due to a minor error.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestations will now always have Minefields as well as Engineers, instead of just Engineers.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix some issues with the science hovertext, where it was still listing planets even after you'd taken all their science.<br />
<br />
* Handle the case where a player might have Overspent building a unit. This can happen if a player was building a unit after spending X metal, saves the game, then changes the metal cost of the unit to < X via XML and reloads the game.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Updated the Steamworks integration library that we use (and the Steamworks dll/so/dylib files from Valve) to their latest versions.<br />
** More details are here: https://github.com/Facepunch/Facepunch.Steamworks<br />
** On windows, we can confirm that now it actually shows you as being logged in properly, and also lets you see the proper main menu visuals rather than a blank space background.<br />
** To check on your OS that this is working, please look in the bottom right hand corner of your screen on the main menu and it should say "Logged in as [your username]." If it says "Not logged into Steam" or similar, then achievements won't be working properly for you later on. And in general it's something we'd want to know about.<br />
** Mostly this is a compatibility thing with the newest version of Unity, so far as we can tell, but we also have some new capabilities that we might flex at some point in the future.<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators for turrets and strikecraft should now work properly.<br />
** On any ship, there is now an is_strikecraft="true" flag, and an is_turret="true" flag that you can apply in order to have them be considered strikecraft or turrets for these (and later potentially other) purposes.<br />
** We didn't use the special_type field because it's possible that these things might be strikecraft or turrets and something else at the same time, and the case of being a strikecraft or being a turret isn't "special" enough to warrant the special_type field usage.<br />
** Note that it's also possible that some of these will be both is_strikecraft="true" and also have a special_type="Drone". In those cases, it won't give the ship cap bonus regardless of the is_strikecraft="true" being there. So drones don't have to un-set that, in other words.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Invert Mouse Zoom" setting in the All Cameras section.<br />
** Normally when you spin the mouse wheel forward, you zoom closer; backwards zooms you away. This lets you flip that functionality. OR, in the case that your hardware or OS is inverted for whatever reason, this lets you correct it to work like everyone else.<br />
** There is a bug in Unity 2019.1 on linux machines that causes mouse scrolling to be inverted, so this lets us work around that: https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/linux-input-dot-mousescrolldelta-returns-reversed-values-in-linux-player<br />
** Note that this won't help with inverted scrolling with dropdowns and other scrolling areas, unfortunately.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.854 Garbage... Collected! ==<br />
(Released April 26th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Known issue: in the bottom right corner of the main menu, it says you're not logged into Steam even though you are, and also if you are logged into Steam the backdrop for the main menu might be just stars instead of the usual colorful thing with ships flying by. We'll be upgrading our Steam integration dlls next build, which should fix that. Hopefully it causes no other issues.<br />
<br />
* Known issue: the intra-galactic coordinators for turrets and strikecraft do nothing right now. We wanted to get this build out asap, since it's beta anyway.<br />
<br />
=== Quality of Life and Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Player mobile defensive ships in planetary fleets now start in FRD mode<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Hovertext for incoming wave notifications now colours the target planet name for ease of reading<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Science in the resource bar now shows the planets science is being extracted from and the amount of science remaining for each.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Ship AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to targeting logic from WeaponMaster, where the code was accidentally prioritizing the worst possible targets.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Add some new Zombifying targeting code, where ships with zombifying guns will prefer to attack things they can zombify<br />
** Thanks to Jonesmz for the suggestion and WeaponMaster for the code<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* If the top unit of a cloaking Stacked Squad dies, the next ship to spawn inherits its cloak state. So if you've decloaked it, killing the top unit doesn't allow the next unit to recloak.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix some typos in the Experimental: Civil War conduct text<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix typo on Encapsulated map type description<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Intra-Galactic Coordinators were increasing the unit cap for Energy Collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some debugging code to catch a null reference exception in the Warden Fleet Long Range Planning code<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for making us aware of a problem in this area<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Flagships that are crippled can no longer pick up units for transport. Flagships that were transporting units and become crippled now unload all their units immediately. This fixes a few ways players could abuse the Crippled mechanic.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Split Intra-Galactic Coordinators abilities. Instead of buffing all ship caps, there are now three, one for each of Turrets, Frigates and Strike Craft. Note that each Coordinator now gives a bigger buff.<br />
** Note that this doesn't work for strikecraft and turrets yet in the current build, we just didn't have time.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleet Centerpieces should now all Rebuild Remains.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting confusion in this area.<br />
<br />
* "Light" and "Heavy" Tech Upgrades cost more at higher levels.<br />
<br />
* "Disruptive" Tech Upgrade costs slightly more at all levels.<br />
<br />
* Battlestation, Citadel and Ark Tech Upgrade costs reduced.<br />
<br />
* "Spire Core" Tech Upgrade cost reduced a bit.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate reload time 9s -> 12s, damage 25,000 -> 20,000.<br />
<br />
* Tamed Macrophage metal cost increased to 2 million, energy consumption increased to 25,000.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Scrubbed Abomination metal cost increased to 350k.<br />
<br />
* Muggers and Brawlers now cost their proper amount of metal - 300k - instead of 3 million...<br />
** Muggers sure lived up to their name.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting this! <br />
<br />
=== AI Threat Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Thanks to ptarth for a great save game that led to all these changes<br />
<br />
* The AI now has a per-AI Type tunable, RatioOfFearOfRemoteEnemies, which informs how seriously the AI takes into account your forces on planets near the planet it is attacking. This reduces the AI's tendency to be terrified of nearby large player/nanocaust forces.<br />
<br />
* The AI is now capable of having Threat that it uses only against minor factions. There was a longstanding bug preventing this from working correctly. This threat is "Dumber" then general purpose (aka "anti-player") threat.<br />
** Treat threat specifically against a player as "general purpose"<br />
<br />
* Improve the way the AI handles Threat adjacent to the player home planet.<br />
** If the Threat is Waiting against your home planet (since you have fortified it too heavily to attack) and there are much easier targets, it will prefer to take your other planets out first rather than just building up a giant fleetball.<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to units keeping track of the fact that they are Threat. Failing to do this was confusing the AI's Strength Counting, leading to the AI believing it was weaker than it should have been<br />
** When Threat gets an order to attack another planet, make sure to stay in Threat behaviour.<br />
** Fix a bug where Retreating AI ships would sometimes lose track of the fact that they should have Threat behaviour.<br />
** Copy Orders when splitting a stack (via the Split GameCommand or when the top unit in the stack dies) to preserve Threat behaviour.<br />
<br />
* Also improve debug hover tooltip for squad orders/Threat behaviour and improve some code commenting/readability<br />
<br />
=== Unity Engine Upgrade (To 2019.1 - Now With Incremental Garbage Collection!) ===<br />
<br />
* Upgraded the game to Unity 2019.1.0f2! The prior version was on 2018.2.0 or something along those lines, so this is a big jump.<br />
** The really big improvement is time-sliced garbage collection: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-incremental-garbage-collection/<br />
*** Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhfzzLyG7_w<br />
** This also has numerous bugfixes, and lets us upgrade from a VERY old version of TextMeshPro to the newest version, which in turn fixes a variety of bugs relating to text, blurry text, textboxes, etc.<br />
*** That said, as part of this, we knew this was going to happen, but it breaks ALL the references to any sort of text-based thing inside of any of our unity projects.<br />
*** But we kind of needed to go ahead and have this done before we started in on a bunch more UI updates or else it was just going to be creating even more work for ourselves in the future.<br />
** There are also a variety of stability improvements to the unity engine in general, and a few performance improvements. I think that Linux machines will see the biggest boost.<br />
*** There are some new capabilities that we can in theory use in the future, too, and nested prefabs are an amazing thing for sure. But we're not really needing those bits in this specific project right at the moment.<br />
** Oh and this does upgrade us to the latest version of the post processing stack v2, as well, which means probably better performance and some edge bugfixes for some folks in that area, too.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so we've been using the mcs.exe compiler for the last two years, and it turns out that doesn't support the newer versions of C#. It would have been nice if that had been more clear.<br />
** Instead, when we were updating our TextMeshPro component or a few other things -- or trying to, anyway -- we would instead get mysterious "System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: "Void System.Array.Reverse(!!0[])" compilation errors. Good luck googling that, almost nobody has that.<br />
** The solution is to STOP USING MCS.EXE, and instead use csc.exe. That's the new Roslyn compiler that Micrsoft created and unity is using for the newer C# 6.0+ features.<br />
*** The !fun! part about that is that all the syntax is different, and also it requires references to... a whole bunch of dlls that are the "reference dlls" instead of the "runtime ones."<br />
*** If you ever find yourself referencing a dll called System.Private.CoreLib.dll, or anything like that, STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING and try a different dll.<br />
**** Even though the compiler just told you that what you need is in that dll, it's actually lying.<br />
**** Actually what you need is in... good luck figuring that out!... but probably it's in the REFERENCE version of System.Core.dll or similar. It has nothing to do with "netcoreapp" or "netstandard," unlike the few non-unity-related references to this on the internet would have you believe. That's unrelated to unity, and is just a fun thing on some web servers and various other software.<br />
**** What the heck is a "reference dll" in terms of what the compiler needs? Well, it's a fuller version than is used at runtime, I suppose. I haven't explicitly seen that said anywhere, but that seems to be the general feeling I'm getting. Why they needed this split I'm not sure, but I'm guessing different compiler flags or perhaps the ability to have different per-platform versions. Something like that.<br />
**** Where do you find those reference dlls?? Ha! Good luck with that. Some of them seem to be in the Roslyn compiler folder... except not really, some of them have way too small of sizes. Others are almost certainly in your [UnityInstallLocation]\Editor\Data\Managed\UnityEngine folder, but there again it's not perfect.<br />
***** Generally you're going to find yourself searching around inside the unity install folder, and you might even find yourself (if you're on windows) searching around inside C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.6.1\ or whatever your equivalent is. Nicely packaged for you? NO.<br />
** So that explains one of the big mysteries that Keith and I have been scratching our heads on for a couple of years now.<br />
*** But even with that "solved," I couldn't get all of the aspects of LINQ working, and some of our third-party networking code uses LINQ, so I moved that into an external dll that will get loaded at runtime. That's more efficient anyway, but annoyingly indirect.<br />
*** All of the network code has been open-sourced by the original authors anyhow, so that actually will work out extra well for us when we get to that point. But in the short term it's another pain in the rear we didn't need.<br />
<br />
* One bonus of all this upgrading of unity-stuff is that the editor is no longer complaining about our external dlls being something that will crash the editor and so something they refuse to load. That's... always a plus. And is related to the whole compiler saga.<br />
<br />
* Okay, nested prefabs from the latest versions of unity are actually indeed insanely useful and we're starting to use those more than we otherwise might have.<br />
<br />
==== Complete Overhaul Of All Fonts ====<br />
<br />
* ALL of the fonts in the game have been reworked (in terms of how they are imported into TextMeshPro and thus how they look in general).<br />
** And a bunch of new fonts have been added to the game as options for us to use in various contexts.<br />
** And we've completely redone what fonts we are using in almost all contexts as it is.<br />
** There was a lot of complaining about the fonts not feeling properly militaristic, or otherwise being non-thematic, and hopefully this helps.<br />
<br />
* The background story is again its own window and scrolls rather than is paginated, but this time is a lot more condensed, uses an improved version of the more-recent rewritten version, and uses strategic coloration to make it easier to read quickly.<br />
<br />
* The little notification icon/panels at the top of the screen now show up with a new font (as with most other parts of the game), but this is a particularly good font for condensed/confined places. It should let you read more things without them trailing off too ellipses, while it also not looking tacky in terms of how it's crammed in.<br />
** Also, the TextMeshPro upgrade itself seems to do a better job of choosing when to go to ellipsis instead of just drawing the raw text of whatever it is. So some of the planet names that were drawing ellipses very much too soon now won't.<br />
<br />
* As an aside, it's quite possible that the following issues are present somewhere in the game now, and we'd love to know about it:<br />
** Some sort of text not wrapping properly or being outright invisible, or cut off.<br />
** Some sort of text section making it impossible to click something near it, or picking up clicks from way further away than it should have.<br />
** Some sort of text section having the wrong font, or being misaligned in a subtle or not-subtle way.<br />
** We tried to correct all these that we could find, but bear in mind that this was a couple of dozen interfaces that we had to edit BY HAND for this version, so we probably missed something.<br />
** Honestly this was another reason we did this now, during the beta period, versus during a non-beta time. Thanks for being our guinea pigs to all the testers helping on this!<br />
<br />
* Given that we're changing so many of the fonts, and may choose to do so even more as feedback rolls in, we've now codified the in-code font-sizing a bit in a new FontSizes class.<br />
** Essentially size 12pt in font A might be waaaay larger or smaller than 12pt in font B. So we needed a way to normalize the offsets from the defaults of whatever we decide makes sense with a given font.<br />
<br />
==== Various Changes to our Post Processing Stack ====<br />
<br />
* Oh, I'm sorry, did we say we were going to be using the new unity Post Processing Stack V2? Blah, that really doesn't play nice with what we wanted to do.<br />
** Instead we're now using Beautify again, stripped down into performance mode but using it for vingnetting and tonemapping. We continue to use amplify bloom for the bloom effects, because messing with that again would be... insanely time consuming.<br />
** Overall this does mean there's a subtle shift to the look of the game yet again -- and, wait, no we're not using that now, either. Sigh. We'll figure out the tonemapping at some point, but frankly our general lighting is doing the heavy lifting on its own.<br />
<br />
==== Splitting Some Network Code Off Into Its Own Area ====<br />
<br />
* A bunch of the networking code has been offloaded into its own dll now, which we're able to more easily update as needed.<br />
** This actually makes our iteration time on that sort of code faster in the future.<br />
** In the process of getting this working, we managed to waste about two hours trying to figure out why the entire game was broken (and it was a one-liner typo). Fun!<br />
<br />
== Version 0.853 An Officer And A Bunch Of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 22nd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Only the offensive (strike and officer) type of fleets are now auto-assigned numbered hotkeys.<br />
** If people want to manually assign hotkeys differently in the future, they can (when that interface is in place), but this really is the most likely use case most of the time.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Command stations can once again die to remains.<br />
** This means that if you have a battlestation or a citadel on the planet, then they can rebuild the command station for you automatically just like remains rebuilders would have done once upon a time. Yay automation!<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes, Badger, and Nameless Terror for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Ability To Scout With Nanites Properly Works (And Related Visual Effects) ===<br />
<br />
* Unlike all the other versions since 0.850, you can now click over to planets that you have never explored.<br />
** This lets you actually use the Explore With Nanites hack, which is kiiiinda important, honestly. Or at least it's important to a lot of people, depending on playstyle.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and others for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The visual effect for viewing a planet where you have stale intel (but have seen it before) was before a bit confusing and a bit much.<br />
** Much as Chris liked the matrix-y effect, that has been ditched and things are a lot more Factorio-like in terms of just being darkened and grainy.<br />
** The effect is subtle enough not to be irritating, but to be definitely noticeable. Given the sidebar notes Stale Intel, and things don't look super duper crazy in terms of the visual distortions, hopefully we don't need any bigger onscreen messages to explain what is happening to players.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, Nameless Terror, and RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* There is a NEW visual effect for viewing a planet where you have never even explored before.<br />
** Through the distortion here you can barely even read the wormhole names, and all you can see are the planet graphics and wormhole graphics (not even metal spots, etc).<br />
** This one is heavily stylized, but is so TV-like and the sidebar is utterly empty and saying "you have never explored here" and similar that hopefully it's really clear what is going on.<br />
** This is needed simply because we're allowing players to click into planets that are unexplored so that they can do the nanites hack against them to explore them.<br />
<br />
=== New Background Story ===<br />
<br />
* A new and brief, paginated story has replaced the longwinded scrolling-based "background story" section of the main menu.<br />
** The old story was complicated and no longer really accurate to the game. This does mean all those character portraits that Chris created are now completely gone from the game, but such is life. The initial pre-game story is super simple and that's kind of how it always has been. We want the rest of the story, what there is, to be based on what happens during your gameplay.<br />
** The new story reads:<br />
*** After an 800-year civil war between humans fighting amongst the stars, they finally birthed a force that would end all human wars forever: Artificial Intelligence.<br />
*** Quickly eclipsing the humans in power and taking control of most of their automated forces, the AI nearly wiped the human race from the face of the galaxy. Only scattered pockets remain, hiding amidst the scattered wreckage from the civil war and the AI-led extermination that followed.<br />
*** You are in command of the last substantial remaining human military force. It is so small that the AI is either unaware of it, or just doesn't care.<br />
*** Potentially coincidentally, something outside the galaxy seems to have distracted the AI far more than humans ever did.<br />
*** You must grow your forces, capturing and reactivating fleets from the old wars... but you must be careful not to grow so strong that the eye of the AI turns back toward you.<br />
*** Gain just enough power, capture just enough fleets, take back just enough planets, that you can destroy the massive structures known as 'AI Overlords' and end this new war before the AI is even fully aware it has begun.<br />
*** If you are too greedy, if you make yourself too threatening, if you let the AI realize you might be a true threat... expect us all to lose everything.<br />
*** You must use discretion, avoid distraction and temptation, and wield your forces like a scalpel. Take risks, be bold, but don't try to be a conquerer.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Removed the "build remains rebuilders" intel tab entry, since that is outdated.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The strength of waves that are incoming should now be correctly stated, whereas before it was not since we switched the AI costs and strengths to be two different things.<br />
** Some internal variables have also been renamed to be more clear.<br />
** This has not been tested, so it might still be wrong.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new capturable_can_seed_at_all="false" flag, which is now applied to the Cloaked Ark One and the Agile Cursed Golem.<br />
** These two entities should no longer seed at all in the galaxy, since they were only ever supposed to be granted via the starting fleet choices anyhow. This won't fix existing savegames, but if you see them in new savegames as something you can capture, please do let us know.<br />
** Thanks to vinco and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases should now seed at more appropriate distances from you.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding and fixing, and reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where you could not select the starting fleet without it always just defaulting back to classic.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for the fix, and HeartHunter7 and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes so that if you have invalid/mismatched options (custom or otherwise) in the lobby, it will now complain about them properly and let you know that things are failing.<br />
** With this we found that the team colors for Instigators and the AntagonizedDysonSphere were not working properly, for instance.<br />
<br />
* Attack warnings in the top bar should now properly show stacked ship counts when you hover over them.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Some complicated code fixes from WeaponMaster have been put in place to hopefully solve the "multi-shot doesn't function when there's an enemy fortress or other super important item present" issue. Please let us know if this doesn't fix it, or any other strange cases wind up happening, but things seem okay from some limited testing so far.<br />
** Big thanks to WeaponMaster for the fix, and to KMan_Gladiator for the initial report!<br />
<br />
* Fixed some internal bugs with "last second we saw a planet" that was causing some oddities in the local tab's reporting of what you could see of enemy strength, etc.<br />
<br />
* The local tab summaries now include strength and ships that are inside other ships, aka drones and reinforcements not yet deployed, etc. It's way more accurate now.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips in the local tab were showing the strength values as being 1000x what we show them elsewhere in the UI. Oops, fixed.<br />
** This bug is old as the game itself, more or less. Wow.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting this right as we also discovered it!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where in the post-0.850 builds you could get too much intel about various other planets if you clicked to them in the first 2 seconds of gameplay. This wasn't as big a deal until we changed it so you can click to unexplored planets.<br />
<br />
* The little "battle at a planet" notification cards at the top of the screen now properly show all the ships that are inside other ships, making it so that their ship counts now match that of the sidebar (which is itself only newly correct in this version).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the incoming wave notifications had strength values that were laughably tiny and wrong. It was only tallying the strength of the first ship of each type, which meant that if there were 1000 ships in a wave, it was 1/1000th the value it should have been.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Strike Fleets vs Officer Fleets ===<br />
<br />
* There was previously a general "mobile combat" (MobileCombatFleetFlagship) category for fleets. This has now been split in two:<br />
** MobileOfficerCombatFleetFlagship - this is the style that we had before, where the centerpieces are either an Ark or a Golem. These are big centerpiece fleets that have small and medium craft but also something big and scary at the center.<br />
** MobileStrikeCombatFleetFlagship - this is new, and is just basically a transport with a "super meh" fusion bomb weapon at the center. Basically this is meant to be the big groups of your ships that are moving around doing the most of the fighting, and the transports are there for... transport! And for ships to pop out of during construction.<br />
<br />
* There are now EVEN MORE fleets seeded around the galaxy for you to find, although many more of them are the "strike" kind of combat fleets instead of the "officer" sort.<br />
** This gets back to the main playstyle for most people from earlier version of this game and from the base game; having big centerpiece units is great, but let's not overdo it. And for those who don't prefer that kind of gameplay, they can entirely skip it.<br />
<br />
* The number of certain types of Arks and Golems that can be seeded has been drastically reduced from what they were before (those that are part of fleets, not lone ones).<br />
** You should still see almost as many of these types of fleets as before, but a greater diversity of them. And in general way fewer armored golems, for instance.<br />
** On really large maps, you will find that you're maybe not getting quite as many of these as you once were, though.<br />
** The ultimate goal is for these to feel more rare and powerful over time, and a lot of them are seeded a bit further away, now.<br />
<br />
* The "Drone" specialtype has been split into DroneGeneral and DroneFrigate.<br />
** This lets us better use the multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_drones and multiplied_nonfrigate_ship_cap_for_drones xml entries when relevant.<br />
** Most stuff is just DroneGeneral, though, as it is.<br />
<br />
* We now have two new entries, multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_mobile and multiplied_strikecraft_ship_cap_for_mobile.<br />
** These let us make fleets larger or smaller based on what the centerpiece is, separate from the fleet design itself. This is intended specifically for the officer and strike fleet types, to let us have them share the types of fleets but to let the non-officer fleets be larger in general.<br />
** Note that officer fleets and non-officer fleets are NOT intended to be balanced with one another (officer fleets are more powerful, naturally), but the officer fleets are more rare and more powerful as well as more expensive in general.<br />
<br />
* There are several variants of tranport flagships, which all look the same and have the same name, but which seed at different frequencies and have much larger frigate, strikecraft, or some mix of the two caps.<br />
** The idea is that if you want really huge fleets of smaller ships, then these are where they come from.<br />
** The balance of all this new stuff is very untested, but the seeding of them seems to work at the very least.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring these various changes.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Overloader Combat Factory speed boost increased from 20% to 40%.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels that roll the OtherDefenseFocus design (i.e Tractors, Tachyon, etc) now have Turrets as intended.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation shields increased from 350k to 500k.<br />
<br />
* Shifted Strength values around (mainly Guardians are lower).<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleets should now always have at least two unit types.<br />
** Finding a Fleet with just one unit type was rather bad, and kind of doomed that Fleet to being relatively useless.<br />
** This was especially bad if it happened to the one adjacent to your Homeworld.<br />
<br />
* Most units for the AI now cost twice as much for it to purchase.<br />
** Guardians and Turrets cost 50% more, Frigates cost 33% more.<br />
** At the same time, the starting AI defenses are increased to make them roughly the same, as that seemed mostly okay, it was mainly the sheer wave sizes people were getting.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Armored Golem hull into shields.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the inspiration.<br />
<br />
* Economic and Military Command Stations store 300k metal instead of 100k, Home Command stores 2.5 million instead of 2 million.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for mentioning a problem here.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate durability upgraded a fair bit, the "Railcannon" variant has a 50% damage increase on the Railcannons, and the "Laser" variant loses the damage bonus in place of simply firing a lot more shots.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes and ptarth for bringing the issues up.<br />
<br />
* Citadels have some weapon boosts.<br />
<br />
==== Speedier Flagships! ====<br />
<br />
* Player Golem Arks speed doubled.<br />
<br />
* Ark speed increased to 1400.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Player Arks and Spire Frigates move 50% faster after entering a planet for 5 seconds.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Decloaking Capabilities For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories now spawn with Combat Sentry Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Engineers For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new category of ship_cap_group for fleet memberships, this one called Civilian.<br />
** Turns out that we just completely forgot to add in the ability to generate more engineers via battlestations and citadels, that that was most definitely supposed to be a thing.<br />
** This won't affect existing savegames, but you should be finding caches of engineers that you can construct along with your battlestations all over the place now in new games.<br />
** The idea isn't to increase the ship cap for engineers on a given planet by adjusting the planet itself (unless you want to change command station type), but rather by which types of stations you put there, and what engineering caps they have. That was always the plan with fleets, but was just a complete oversight.<br />
** The reason for the new Civilian category is so that we can have caps of engineers (and later maybe a mix of something else) that is separate from the OtherDefenses, turrets, and whatever else. Basically to let them not compete with other types of defenses while still being added new.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== No More Mysterious Metal Increases As Marks Go Up ====<br />
<br />
* There is no longer any added metal cost to having higher-mark units.<br />
** Some may lament this, but this was the only downside to increasing the mark of units, which is otherwise an all-positive thing to do. It was such a sharp negative that you could actually tank your economy without warning.<br />
** The first game made good use of this because you could choose to build cheaper low-mark units at any time, and then more expensive high-mark units later, and the higher metal and energy costs, as well as lower ship cap, were all deterrents to the higher marks being overly relied-upon. That was an interesting system, but we moved away from that well over a year ago, if not more, when we combined all the ships of yours into being the highest mark of whatever their line is.<br />
** This new system is one that does stress your metal reserves less, probably, but you're gaining so many more ships over time (by capturing more fleets) that you're still going to need more metal later in the game than what you start with. It's just due to increased ship counts in this game, not due to your units suddenly and unexpectedly costing more.<br />
** Thanks to Karhax for reporting the root issue here.<br />
<br />
==== No More AIP Increases From "Too Many Fleets" In A System ====<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the "too many fleets at a planet" logic entirely, at least the current version.<br />
** It simply felt punitive and un-fun, and there was no version of that style which was likely to be fun. Nonetheless, we still just commented it out for now so someone can build something on that if desired in the future. We are also going to be working on some things to prevent players going absolutely nuts with how they stack things, but they won't be so opaque or so likely to unexpectedly bite you.<br />
** Thanks to basically everyone playing the betas for complaining about this. Honestly that didn't hugely surprise any of us, but the discussion it sparked was interesting. In particular thanks to Nameless Terror, Ecthelon, themouthofsauron, Karhax, and probably some folks we missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.852 Directness Is Better==<br />
(Released April 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Rather than being markless, Sentry Frigates are now mark 1 but only get upgraded by the fleet itself upgrading (which isn't a working mechanic yet, it's coming!)<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for noticing this.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Tooltips setting option: "Show Weapon Activity Details"<br />
** If enabled, then each weapon in your tooltips shows you a bunch of info about how long until it reloads, why it didn't fire most recently, and other such info.<br />
** Previously this info was just always shown, but now it's off by default.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips -- for player ships or anything on the build sidebar -- now tell you if the ship is unable to be upgraded, or what techs upgrade it if any do, or if they are of the sort that only upgrade when their fleet itself upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reminding us just how important this is, although we were already going to do it.<br />
<br />
* One crippled mobile fleet flagship among several functional ones could previously erroneously prevent you from building command stations. Fixed.<br />
** Additionally, now battlestations/citadels are able to build command stations, not just mobile fleet flagships.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== AI Reconquest Command Stations ===<br />
<br />
* There once was a specialtype of "NormalAICommandStation." This has been removed, and split into:<br />
** AICommandStationOriginal, which is used in the majority of cases.<br />
** AICommandStationReconquest, which is used for cases where the AI reconquered a planet.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "AI Reconquest Command Station," which is now what the AI will seed after taking back a planet during a reconquest wave.<br />
** This acts just like the original command stations of the AI, with the following exceptions:<br />
*** It has twice as much health and shielding.<br />
*** It doesn't have any confusing messages about AIP going up if you destroy it (that already wasn't the case, but the interface made it sound like it did).<br />
*** It can't be hacked for science extraction. Go build your own command station there if you want that science, sonny.<br />
*** It doesn't grant any scouting intel when destroyed, so you can't use any exploity type of behavior to let the AI take a planet back and then destroy the reconquest station in order to get more scouting intel AIP-free.<br />
** Note that in existing savegames, any existing command stations the AI put there because of reconquest will still be of the original sort. So you won't see this until the AI does a reconquest wave in this version or newer.<br />
** Fun fact, the humans-don't-autotarget-this rules are still the same here, for now at least, but this can be changed in xml if we really want to. We left this not because of an AIP cost (which is why the original has it), but because there might be a very valid reason you want to let the AI keep the planet (aka them wasting reinforcements on a planet that has been neutered). So having your ships go into auto-kill mode would probably break some valid advanced strategies.<br />
** Thanks to BadgerBadger, TechSY730, and Exlium for suggesting and reporting various issues that led to this.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Rallying Out, Direct Orders Inheritance And Position In ===<br />
<br />
* All concept of ships rallying to... anything... is now gone. It was annoying and full of edge cases that would cause players to have their fleets not behave how they wanted them to as refleeting was in progress.<br />
** Now all ships that are created for a fleet by a factory now pop straight out of the fleet centerpiece, with all the orders from the fleet centerpiece (including stance).<br />
** This gets around some of the most annoying logistical issues, and because the centerpieces of the fleets are so large it makes enough logical sense to not cause huge amounts of cognitive dissonance. Putting gameplay first, this is the only thing that really solves our age-old (literally like a decade old) problem.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 and others for reporting, although here again we were already leaning in this direction because of our own frustration.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.851 Drones And Economies==<br />
(Released April 19th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Player Command Station Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the economic command station description:<br />
** Economic variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variant gives greatly improved metal and energy output, but lacks the ability to directly defend itself very well. It doesn't even have any means of decloaking enemies directly. Planets with these should either be protected by a powerful citadel or battlestation, or so far back from the front lines that they are safe.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The matter converters and energy collectors were higher on the logistical command stations, and now that has been swapped with the economic command stations.<br />
<br />
* Logistical command stations now come with 20 mines built in, and also two focused gravity generators. More stuff to help them be more tricky and dangerous directly.<br />
** They also now get 2 forcefields while the military variants only get 1 instead, swapping those two.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the logistical command station description:<br />
* Logistical variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at finding cloaked enemies, tractoring enemies, and even laying traps (mines!) for enemies. Beyond that it's kind of a halfway point between the military and economic drives of its peers. They also get two forcefields where their peers only get one, and way more engineers.<br />
<br />
* Military command stations now get 5 beam cannons and 15 ambush turrets, making them by far the most able to defend themselves without the help of a battlestation or citadel.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the military command station description:<br />
** Military variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at defending itself, and perfect for dangerous border planets. It also gets the most factories, making it probably the best way to resupply your fleets near the front lines.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The lost spire frigate faction has now been properly removed from the game.<br />
** We had already folded the functionality from that into the main game itself, so the faction was pointless and just broke things if you enabled it. If you enabled it in your savegames, then those savegames are probably now broken.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding issue where if we removed game settings from the game, then old settings files that were loaded in would complain about UnrequestedXMLAttributes.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that are owned by no faction (aka not claimed yet) should no longer have their cloaking devices function until they are claimed. Tested and works as expected.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The seeding logic for NormalPlanetNastyPicks, SpireArchives, and CivilWarTriggers was... nonsensical? The code did some kind of strange things.<br />
** It should now work properly and not do things like putting spire archives on AI homeworlds.<br />
** It also now logs what it is doing to the mapgen logger if you have that turned on and want to see what it is doing.<br />
** We've not tested this at all.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with beam cannons where they were being upgraded by the Melee tech instead of Splash.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where it would register a double-click if you were clicking too rapidly between different parts of the screen. Mice are fast! Now if you've moved the mouse more than 10px, it doesn't consider it a double-click. Probably. We need to test that.<br />
** Fully fixed (and verified the fix) to the double-clicking stuff.<br />
** Thanks to Bobtree, Talkar, Kaleopan, and Exlium for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "MISSING LOCALIZATION: AIPChangeReason_FleetConcentration" bug.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* It is now possible to explicitly set up in the xml that units cannot be stacked. Use the tag cannot_be_stacked="true".<br />
** This also now automatically happens on all AI guardians (dire and regular), drones (that got exploity), lone golems, and NPC centerpieces.<br />
** All of the marauder raiders and similar can no longer be stacked because of the tag, to prevent issues with them.<br />
** Astro Trains also can no longer be stacked, since that's just odd.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where drones were never being set up properly on drone controllers at all (hive golem, etc).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories would help with drone production.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that was preventing drones from ever being deployed even if they were internally created. Fun with boolean inversions!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a whole nest of bugs where drones that were a part of non-drone-specific fleet types could never be spawned by their spawner.<br />
** Aka this was breaking things like hive golems, but drone producer guard posts would have been fine (though that bit is untested).<br />
<br />
* Fixed some issues with the drone caps getting higher when the mark level of the drone controllers was higher. It should be the same ship cap for those drones regardless of cap, unlike with regular non-drone ships.<br />
<br />
* The data and tooltip info for AIs unlocking new ship types has been removed, as that mechanic actually isn't a thing anymore.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Irritation Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* AI guard posts that are no longer on AI-controlled planets now lose their cloaking. This also just seemed like a needed thing to avoid an annoying bit of cleanup you otherwise have to do. Typically they would be sitting around doing nothing, since all their defenders fled. Tested and works as expected.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking fleet leaders (centerpieces, flagships, command stations, whatever) now selects or deselects all the stuff in their fleet, rather than all the things of their same type.<br />
** For individual ship types, like fighters or whatever, it works like it always has.<br />
*** HOWEVER, when it comes to individual ship types, it no longer considers spinoff units (Daggers, etc) something to select along with the main unit type that you might have clicked. Sharing a common ancestor is no longer good enough for the selection stuff to work that way, particularly given the ludicrous number of variants we now have.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 for suggesting the change to double-clicking on centerpieces.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips now specify how many undeployed drones there are inside an entity.<br />
** Additionally, you can see the construction percentage on each drone that is getting created inside.<br />
<br />
* In preparation for some upcoming changes, the Ships tab has been renamed to the Local tab, and says "At Local Planet" instead of Ships up at the top.<br />
<br />
* On the fleets tab, it now has a new piece where it will show the hotkey assigned to that fleet, if there is one assigned.<br />
<br />
* You still can't manually assign hotkeys to fleets, but hotkeys are now automatically assigned to fleets as you acquire them early on in.<br />
** This is something we want to have happen so that the use of these hotkeys is encouraged by the large numbers of people (including some of us on staff) who never bothered to use them in the past.<br />
** But obviously prior to 0.900 we want it to be something you can control directly, too.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Dire Guard Posts no longer increase AIP on death.<br />
** Was intended to mimic the AIP Floor increase from Classic, but didn't play well with the random Post count and multiple AIs.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlords Tachyon system is a bit shorter range and decloaks at half the speed.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where this was a major roadblock - more than intended.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida and Shredder Guard Posts fire every 3 seconds instead of 1.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where a Tethuida was actually far scarier with the gun than intended - it's meant to use the drones, mainly.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation and Rorqual Hegira Ark have much larger forcefield radius now.<br />
** Things are bigger in general, so you weren't able to fit as much as you used to under these.<br />
<br />
* All Citadels except Interceptors now have a weapon range of 10,100.<br />
<br />
* AI requires higher AIP before increasing its tech level.<br />
** Used to be, starting from Mark 2: 150, 300, 450, 600, 800, 1200.<br />
** Now is, starting from Mark 2: 225, 450, 675, 900, 1125, 1350.<br />
*** The AI no longer pays more for higher Mark units, and so it was having very large power spikes relatively early on.<br />
*** Although, Mark 7 is actually triggered not much slower than what it used to, so really annoying the AI is still going to hurt a lot.<br />
<br />
* All Battlestations shield points increased to 350,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.850 The Arrival of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
''We are breaking '''all''' the savegames again, sorry about that. This series of updates leading up to 0.900 should collectively be the last time '''for real''' for real, although we've said that before. It's not our practice to do this sort of thing at all, typically, but this game has been going through a lot more pre-release evolution than most of our titles have. The old savegames won't even make sense in the new version, really.''<br />
<br />
* This got super long and we wanted to show what we were working on as we went, so we wound up also having this: [[AI War 2: 0.850 Raw Chris Changelog]]<br />
<br />
* And in general if you're not clear why we're doing all this, then here's a really long document that explains it: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/16dJvDOWckK4vfnW2Mwut7wv2OF_bCn17XuspBlPBymQ/edit#heading=h.wkf7np25ov5 AI War 2 - Unit Construction / Fleets Rework].<br />
** Although we went much further than the document laid out, moving into territory like making the AI planets more unique from one another, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Misc ===<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres will remain antagonized much longer after hacks.<br />
** More hacks against a Dyson Sphere will increase the antagonization time.<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI to spawn Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy. Only Dyson factions with high enough intensity can spawn antagonizers.<br />
** Antagonizers affect all Dyson Factions, so if you've enabled 3 dyson factions, the AI will spawn antagonizers for each dyson faction, and you have to kill all the antagonizers before they will become friendly again.<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers follow similar spawning rules to Instigator Bases; they need to spawn close to the player at lower AIPs, and at high AIP can spawn anywhere.<br />
** To compensate for this, the Dyson's income has been slightly buffed.<br />
<br />
* Gives some units unused voice lines, and the Dyson ships the Zenith voice.<br />
** Engineers and other similar civilian ships now actually talk!<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map now has more of a "military screen" style look to it again, although this doesn't yet apply to the actual icons and lines and so on. But it has that same sort of scanline effect and whatnot as in the first game, though more involved now and fancier with some hexagons, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts and Tutorials Gone for Now ===<br />
<br />
* The old quickstarts have all been moved to QuickStartsOld, since they no longer function with the new system in general.<br />
** Because of the way Steam updates work, the QuickStarts from now on will be loaded from QuickStarts2 instead, which is presently empty and needs to be for the next little while. But at least it won't be throwing errors when players try to start quickstarts in the new build.<br />
<br />
* The pre-existing tutorial has been completely disabled, since it is probably nonfunctional in general and tries to teach you a lot of things that are no longer relevant. We're going to be majorly redoing that in the future, but for now we don't want people accidentally going in there.<br />
<br />
=== Fleets Added ===<br />
<br />
* Fleets are a new concept in the game, which are basically collections of ships in one of a few different categories. The AIs and NPCs don't really use these, per se, although there's nothing stopping them from doing so. But on the player side, this basically is now the central grouping of units for your stuff, and you use these offensively and defensively. You can get waaay larger ship caps than before, but each group is... well, automated as well as being a distinct flavor unto itself.<br />
<br />
* The concepts of destruction points and Ark Upgrade Points are both gone, and replaced by Fleet EXP instead. This works similarly to both of those other things, in that if your fleet centerpiece is on a planet with an enemy ship that dies to your forces, then that fleet gains some EXP. More for big-ticket items.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of logic for how fleets are selected and moved around, which was previously related to control groups, is now in place.<br />
** The logic for how to assign fleets to keybind indices (fleet groups, essentially) for now is going to be clicking-the-interface-only, since that's really confusing in keybinds. We may wind up reintroducing keybinds for this at some point in the future, but more likely would be a better interface for organizing fleets into the keybinds directly, since this would avoid the confusion factor for players.<br />
** The big sticky spot for confusion is people thinking they're making a control group of ships, when really it is of fleets, in essence. Even this explanation is confusing. ;)<br />
<br />
* The various things that you can purchase from the Zenith Trader are all now planet-bound, even if they are normally mobile. They go into the fleet of that planet, and are on permanent station-keeping there.<br />
** In theory we could later have something that can let you purchase new ships for mobile fleets from the Zenith Trader or otherwise, but that would need a new UI and new general mechanics. That would be fun, but in terms of replicating the experience of the Zenith Trader thus far, here's how it needs to work for this part.<br />
<br />
* The various kinds of command stations now each come with their own hand-designed fleet styles, which are of the type that just use the max cap of each type they can have inside of their categories. That way they are always predictable per type, but you get more forcefields with a military command compared to economic, etc.<br />
** Things like minefields and the gravity generators don't go with any of these, but rather have to be gotten via Battlestations.<br />
** When it comes to factories, some of the command station types grant more factories per planet than others.<br />
<br />
* The Battlestations in general are set up, although most of them just seed randomized template-based fleets. The Ensnarer one has an example instead of a specific type of fleet that it uses in place of a template.<br />
** Bear in mind that there are several different ways to set up how a fleet leader (Battlestation or mobile) might have its fleet design created, and if none of them are set up then you'll have a lonely empty fleet. Right now the game doesn't warn the designers about that.<br />
** In general there is a looooot more that could be done here in terms of making new and unique things, but right now the procedural fleets themselves are enough that probably that's not a big priority.<br />
<br />
* The general strikecraft and frigates are all now set up so that they'll populate some interesting different procedural fleet designs in (currently) 9 different overall flavors. But even within those 9 flavors, there's a huge amount of variety likely to be found.<br />
<br />
* The game now actually seeds the Battlestations and fleet flagships, and makes sure that they have their fleet designs populated right from mapgen start.<br />
** First it tries to seed 1 item with tag "MobileCombatFleetArkOrGolem" on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed 1 more two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least eight more, but up to 1 per 25 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** It's possible that it won't have enough types or will run into blockages, and that's A-OK to happen.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 Battlestation (based on the SpecialEntityType directly) on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least five more, but up to 1 per 50 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** In both cases, if it couldn't seed a thing closer in, then it will retry with it further out. This is mostly only relevant for snake maps and other things with very few direct and secondary connections from planets.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 item with tag "MobileSupportFleetFlagship" on a planet two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least two more, but up to 1 per 150 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** The reason it uses the SpecialEntityType directly for Battlestations is because that's the most direct thing. For the other two categories, those both have a MobileFleetFlagship type, and so those tags help specify a bit more if they are regular (and thus more common), or are "support" (and thus less common and further out).<br />
<br />
* The Battlestation special entity type has been split into two: BattlestationBasic and BattlestationCitadel.<br />
<br />
* The MobileFleetFlagships special entity type has been split into three: MobileCombatFleetFlagship, MobileSupportFleetFlagship, and MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship.<br />
** The third in this category is for the things that don't have a fleet with them, namely right now the spire frigates.<br />
<br />
* The seeding for battlestations and mobile fleet flagships has been updated, as you might guess.<br />
** The existing logic for mobile fleet flagships now applies to MobileCombatFleetFlagships, and MobileSupportFleetFlagships still also work the same.<br />
** The existing logic for battlestations now applies to BattlestationBasic.<br />
** MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship is now seeded "kinda wherever" and is both rarer but also no longer counts against the normal combat fleet flagships.<br />
** BattlestationCitadel is following the general pattern of the basic battlestations, but with the following differences:<br />
*** It only ever seeds one on a planet, not two at a time.<br />
*** It seeds one within 2 hops of a player starting planet if possible.<br />
*** It then seeds a smaller number of citadels out in the galaxy, mixed between the middle-distance and far out. These are in addition to the basic battlestations, not in place of them.<br />
** With all this, there's a better sense of control of what exactly the player can look forward to out there, but also in general there are yet more capturables out there, and they can continue to be balanced in their niches: we can add more lone wolf stuff without swamping the main mobile flagships, and we can add more citadels or regular battlestations without affecting their relative mixes.<br />
<br />
* The various MobileSupportFleet flagships now are able to get upgraded from Mark1 to higher marks based on their fleets being upgraded. They have no techs that benefit them directly.<br />
** This fixes an issue with them referencing an Engineer tech that was nonexistent.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each faction as their "loose" fleet.<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just used for all their ships, more or less, and doesn't really get used for much. Drones don't go in there, but that's it. Actual useful fleets can be created as-desired in the future, but for anything not using something specific, it uses this.<br />
** For the players, there is a PlayerLoose fleet, which is basically "remainder units" that are not in a fleet. Odds are that this won't be used, but it's an overflow valve in case we have a truly odd case or potentially even a bug that we want to fail more gracefully.<br />
*** Oh! Actually, we are using this now for ships that are being captured via zombification. So there you go, a use for it already.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each PlanetFaction as their "fleet of that planet."<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just a reference to their parent loose fleet from the faction itself.<br />
** For the players, these are unique fleets that are what the command stations go into and put their stuff into.<br />
*** It's entirely possible for a command station of a player to die, but in those cases the fleet must live on.<br />
<br />
* When the game creates a new ship/structure, it now REQUIRES that the appropriate Fleet.Membership be passed into it.<br />
** This solves all sorts of bugs where fleet membership was never being set previously.<br />
** In the case of fleet leaders or ships that create drones, it ignores this membership, however, and creates and populates its own fleet.<br />
<br />
* Added a whole bunch of ways to calculate the strength and health percentages of fleets based on their type, which is more complicated than you might think.<br />
** For command station fleets, or the battlestation ones, it's based around the total power out of what you've DECIDED to build (and what has died to remains or is hurt or whatever).<br />
** For drones and mobile fleets, it's out of the total things that would be auto-built, since you get no decision-making in whether to fully stock those fleets or not (aside from keeping them away from docks).<br />
** This is surprisingly complex when it comes to things like the ships being transported in fleets, or undeployed drones, etc, etc.<br />
<br />
* A new destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command xml tag has been added.<br />
** This is used only in a really narrow set of circumstances: it was a planet that a human player controlled with one kind of command station, and they now have a different kind of command station there.<br />
** Basically, different types of command stations give you different numbers of engineers, basic turrets, energy collectors, etc. This prevents you from having too many left over after you switch from a military to an economic command station, for instance; there were all sorts of games you could play with that to exploit things.<br />
** What this does NOT do is destroy units after your command station has died on a planet; in those circumstances, whatever is there continues to live on until you build a new command station. Presuming you rebuild as the same type, nothing gets destroyed.<br />
** This flag is also explicitly NOT on certain units like the human home forcefields and the various things you get from the Zenith Trader. They will frequently be over-cap (since their command station type doesn't always include it but you might have bought it separately), and so these are always assumed to be valid.<br />
** Confusing? Basically this just shuts down an exploit and doesn't affect much else.<br />
<br />
==== Docks Sidebar Tab Gone, Fleets Tab Added ====<br />
<br />
* The docks tab is gone, and a new fleets tab has taken its place.<br />
** The fleets tab has a bunch of sections which show first your fleets at the current planet, and then all of your fleets in the entire galaxy, by category, after that.<br />
** The categories, in order, are:<br />
*** Current Planet<br />
**** A quick view of all your fleets at the current planet.<br />
*** Mobile Combat<br />
**** The most versatile of your fighting forces: generally intended for offense, but quite able to come and defend your own planets as need be.<br />
*** Mobile Support<br />
**** Unusual supporting fleets that are able to either act as a force multiplier for your offensive or defensive fleets, provide remote supply on deep strikes, or perform surprising other secondary duties.<br />
*** Lone<br />
**** Unusual single 'lone wolf' massive ships that forego having attending ships in exchange for a simply awe-inspiring amount of direct power. Use them offensively or defensively, as you see fit.<br />
*** Battlestations<br />
**** General battlestations that are useful for either defending your planets or for setting up offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Citadels<br />
**** Citadels that are much stronger versions of your general battlestations, packing a huge punch in their own right as well as providing access to defenses for your planets or for offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Planet Cmd Stations<br />
**** Each command station you have on a planet has a small force of mostly basic, utility, or economic nature. However, if you've made purchases from the Zenith Trader or found other unique capturables throughout the galaxy, you might have some fixed-position weapons of surprising power here, too.<br />
** For the time being, the tooltips over the actual fleets just shows the tooltip for their centerpiece. This won't always be the case; they'll later have their own unique tooltips that are more informative.<br />
** For the time being as well, clicking these does nothing but show you a message saying that the fleet management interface is coming soon.<br />
** The individual fleet entries show the name of the fleets, their health percentage, their total ships out of their EFFECTIVE ship cap (for the stationary things, that's out of what you've deployed), their planet name, and their total effective strength if they were fully powered at the level that is chosen for them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new specific tooltip for the fleets in the fleet sidebar.<br />
** This gives a lot of the same info you could already see on the centerpiece's tooltip, but in a slightly more focused and condensed format.<br />
** You can also now right-click to center your view on the centerpiece and select the entire fleet. The tooltip now tells you this. You can also hold shift to select multiple fleets quickly by doing this, as you would have with selecting control groups previously.<br />
<br />
* Given that the fleets in the fleet sidebar can be shown twice -- once for their current planet, and once for their other category -- we decided to add some color to the ones for the current planet to set them apart. This helps to keep it clearer visually what is happening.<br />
<br />
==== Hand-Designed Fleet Capabilities ====<br />
<br />
* Normally it's nice to only have... one way to do things when setting up the XML, right? I mean, that's the most clear thing, eh?<br />
** However, in a few cases it is sometimes nice to be able to have parents talk about their children, rather than children always being the ones talking about their parents.<br />
** This is most notable for hand-designed fleet templates, where we don't want auto-modded stuff to be added in a bunch.<br />
** Thankfully, we can do both things, with both coexisting and neither acting in exclusion of the other.<br />
*** Basically, NORMALLY, you should definitely still use the fleet_membership nodes on ships in order to get them into fleets. This is more modder friendly and more flexible in general.<br />
*** THAT said, now you can also define ship_membership nodes in the fleets themselves, which basically are just the inverse of a fleet_membership node. They say all the same things, but say "a specific ship is being added to my fleet," versus the other way around with a ship adding itself to a specific fleet.<br />
*** This is now in use in a new CMP_StartingFleetDesigns.xml file, which uses a new design_logic of InitialPlayerFleet.<br />
**** Basically: we want to have 5-7 starting player fleets that are hand-designed including what their centerpiece is as well as what their ship compositions are. This lets players start off the game with something they are excited about, and move forward with whatever they find procedurally generated after that.<br />
<br />
==== "Control Groups" Are Gone ====<br />
<br />
* Fleets basically handle the same thing. But better. Some of the interface for this won't be until an upcoming build, though.<br />
<br />
==== "Supply" From Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new IsConsideredOutOfSupplyOfParentFleetCenterpiece bool, which is calculated based on ships within a human mobile or defensive fleet not being on the planet of their centerpiece.<br />
** This is done separately because that way it can only be calculated once per second, which is a lot more efficient.<br />
** This then gets used by things that are checking to see if ship systems are disabled -- aka guns, engineers, etc. These ships can still move, but they're neutered on purpose.<br />
** If the centerpiece is itself kind of hobbling along half-dead, it's okay because the ships are still able to draw supply.<br />
** For the stuff that is either considered "loose" or part of a command station's fleet, these things don't have the concept of supply at all, because their fleet leaders can legitimately be destroyed permanently and they need to still function. Or the loose ones don't even have a fleet leader.<br />
** The goal of the fleet leaders thing is to keep the mobile fleets, and the Battlestation stuff, remotely in the same area as one another. You can't start segmenting your fleets and sending them off to fight WAY off, only raiding neighboring planets. This is for balance purposes more than anything else, and is similar in reasoning to the old Supply concept from AIWC. Funny how things like that come back around!<br />
<br />
==== Squads Removed ====<br />
<br />
* Intra-Squad Formations have been removed, as have the concept of squads, the counts of "visual things per subsquad," and so on.<br />
** The whole "squads" idea was mainly to have more ships without having more ships, and that just wasn't working out for a variety of reasons. Now it's just ships instead.<br />
* large_ship_scale_multiplier has been removed, so that all marks of a starship or whatever are now the same size. This lets us define them in ways that are best for being able to see them without them getting too stupidly huge.<br />
<br />
* Various parts of the game referred to "squads" and "ships" as separate things, and there were internal mechanics for repairing lost ships in a squad, etc.<br />
** That's all gone now, but there are some code remnants (to say the least) that still refer to squads. If you run into anything in the front-end (aka actually in the game) that mentions squads, we'd appreciate a heads up so that we can correct that.<br />
** There ARE still visual groups of many of the smaller ships (V-Wings, etc), which is because those are just a single "3d model" made out of several smaller 3d models at this point. We can go back and correct that later, or we can leave it; we're kind of on the fence.<br />
<br />
==== Rallying Ships From Factories to Fleet Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* IF a mobile fleet of yours is on a planet with a factory, or on an adjacent planet, then the factory now produces ships for it as fast as it can.<br />
** In the interest of fairness, a given factory divides up its resources evenly between every possible ship that it can build for every fleet in range, and works on them all at once. So there are no queues, there is no order to set, there's just whether or not you accelerate the factories with engineers or not.<br />
<br />
* The various types of "ships rally to X location after construction" are now gone, with instead all the ships from docks rallying to their fleet centerpiece, whereever that may be.<br />
** This is highly automated and much more the default thing we want to have happen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of bugs with ships rallying to their fleet centerpiece (which is the only type of rally that now exists).<br />
** They should rally to where the centerpiece either is or is heading, and they'll stop rallying once they get very close to where the centerpiece is.<br />
** They stay in rally mode, continually updating their destination, until they reach the target. Initially the target can only be on the planet they are on or an adjacent planet, but it's possible that the target will move even further away while they are chasing it, and they should adjust to follow. That has been tested except when moving more than one planet away while they chase.<br />
** Note that you can't set the rallying directly at all, unlike prior versions of the games. Factories just make whatever is needed in order to bring a local fleet up to full fighting force, and those things automatically rally to their respective fleets. "Local" means on this or an adjacent planet.<br />
** On arrival, the rallying ships should take up the disposition of the ships that are at the other end, but that remains to be seen if that works as the interface for that bit isn't there yet. If you see problems with us, please do let us know.<br />
<br />
==== Procedural Fleet Names ====<br />
<br />
* The fleets for most fleets now have default names that are pulled from folders [FleetNames_Mobile_P1]+[FleetNames_Mobile_P2]. If anyone reading wants to add to these after this build is out, that's certainly welcome.<br />
** This wasn't a high priority item, but Chris needed a small mental break when starting the morning. ;)<br />
** These can be renamed later by players.<br />
<br />
==== AIP Penalties for Fleet Clustering ====<br />
<br />
* If you put too many ships from too many fleets on one planet, basically the AI notices, gets scared and angry, and the AIP starts increasing over time. It warns you about this.<br />
** You're allowed to have WAY more units in this version of the game compared to any prior one, but if you go putting them all one one or two planets the AI is going to kick back... hard. That whole "guerrilla warfare" bit goes out the window if you advertise your presence like that.<br />
<br />
* The fleet concentration AIP penalties will now only kick in at 3 fleets on an AI planet, and 5 on a player planet, rather than 2 and 4 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "too many fleets on a planet" code works has been reworked a fair bit, but not tested:<br />
** It now looks at all the human ships that are part of a mobile (flagship) fleet or a battlestation/citadel fleet. Before it was just looking at the fleet centerpieces, meaning you could have your centerpiece hide on an adjacent planet and send its ships in and the AI wouldn't notice.<br />
** It also now only looks at the ships that are actually on the planet, and not the total strength of the fleet. The strength must be at least 2 in order for it to care at all about it for these purposes. If you send in 10 fleets of strength 1 -- or a slice of them that is strength 1 -- then it won't care.<br />
*** This latter thing will probably encourage all sorts of bad behavior, but we'll figure that out in the future. For now it should feel more natural in general, but it will likely need further iterating.<br />
<br />
=== AI Behaviour Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The AI will now be less worried about distant mobile enemy forces.<br />
* The AI will no longer mistakenly count Guard units as Threat in some code paths<br />
* Make some improvements to hunter/warden fleet routing logic<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the Hunter/Warden save game<br />
<br />
* Each AI faction now has its own Hunter/Warden fleets. The units of each Hunter/Warden will just show as "Hunter Fleet" or "Warden Fleet", but there will now be multiple fleets acting independently. The goal of this is to make those fleets much more flexible in how they deal with enemies.<br />
** Only one Hunter and one Warden are visible in the game lobby. The other hunter/wardens will copy the colours but not the settings of the visible Hunter/Warden.<br />
<br />
* Add a new gameplay mechanic, "AI Civil War". At the beginning of the game, Communication Nodes are seeded near all the AI homeworlds. Destroying all of them will trigger the AI Civil War by making the AIs unable to communicate with eachother. This will make all of the AI factions hostile to eachother; they will send waves at eachother, use Threat on eachother, etc, just like they do against the player.<br />
** This will significantly strengthen all the AIs.<br />
** The Warden and Hunter Fleets will remain friendly with all the AIs. They are unaffected by the Communication breakdown and are quite confused. <br />
** If there is only one AI in the game then the Communication Node will not be in the game.<br />
** "AI Civil War" mode is also available as an option to the Game Lobby, which will start the game with AI's in Civil War mode. This is for testing and sandbox purposes.<br />
<br />
* The targeting code now treats XML-based importances as more important than 'amount of damage I can do'; this makes it less likely for units to ignore Command Stations and other high-value targets in favour of fleetships<br />
<br />
* Change how overkill is calculated; only count units that are actually in range of the target<br />
** This makes ships less likely to dance between multiple targets, unable to pick which one to attack.<br />
<br />
* Don't throw away Distance to Target information when choosing a target<br />
** This also makes ships much less likely to do the "can't decide on a target" dance<br />
<br />
* AIs no longer have any concept of "unlock points," and they don't unlock new ship types over the course of the game.<br />
** This was a neat concept in AI War Classic, kinda-sorta, but in a long campaign it just meant more chaos, honestly.<br />
** The original intent was to make it so that there was a feeling of progression and the AI doing new things with new tools as you go through the game, and that is now handled far better via the ship groups instead, and the planets being more unique, etc.<br />
<br />
* When the budget for a wave is over 3k, the AI no longer randomly gets guardians added in as a thing they can buy for the wave. Instead things are more hand-designed than that.<br />
<br />
=== Map Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Several map types have been improved by Draco.<br />
** Thanks Draco!<br />
<br />
* Make the Simple and Realistic map types more interesting by fixing a dumb bug in them.<br />
<br />
* The Max/Min number of planets in the galaxy is now defined on a per-map type basis rather than a global (since some maps scale up to larger galaxies better than others)<br />
** Some map types go up as high as 500 planets, others are capped at an AIWC-like 120 planets<br />
<br />
* The previous methods for some of the map seeding of AI things are also being... phased out in some ways, and made a lot more centralized and thus flexible.<br />
** This in turn lets us make the various AI planets a lot more unique, and lets modders add to things without replacing them.<br />
<br />
* The warden special forces hideouts were previously always seeding 4, but now it's sometimes more based on the size of the galaxy being larger.<br />
<br />
* The game is now able to seed multiple entities on certain planets if we so desire, during mapgen.<br />
** As the sole use of this so far, we're now seeding two battlestations/citadels on any planets that have those, to make those a lot more attractive as targets and also thus provide more firepower for defensive purposes for players without them having to capture QUITE so many planets for each of these that they get.<br />
<br />
* Did a fair bit of rework on some of the mapgen logic where it is trying to seed things close to the player homeworlds.<br />
** A while back we had some problems where things were frequently seeding too close, so we put in code to counter that. That was in turn preventing us from intentionally putting stuff there more recently.<br />
** Now there's a healthy balance between us being able to do that while still avoiding the old bug, and in general things seem to be working well.<br />
<br />
* There was some other funkiness with it being really unlikely to seed certain things very near to you.<br />
** That has been fixed, to start with, but then beyond that it also now tries to seed half the flagships and battlestations kind of in the middle-distance for you on the map.<br />
** In general this now gives you way more options for middle-game goals for making yourself stronger.<br />
<br />
==== Limited Ship Types For Each AI Planet ====<br />
<br />
* Essentially it's super boring when there are too many types of ships all over the place on every planet for the AI. So now it does this really interesting thing where it chooses a subset/theme for each planet, and some themes are harder than others, rarer than others, etc. Now you can actually see what is there, formulate a strategy of which of your fleets is best to send, and... well, send them.<br />
<br />
* Planets now remember what specific ShipGroup out of a ShipGroupCategory they are using for a given faction. This is where the theming comes in for these planets.<br />
** For the wormhole sentinels, it's actually only seeded at the start of the game, and each wormhole is unique rather than being homogeneous per planet. So those don't get remembered.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that AIs choose their "draw bags" for how to populate a planet's guard posts, strikecraft, turrets, or whatever, has been redone; but also the same is redone for waves and CPAs and the like. It's all using the new AIShipGroups and AIShipGroupCategories.<br />
<br />
* In the tooltips, you can now see how many ships and what strength is contained inside a guard post, as you used to be pre-fleets. HOWEVER, you can also now see exactly how many of each type of ship is inside there, to see what mix the AI is using at that planet without having to go aggro a guard post.<br />
<br />
* Basic definitions for ai ship groups and ai ship categories have been implemented. These are based around the excellent document that Puffin set up on the subject, but with some changes and additions here and there.<br />
** Note that this is ai_ship_groups_i_am_part_of, and it refers exclusively to how the AI uses ships. This isn't meaningful at all to fleet design stuff for players, which is a separate topic.<br />
** This also doesn't affect minor factions, although there's nothing stopping minor factions from adopting this new pattern in the future.<br />
** At the moment this also only describes strikecraft and frigates, and not turrets or other things of that nature. Those are coming soon. Puffin, if you want to set up the other categories and groups based on this starting template, probably ignoring the "singular freaky surprises" stuff, then please feel free as it would save me some time.<br />
** The overall rule with this usage of ships in groups is that anything that is a variant of something else shouldn't be in the same group with it. This is just a design thought, not a technical restriction. Warden and Hunter fleets will wind up having all sorts of strange mixing and matching, but by keeping to this rule we will ensure that planets and waves otherwise don't have that sort of strange mixing.<br />
** You'll also notice that for the ship group categories that are specific to certain AI types, like Turtle or Cloaking-Heavy or whatever, those also include some sub-groups that are unrelated to their type, but which will provide some... well, variety. Aka sometimes instead of being a cloaking-heavy wave, it will by an anti-structures wave. Sneaky! There's nothing worse than a predictable AI type, so having some variety in what they do, even if they are thematically heavy, is good.<br />
** It's also worth noting how the "draw bags" work, in this context. Essentially the number after the things that are included say "how many raffle tickets do I put into the draw bag?" And depending on how many other total raffle tickets have been put in, that's how likely it is to come out.<br />
*** In order to allow for granularity in definitions, our default number of tickets to add is 100. That way we can say "only do this 1% as often as most stuff" by putting in 1 ticket instead of 100.<br />
*** But even there, the odds of it coming out are not 1%, because it depends on what else is put into the bag. And by very definition, what is put into the bag is something that is meant to be unknowable at design time, since it can be modded, and expanded in the future. So we simply use something like "100" to mean "regular frequency, whatever that is," and then the other numbers like "25" to mean "about a quarter as often as usual, whatever that is."<br />
*** It is worth noting that not putting too many types inside a single draw bag is probably good in MOST cases, because it means that players will be facing a planet or a wave that has some sort of coherency to it that they can plan around. I'd say that 3 types is a sweet spot for waves, but sometimes having many more or fewer types is okay. Variety being the spice of life, it's okay that many of the things drift off the "normal" design parameters.<br />
*** Overall we'll find some situations where people go "wow there's way too many xyz unit in this circumstance," and we'll deal with that as need be. But most of these groups are intended for things that are not strictly numbers-bound (aka more than a handful of forcefields on a planet is terrible, so using them in these groups would be a Very Bad Idea since it would lead to occasional bouts of player dismay).<br />
**** Most of the time, we are likely to wind up with something like "holy cow that one planet is a nest of sniper like I've never seen in my life," and we just kind of sit back and go "yep! That will happen, in extremely rare cases. Either deal with it or go around, but that's the fun of this." The prior system was leading to a feeling of samey-ness on all the various planets, and so this is meant to break things up more into various thematic niches, some of which are more rare than others due to being either annoying or scary or hard or whatever. But we still want those rare outliers to happen, because those are either the places where good stories happen during AARs, or where the player's eyebrows can shoot up as they go "I'm glad I don't have to go THERE." Or sometimes it's just going to be the Wave From Hell that surprises players before going away again.<br />
** This whole thing is going to take a lot more defining and redefining over time, but it's really well set up for having lots of ship variants and strange outliers. In a lot of ways, this is intentionally pushing planets and waves a bit more in the direction of a RogueLite, where you never quite know what you're going to find. Chris was really missing some of the sense of exploration, and this is his way of trying to capture that again.<br />
*** And note that this is completely parallel to the player fleet waves and such, so the nice thing is that the AI, other factions, and players can all be thought of using completely separate structures and in completely different terms. As it should be.<br />
<br />
* Each planet belonging to an AI now seeds a single entity from SingularFreakySurprisesAIShipGroup on each of their planets at the start.<br />
** Note that this includes a fair bit of blank space, and that if it chooses blank space that is considered A-OK. So it won't really be every planet, and the frequency is actually determined in the xml rather than the code.<br />
** This lets things like the Golemite be set up a lot more directly, and without using tags.<br />
** The ONE downside of this is that the frequency can no longer be based around things like what the AI difficulty level is. But frankly, that's something that makes the AIs feel less unique and not just easier; if the game is meant to be easier, the player should still be facing the unique foes of that AI nonetheless.<br />
*** As part of this, the explicit seeding code for the Golemite to seed its golems has been removed, and it now uses the new central xml-based function.<br />
*** Note that, if we want to, there's nothing stopping us from using both the old method and the new one at the same time. The new one is mainly a convenience that makes for some powerful new xml-only modding capabilities that don't need to touch C# to add cool stuff to an AI.<br />
<br />
* Guardians now have their own AI ship groups, like Strikecraft, and are similar to them. Did the same for Royal, and it uses those for the wave and reinforcement ones as well, so interestingly it can vary what Guardians it has, or roll the same thing in Reinforcements and Guardians separately and really focus on one thing, or even have almost every kind, with an emphasis on this set, etc.<br />
** Just didn't like how planets were always a mess of Guardians. Sometimes they still will be, but that's a rare "Oh dear" thing.<br />
<br />
===== How The AI Guards Wormholes Is Way Cooler =====<br />
<br />
* The Stealth Wormhole Sentinels have been set up as something that only show up rarely, now that scouting is going to be working differently. This is useful for making planets feel a lot more varied, and not all planets so hard to sneak your stealth ships into.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Basic Minefield Wormhole Sentinels, possibly against our better judgement, to let a tiny minority of wormholes actually have mines around them that players can stumble into.<br />
** Since these should only really show up once, with the AI not rebuilding them, this should be an interesting thing for the player to run into well under 1% of the time. Thanks to Puffin for suggesting this; this should provide for some interesting traps without being too frustratingly common.<br />
<br />
* Actually jacked up the default NobodyHereWormholeSentinels draw bag count to 1000, and the StealthWormholeSentinels to 50, so that the 1 of BasicMinefieldWormholeSentinels is EVEN MORE RARE. Hopefully players run into one or zero minefields during a given campaign, thus making it more exciting.<br />
** Of course, if someone wants to make a minefield-heavy AI type, that is straightforward to do, now.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, there are now 5 different kinds of wormhole sentinel setups that are based around using tractor arrays and turrets, tesla turrets, gravity weapons and pike turrets, and whatever else.<br />
** These are also in the minority in terms of how frequently they will seed, but are way more common than the minefields and should make it so that some of the wormholes are a lot more interesting to face, now.<br />
** This gets back a bit more back to the original design of the original game, which is only possible now because of how some of the scouting changes will interact with the game here. We had had to move away from this because of tedium of automated scouting in other circumstnaces.<br />
** There are still quite a few wormholes that won't be directly defended at all, and it's possible for us to set up way more wormhole defensive types as desired in the future; these are mostly a proof of concept.<br />
** Note that with the sentinels at wormholes, the idea is that these will exist from the start of the game and never get upgraded or reinforced, unlike what happens at guard posts.<br />
<br />
==== Revamped AI Types Based On New Seeding Styles ====<br />
<br />
* Set up new "singular freaky surprises" that includes how golems are seeded for the Golemite now, and actually gives a very rare chance that some regular planets will sometimes have an AI golem.<br />
<br />
* The Vanilla AI type has been renamed to "Full Ensemble," referening the fact how it is basically the most well-rounded AI type that presently exists. It has the most varied surprises up its sleeves.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Simple Ensemble AI variant: Like the full ensemble in most respects, but minus some of the more esoteric ship variants. There's plenty going on here, but not quite so much craziness to discover as you explore.<br />
<br />
* The Starfleet Commander AI type has been removed, as now all the AIs kind of do what it was doing before. It no longer stands out as unique.<br />
<br />
* The Everything AI type has been removed, as it was kind of redundant now, and wouldn't have made for coherent gameplay anyhow.<br />
<br />
* Added in a completely untested new Thief AI type that was kinda-sorta defined previously but seemed to be missing, nonetheless.<br />
<br />
* Also added a completely untested new Zombifier AI type that uses a bunch of zombifying ships and other nasty things. It was kinda-sorta previously defined but again still seemed to be missing.<br />
<br />
* In general there were very few AI types removed, and instead they are all just a whole heck of a lot more vibrant, and we actually added a few.<br />
<br />
=== Hacking changes ===<br />
<br />
* Science Extraction hacking will now show the total cost for the remaining science on the planet in the tooltip<br />
** Requested by Ecthelon on Steam<br />
* Hacking has been feeling a bit too easy these days, so include AIP when calculating how strong the hacking response should be for hacks against the AI.<br />
** The formula is now NewHackingResponse = oldHacking Response + (oldHackingResponse * AIPMultiplier * CurrentAIP)<br />
<br />
* Add the Sabotage hack<br />
** This will kill a random NormalPlanetNastyPick structure on a planet. Many people have asked for this. <br />
<br />
* Allow hacks to be done against planets, not just structures<br />
* Allow hacks to be done without a local hacker on the planet<br />
* Allow the AI to launch an attack against the player after hacking is completed<br />
** These can be set on any hack with an XML tag. So all the previous hacking mechanics can continue to function as usual, but new options are now available.<br />
<br />
* Mercenary Beacons can be done without a local hacker on the planet. They are also nearly instant to complete.<br />
<br />
* Hacking the dyson sphere in order to download a ship design SHOULD now actually work, although it works differently from before.<br />
** Rather than unlocking a new ship line in general (type Dyson Defender), it now adds a permanent cap of 2 more dyson defenders to whatever the hacking fleet is that just did the hack. So it's a way to buff up the particular fleet doing the hack with some sweet new dyson tech that you get to keep forever.<br />
** In general this can now serve as a model for other types of the same thing that we can do, although there's a question mark of course as to whether this actually works since we've not tested it. But it's neat and should be useful in general for the future.<br />
<br />
* The hacking for the dark spire wraiths now works like the dyson hacking.<br />
<br />
=== Bug Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the entity hovering ui where it was incorrectly identifying energy overdrive as an attack penalty<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Zenith Trader (Traitor!) was allowing the AI to buy way too many goodies<br />
** Thanks to lots of people for reporting this, including Jannik2099 and Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when handling GameCommands<br />
** Thanks to jannik for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where v-wings were having damage multipliers based on buildings lack of engines<br />
** Thanks to weaponmaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Correctly flag the "Download Dyson Sphere Ship" hack as unavailable after that hack has been completed<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where vengeance generators were warping in already vulnerable to damage<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and zeusalmighty for the reports<br />
<br />
* Add an Objective for hacking the Spire Archive<br />
** Thanks to settemio for the reminder<br />
<br />
* Only seed one spire archive per AI<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the report<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive isn't invulnerable to all damage, meaning it properly dies after being hacked.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Spire Archives now show on the galaxy map.<br />
<br />
* The Superterminal now explodes after the hack finishes, instead of using a kludgy and bug prone mechanism to prevent it from being hacked multiple times<br />
** Thanks to Lifestrider and zeusalmighty for bug reports<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the settings menu for multiple AI types<br />
** Thanks to coldrage101 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug where the HRF Raiders were never spawning because of a typo in their tag.<br />
<br />
* Fixed that issue with the fullscreen resolution not being settable in recent internal builds.<br />
** Note that there is still some issue that may make you need to alt-f4 the program after changing between fullscreen resolutions or fullscreen to not-fullscreen, but it then shows up properly after that. I expect an upgrade to the unity engine, due in the next month or so, will probably fix that one part. And that one part probably isn't new. But the new part that was broken is now fixed.<br />
<br />
* The game now properly unpauses itself after you close the escape menu, if it paused itself going into there.<br />
<br />
* Units that are stacked, or units that are in transports, now cost energy the same as they do when they are outside of their hosts.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Renaming And Visual Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Cleaned up all entity names, from in the past when they changed function (i.e LaserTurret to NucleophilicTurret).<br />
* Also cleaned up and standardised all the entity system names, and cleaned out a few that were redundant.<br />
** This should make it a bit cleaner to work with in future, as there's no weird cases of there being a WidowGuardian, which is really the Paralysis Guardian, but it shows up as the Widow in all the internal files!<br />
<br />
* The Widow Mine is now the Paralysis Mine, and the Grenade Launcher fleetship is now Grenade Launcher Corvette - seeing as it has the Corvette icon and all.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Frigates are now Sentinel Gunboats.<br />
** Anything in future, like Lightning Torpedo Frigate will use the term Gunboat instead.<br />
<br />
* Fleetships are now called Strikecraft, and Starships are now called Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Space Docks are now simply called Factories, Mobile Space Dock is Mobile Factory, and the Starship Constructor doesn't exist at all now.<br />
** Both Strikecraft and Frigates come out of the same building.<br />
<br />
* Not a rename, but a recolour. Human Resistance Fighters and Marauders have a primary green that shows up better in game, and matches what it is in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Advanced Factory is now the Intra-Galactic Coordinator.<br />
** It's just a thing that increases your ship caps, essentially.<br />
** The ship_cap_multiplier actually works now in the new system. It won't increase the caps for anything with a cap of 1, though, just FYI. It also can't be used to reduce the cap.<br />
<br />
* Mentions of Shields such as the Shield Frigate, Shield Generator etc are all Forcefield now.<br />
** Apparently we were using both in kind of random places?<br />
<br />
* As Squads are removed, all the Strikecraft models are much bigger, with a single one taking up the same space the full squad used to!<br />
** In addition, things like Frigates, Command Stations, Turrets, etc are all bigger. Almost everything, really.<br />
<br />
* All icons in the game are displayed a bit higher above their entity. This gets them out of the way a bit, hopefully not too far that it's difficult to know what they're for.<br />
** With this and the above change, you can actually see the models a bit!<br />
<br />
=== Ship Variants ===<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Harasser" variant of the MLRS Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Porcupine" variant of the Pike Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ablative Troll" variant of the Ablative Gatling.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Dagger" variant of the Raider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Gunbot" variant of the Autocannon Minipod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Velociraptor" variant of the Raptor.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Stalker" variant of the Eyebot.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Tripper" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Railpod" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Pulsar Punk" variant of the Pulsar Tank.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Aggressor" variant of the Agravic Pod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Mirage" variant of the Space Plane.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Hydra" variant of the Vanguard.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Zapper" variant of the Inhibiting Tesla Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Terrier" variant of the Spider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Molotov" variant of the Grenade Launcher Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ranger" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Medic Gunboat" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Absorber" variant of the Vampire Claw.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Thief" variant of the Etherjet.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Paralyser" variant of the Stingray.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Cluster" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Nanoswarm" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Persuader" variant of the Parasite.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ripper" variant of the Warbird Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Brawler" variant of the Assault Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Devastator" variant of the Siege Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Siphoner" variant of the Shield Frigate.<br />
<br />
* The Hydra is now the Vanguard Hydra, and there's a new Stringray Hydra type to keep it company.<br />
** The Stingray version is markedly more strong in the sense that it subdivides but doesn't have worse stats. It's a quick bit of variance for planets or waves that are replicant-heavy.<br />
<br />
* Also added a Parasite Hydra to round it out even more, although made them thankfully lexss frequent.<br />
<br />
* Added Ghost Grenade Launcher Corvette and Ghost Concussion Corvettes, to round out the ghost strikecraft category a bit.<br />
<br />
* A new Station-Keeping Assault Frigate has been added to the loadout of military and home command stations (2x each), and logistical command stations (1x each).<br />
** As with the pike turrets that all the command stations now have, this gives you some more defensive options without having a fleet or a battlestation around.<br />
** Unlike the turrets, these don't require any placement planning, since they are mobile and able to roam around and hit enemies. Seemed like this would get around a variety of frustrating situations that even having turrets would not solve.<br />
<br />
==== New Variants For Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Cloaked Ark One variant, and this one is ONLY available via a new "Cloaked Fleet" (CloakedStartingFleet) that players can get in the lobby at the start of the game.<br />
** This offensive fleet is one of the first that players can choose from, and it's powerful and invisible and likely to make them feel quite powerful.<br />
** Led by the Cloaked Ark One, this has Raptors, Agravic Pods, Gunbots, and then Warbird Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Mugger variant of the Assault Frigate that gets parasitism (this needs to be tested).<br />
** This is ONLY available via the new "Parasitic Fleet" that players can choose at the start of the game.<br />
** The parasitic fleet in general is weak and small by comparison to others when it comes to direct firepower... but of course they create a bunch of zombies to work for them. Uh, and yeah there's a Botnet Golem at the center. So weaker might not be accurate after all.<br />
** Led by the Botnet Golem, these have 60 Parasites and 2 Muggers. This is by far the smallest ship cap fleet you can start with... until you start creating zombies.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Classic Fleet that players can start with.<br />
** This classic mix isn't good at any one particular thing, but is well-rounded against any foe. The forcefields just make things even better.<br />
** It's V-Wings, Fusion Bombers, Concussion Corvettes, and then a Forcefield Frigate, with the centerpiece being an Armored Golem.<br />
** This is a nod both to the first game as well as the classic starting loadout of ships in this game itself, which is now absent.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Raid Fleet for the starting player options, which also has a new "Agile Cursed Golem Ark" that is the Cursed Golem but with way faster engines.<br />
** The whole purpose of this fleet is being able to rapidly move around faster than any other purely offensive fleet in the game.<br />
** It also includes a new "Turbo Stingray" ship that is a faster version of regular Stringrays, and then Velociraptors and Daggers, which are normally already super fast.<br />
** All of these things share the same base (very high) speed except for the last and obligatory part of the fleet, Raid Frigates. These are able to move EVEN FASTER, and so can go off on their own away from the main body if you so desire.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Doorkicker Fleet" as another starting fleet option.<br />
** Mostly focused on crowd control, but with siege frigates along to punch giant holes in large targets when required.<br />
** Basically this is the taking the idea of the Attritioner archetype, but giving one bit of counterbalance to it. Led by a black widow golem, this has MLRS Corvettes, Grenade Launcher Corvettes, Inhibiting Tesla Corvettes, and then Siege Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== New Battlestation Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Revealer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tachyon Array.<br />
<br />
* Gravitic Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Gravity Generator.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has greatly improved shields that extend out around itself.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has very powerful engineering capabilities.<br />
<br />
* Ensnarer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tractor Array.<br />
<br />
==== New Citadel Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Metabolic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing many weak shots that turn targets into resources on death.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of high power Agravic Bombs.<br />
<br />
* Inhibitor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of shots that reduce enemy weapon output.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires multiple paralysis shots.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing small bursts of bolts that zombify victims.<br />
<br />
* Interceptor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, packing multiple railcannons that shred fast moving targets.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Tesla-class structures (Guardians, turrets, etc) now reduce incoming damage from far away by 99% instead of 100%. This allows the targeting code to identify Tesla units as potential targets (instead of ignoring them as if they were Invulnerable). Units in FRD (and minor factions) should now be able to actually attack Tesla turrets.<br />
** Many people have complained about this, including TechSY730 and Democracy.<br />
<br />
* Ark Energy Overdrive is removed for now. Find another place for it (likely in a changed form).<br />
<br />
* Sniper damage bonus requirement reduced from speed 1200 to 1000.<br />
<br />
* Sniper: Starting bonus multiplier 5x -> 8x.<br />
<br />
* Space Plane gets the damage resistance to anything beyond range 4600 instead of 5600 now.<br />
** Basically you have to be closer to it to do full damage. Also means that when using Pursuit, they try to stay beyond that.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units have half the shots per salvo, but reload in half the time.<br />
** Helps them retarget more often.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units get their damage bonus at 30% enemy hull remaining, instead of only 20%.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette, Grenade Launcher Corvette: Mass 0.21x -> 0.3x.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard: EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Raptors, Autocannon Minipods, Space Planes, Agravic Pods, Vampire Claw, Raid Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Eyebot, Stealth Guardian: Albedeo increased to 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette, Sentinel Gunboats, Snipers, Siege Frigate, Tritium Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Tritium Guardian, Concussion Guardian, Plasma Guardian: Armour reduced to 40.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette: Shields 2,800 -> 1,800, EngineGx 8 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Claw: Armour 40 -> 70, Life Leech reduced from 1.5x to 1x.<br />
<br />
* Raptor: EngineGx 7 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Raptor Hull: 2900 -> 1900.<br />
<br />
* Stingray, Etherjet, Metabolizing Gangsaw: EngineGx 7 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette only applies reload penalty to armour below 60.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate: Damage 2500 -> 25,000, spreads it among targets instead of hitting 10 for full damage, range 10,100 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard, Pulsar Tank (main gun only): Range changed to 4200.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard: Speed reduced to 400.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette: Hull 1,000 -> 1,400, shields 1,000 -> 1,600, EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Armour increased to 110.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Shields 2,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
* Etherjet: Damage 30 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Turrets have a similar damage bonus to Ablative Gatlings now.<br />
** Makes them a bit more interesting, and also some room for other changes.<br />
<br />
* V-Wing: Hull/Shields changed from 500/3500 to 2000/2000.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette: Armour 50 -> 70, range 8,000 -> 6,000, shields 200 -> 800, speed 700 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot: Hull/Shields 1,000/1,000 -> 800/800, armour 50 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod: Armour 50 -> 70.<br />
<br />
* Dark Spire get a bit less energy if they're the ones that killed something.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian: Armour 90 -> 50, albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian: Hull/Shields changed from 20,000/20,000 to 10,000/30,000, EngineGx 12 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian, Paralysis Guardian: Speed 1,400 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian: Range 15,000 -> 8,000, Armour 90 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Guardian: EngineGx 13 -> 7, Armour 90 -> 110, range 8,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian: Albedo 0.4 -> 0.3, EngineGx 14 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guardian: Armour 50 -> 70, EngineGx 14 -> 7, range 8,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Guardians now have Cloaking, but attack half as fast.<br />
** Stealth Guardian now has a friend that it shares a group with.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Plasma Turret.<br />
** Closer to Heavy Beams than the rest.<br />
<br />
* All Turrets except Beam and Plasma have 10% lower health, but 15% greater damage in exchange.<br />
** Turrets felt like they slap the enemy to death slowly while outlasting everything. This is minor, but speeds it up a tad.<br />
<br />
* Slow the increase in cost for Science hacking multiple planets<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Minefields are now all one use. Damage increased for normal and Area mines to compensate, Paralysis mines have a longer effect as well.<br />
** This fixes numerous problems with them, including somehow surviving and the AI being confused, being repaired mid-combat, overkill or Military Command Station boosts having weird effects, etc.<br />
** Also lets us put damage bonuses on more cleanly without worsening any of those previous problems.<br />
<br />
* Marauders have a per-outpost cap on the Raiders they can produce. Unfortunately, stacking causes raiders to lose information about their spawning outpost. As a backup, also introduce a global cap on the number of raiders that the marauders can have.<br />
** This should dramatically tamp down the power of high intensity Marauders late game, especially in sandbox games.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Hunter/Killer.<br />
<br />
* AI Co-Processors reduce AIP by 20 more when all destroyed.<br />
<br />
* Player Golems are much weaker now, but can be upgraded alongside Arks. AI Golems have minor upgrades.<br />
** With enough upgrades, the player ones will match then surpass their previous forms.<br />
** Initial testing of Golems as Flagships was...amusing.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos starts with the zombifying weapon already usable.<br />
<br />
* Arks are a bit faster, have a bit less health and a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate can be upgraded as well, has some weapon and health changes and has three versions of itself now.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Guard Posts and Forcefield Generators are now actually in use again, as rather rare finds.<br />
** Connected to this, AI Turrets are in a tighter spread around whatever they defend, so they actually sit in the forcefield instead of uselessly outside.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord Phase 2 should actually come after you on that planet now.<br />
<br />
* Mercenaries spawn at Mark 1 now, and level up with the players tech level.<br />
** They're also a bit weaker to compensate for that.<br />
<br />
* Carrier Frigates are, unfortunately, gone. For the player, Drone producers must be a Fleet Leader, instead of a random Frigate or whatever in it, to avoid having nested fleets.<br />
** Potentially it can return in a fashion as a Fleet Leader in future.<br />
<br />
==== Crippled Status ====<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Mobile Fleet Flagships are now automatically something that cannot ever die, per se -- instead they become "crippled" when their health is less than 10% of its maximum value.<br />
** This solves a whole heck of a lot of problems that we otherwise have, such as where ships should rally to, and it also avoids the "corpse run" problem. <br />
*** If there are lone golems that players are capturing that die to remains, or other similar things that are not fleet leaders in that way, then those can still be a source of corpse runs, so it's not like that mechanic went away. It's simply not being a major focus for these types of ships.<br />
*** For a while, we were having things like Arks (which fall into this new category) automatically warp back away to some sort of safe space, but that's no longer a thing, which is good.<br />
** Their weapons and other systems all go offline when they have less than 10% health now, which is actually a pretty new limiter on them since it gives them only 90% of their health in which to work, although there's no longer the risk of them dying if you're not paying attention. But for balance purposes it's worth noting that we may wind up needing to beef these out slightly.<br />
** Enemy ships will consider them an uninteresting target if they are already crippled. It's possible that actually shots won't do any more damage when hitting them and they are crippled, which if so is a bug I need to fix later. But them not bothering to target the enemy seemed to be the most important thing for now. If you have a savegame with shots not damaging these ships, then please let us know.<br />
** It's also possible that there will be some edge cases where these things actually DO die rather than being crippled, in which cases repro saves will be very welcome.<br />
** Mobile fleets with a crippled centerpiece now have an effective remaining cap of 0 for all the ships that factories might be sending to them.<br />
*** This makes it so that factories won't supply new things for them anymore until there is an un-crippling of the centerpiece. Otherwise there's no reason to bring said centerpiece home for repairs, it's just this strange invincible vessel to which lots of ships rally.<br />
*** The metal spent on partial construction of ships is not refunded, but rather is stored at the fleet and as soon as the centerpiece is un-crippled things will come back online and resume wherever they were.<br />
** Note that if any ships are set to reverts_to_neutral_on_death="true" in xml while being of one of these two types, that really won't matter because they should never die. So those should probably be removed.<br />
<br />
==== Costs of Repair vs Construction ====<br />
<br />
* We recently (in this giant build group) redid how the repair costs were working for ships, and it's unclear how that changed things cost-wise compared to what the costs used to be (the costs as they used to be were super unclear).<br />
** What IS clear is that we changed it to just be the equivalent to rebuilding the unit, aka repairing it 50% is the same as building half a new unit. This was by design and we didn't think much about it, but it is definitely something that was eating through metal prodigiously.<br />
** What's also clear is that we were charging this FULL amount for repairing shields, health, and engine health -- ouch. So really if you were at half engine health, half shield health, and half hull health, you'd spend 150% of what it would cost to just build a new unit. Not good! We'd much rather encourage repair in general.<br />
** We now have a variety of dials in the xml external constants to affect the percentage of the full metal cost that it will cost for various repair types:<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_hull_points: 50% cost for repairing hulls.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_personal_shields: 20% cost for repairing personal shields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_bubble_forcefields: 75% cost for repairing bubble forcefields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_engines: 10% cost for repairing engine damage.<br />
** This should make things quite a bit less constrained on the player income-wise (it was feeling pretty tight at certain points in the early game because of your much larger forces), and also encourages reuse rather than just refleeting.<br />
<br />
==== Costs For AIs Purchasing Things ====<br />
<br />
<br />
* There is a new field, cost_for_ai_to_purchase, which is an integer that replaces the old_strength values.<br />
** This is now what AIs use to purchase units, and it is separate from how strong the unit is seen as.<br />
** This is problably way out of balance for now, but it at least is something we can tune directly from now on.<br />
** "Strength" in the game is now properly only used for evaluating, well, how strong something is. Aka how the AI acts, or as information for the player.<br />
** This is NOT something that goes up by mark level anymore, unlike before, and that's by design as well. The AI should be able to afford equal numbers of ship type X on a mark 1 or a mark 4 planet. That's how things were in AIWC, but it was oddly not at all like that here.<br />
<br />
* There are a bunch of other related changes to making the game use the CostForAIToPurchase field instead of the Strength field -- and remember that this is on the TypeData rather than the ForMark data, and that this is by design.<br />
** This is probably buggy as eff. There's a ton of code in this area, written by a bunch of people over a long period of time. So AIs will probably wind up making some pretty strange purchases for a little while, until we find and fix whatever bugs there are, aside from the inherent data issues.<br />
** Nonetheless, now was the time to go ahead and make this change, because it was a fundamental deterrent to us being able to balance what the AI builds separately from how strong the AIs and players view a unit as being. And that was one primary driver behind all things being a very similar cost-to-benefit ratio, at least on paper... and ongoing headache for Puffin, with that. The headaches won't end because of this change alone, but they will shift to a new sort: balancing each of those two things independently of one another ("does the strength stated for that unit seem to match how scary the AI and players should think it is?" and "does that cost an appropriate amount for the AI in most contexts, or is it too cheap or too expensive for them?").<br />
** But in the short term, this will be extra complicated by the fact that the math probably has some bugs in it because probably some things that should be using the new AI budget stuff are still using the strength data. I would be shocked if that's not the case, despite looking at it very carefully until I was cross-eyed.<br />
** And then the other question of "how much should this cost" is now out of date compared to what the strength values were, so even if the math is all perfect we're going to have bonkers data for a bit. That part I do leave to Puffin for the most part, sorry about that. ;)<br />
** As a general design note, both the players and the AIs have been having fewer ships than I would prefer, thus far. For players it was because of the way the ship caps were -- pre-fleets. For the AIs, it was because of the way they were being "charged more" for higher-mark stuff when looking at their own budgets. At the start of the game, a mark 3 planet and a mark 4 planet should have the same relative amount of budget spent, but one gets better stuff from it. Previously, unlike AIWC, the mark 4 planet was getting charged a premium and so felt anemic by comparison to the mark 3 planet.<br />
*** This may in turn wind up with the AI having waaaay too many ships for a while, but if we pack those into the guard posts as contents that are not deployed yet, that should have zero performance impact. And it will be good for the humans who suddenly have a lot more firepower at their disposal. Overall the goal coming up is for everyone to have a whole heck of a lot more shooty things, but having them more spread out so that the mega-battles aren't individually any larger than they are now. It will take us a little while to get that part perfect, so please bear with us.<br />
<br />
* TryToSpendBudget_CPA has had some updates to how it deploys ships from itself, since the way it stores ships is different from the start. This may or may not cause demonic fumes to erupt, so let us know.<br />
<br />
* UnlockShipLineForAI() has been removed, as AIs don't work that way anymore, either.<br />
<br />
=== Achievements ===<br />
<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with each AI type enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with some of the Minor factions enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with various galaxy sizes<br />
* Add Achievements for controlling a given number of planets in a game<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have > X Metal/Energy/Hacking points"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Kill > X units", "Lose > X units" and "Kill > X && Lose > Y units"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have a campaign X hours long"<br />
** Note that the above types of Achievements can be added to the game with only XML changes<br />
** TODO: Add a UI to show the player which Achievements have been earned<br />
<br />
=== Science/Tech Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete rework of how techs function. They are no longer tied to individual ships like before, but rather there are actual technologies that are named and that benefit a variety of ships.<br />
<br />
* Ark Upgrade Points and Destruction Points are both confusing and have been removed from the game as a concept.<br />
** But never fear, something very similar with a clearer name and purpose is being added back: Fleet Experience Points.<br />
<br />
* The initial techs have been added, and applied to ships and turrets and whatnot.<br />
** This is, at best, a first pass for now. However, there are are present 14 distinct techs that you can upgrade that are more ship-abilities-focused, and which are generally shared between strikecraft, frigates, and turrets. This is the general intended design, even if exact matchings aren't correct or ideal right now.<br />
** The costs here are also potentially bonkers for real-world use. Additionally, there is a maximum number of times a given tech can be researched, and that is usually set at 4 right now, kind of arbitrarily. That does NOT mean that the max tech level of a ship is 4, however.<br />
*** Ship tech levels are a combination of all the techs that benefit them (some have more than one), as well as any upgrades to the tech level of their specific fleet. So some are much easier to get to a VERY high mark now, whereas others are almost impossible to do.<br />
** There is now a new UpgradeMeFromFleetOnly tech that isn't shown on the menu, but which we use in cases where we want to denote that this IS something we can upgrade, but only at the fleet level rather than the ship level.<br />
*** This is used for things like command stations, engineers, economic production units, and forcefields. That makes these things a lot more location-dependent in terms of how high quality your ships of those sorts are. This should be pretty interesting, actually, and it takes them out of contention for the main science upgrade costs more.<br />
** Overall the goal here is fewer science upgrades happening, but each one having a much larger impact. We may have gone too far in that direction with this first setup of the data, but at this point it's all an xml-based issue.<br />
** Note that all of these techs are based around upgrading all the ships that you have that subscribe to this tech via tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and that crosses fleets.<br />
*** This should benefit mercenaries, although that hasn't been tested.<br />
*** We did base this loosely around Puffin's classes/roles document, but this is meant to be... slightly both more and less granular than that document, and to be multi-categorized in many cases. So your document is still relevant (mainly for fleet design), but it's just semi-related to this specific use.<br />
** It's also worth noting here that some ships/turrets/whatever have multiple tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and those are going to go up in tech quality FAST by comparison to their peers. Assuming that players unlock techs synergistically. So some of the ones like the Light, Heavy, etc, might need to be a lot more expensive than they are right now.<br />
*** As noted already, the balance here is a bananas basic proof of concept right now, and I'm sure broken in a thousand ways. The only purpose of me throwing this together at the moment was to give a proof of concept unified design philosophy to look at, even if details are really wrong. This gives Puffin and others a chance to actually make it make a lot more sense while I move on to work on other things.<br />
** Note that the EXP concept doesn't come into play at ALL with these sorts of techs. These are purely science costs. The EXP is fleet-based stuff instead, and may not cost any science at all (fleets that auto-upgrade would be nice). But also spending some science on a specific fleet's upgrading would be nice, so that's something that will likely be possible. How that works at the planet level is still TBD, I have two different possible models for that and haven't been able to choose between them yet.<br />
** Also please note that for an individual ship/turret/whatever type, there's no risk of it going above its max mark level, which is either 7 or is explicitly defined as something lower, or is markless. If it subscribes to 2 techs that each have 1 upgrade, it would naturally be mark 3, unless it's capped at mark 2 in which case it will sit at mark 2. And if its fleet is also upgraded 3x, then it would be mark 6, unless it was capped lower.<br />
** A general note: This overall tech system has way fewer decision points than the old one, which is good because that makes them actually something that you can contemplate. However, as a byproduct of that, you'll often get some secondary stuff upgraded that you cared less about, and that actually provides opportunities for you to make new use of them in interesting ways if you so choose. Also also, you're a lot more likely to have really wide mark level disparities between parts of your empire (different planets and fleets), which is more in keeping with the first game albeit from a completely new angle. This is exciting.<br />
** Another general note: the overall ship caps per fleet will only be whatever they are, but the idea is to have larger effective ship caps for players by the late game because of a proliferation of fleets. In some cases in the late game you'll also have some fleets that are incredibly technologically superior to the AI, and other fleets that are incredibly behind the times. How this exactly plays out will be interesting to see from players, but in a theoretical sense there's nothing wrong with that; we may just have to adjust some balance dials over time to keep things from being TOO extra weak or strong, and/or to make the AI really reactive to overly-advanced forces if those exist. Here again this is an opportunity for more gameplay, rather than a real challenge in a negative sense.<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for science has been improved to be more accurate and also more descriptive:<br />
** Spend Science to unlock higher-level units and structures. It is gained primarily by claiming new planets and holding them for a while.<br />
** There is a limited amount that scientists can learn from what they find in each system, so you'll need to keep finding new research targets for them.<br />
** A single ship type can be upgraded by multiple tech upgrades as well as from its parent fleet gaining experience, so be sure to consider your options carefully.<br />
** More techs will appear in the tech sidebar as you capture fleets with ships that can benefit from them.<br />
<br />
* The tech sidebar is once again functional, and allows for you to unlock techs that benefits various ships that you have.<br />
** It looks and works a lot more like the hacking sidebar instead of the build sidebar, now, since the type of data it needs to show is very different. This makes it a lot more text-heavy and showing related costs and the mark levels of ships in a really clear and concise fashion. Yay! It does mean no real icons on here, though.<br />
** The tooltips for techs that you can upgrade are also now completely redone, and it shows you which ships will benefit as well as how many of them you have. It doesn't show you the mark level of the ships, because you might have several different mark levels of each ship type since they may be upgraded by fleet upgrades.<br />
** This was certainly needed in order to make the game all that playable in 0.850, but in terms of why we did it right now versus after the build menu, it's mainly because this was simpler and was therefore a nice dry run for the more complicated menus.<br />
<br />
* Ok! So we've already learned quite a bit about techs and how people will wind up using them. Clearly the new system works well, but is going to need refinement; chief among that is just how many upgrades a given line can grant.<br />
** One of the other things that was immediately most clear was that "Ark" as a technology was really not cutting it. This was way too broadly useful, and "Battlestation" was almost as bad.<br />
** First of all, these need to be more pricey, but some Arks should cost more than others, and some Arks should share techs, but not ALL Arks.<br />
** With that in mind, there's a new schema in place for various Arks and Battlestations broken out as follows:<br />
*** Ark Spirit (most basic stuff), Ark Heart (happy helpful stuff, less dangerous), Ark Armor (beefcakes you need to really pay for), Ark Fist (holy smokes these things are powerful, and thus expensive, and only have 3 marks rather than 4).<br />
*** Battlestation Shelter (protection-oriented), Battlestation Hand (grabbing or slowing enemies), Battlestation Architect (engineering or construction).<br />
** And it's worth noting that Battlestations are really oriented into those as well as the previously-were-fortresses Citadels that are way more combat-oriented, so splitting those also matters:<br />
*** Citadel Executioner (kill a lot of things), Citadel Protector (yeah, hurt them, but protect other stuff as the primary), Citadel Consumer (eat or steal the enemies).<br />
** And then there's the Spire Frigates, which really don't need to be lumped in with Arks or Battlestations or Citadels. I'm sure these will expand in the future, but for now we just have the new "Spire Core" (for all three types of Spire Frigate), and they're super expensive but can be upgraded 4 times.<br />
** The overall lesson here is that we CAN have more techs than we maybe were once thinking, particularly since they only show up conditionally. This also makes the Arks and Golems and so on a lot more unique in terms of how well they are upgraded (or not).<br />
*** This will get more crowded in the tech tab with time, unfortunately, as you unlock a lot of ships. For that reason they are now down at the end of the list below all the actual main ship lines.<br />
*** This may also hint that we want more tech lines in general for the other ships, and/or that they need some changes to their science costs, but we'll cross those bridges when we come to them.<br />
<br />
* The science intel message is now more brief in the sidebar, and more informative in the tooltip. Now everything fits.<br />
<br />
* On factions, there is now a InheritsTechUpgradesFromPlayerFactions serialized bool that should be set to true for any factions that the designer wishes to recieve all of the upgrades for the player techs.<br />
** Aka, if two players each have upgrades to Tech A, then the faction will get the largest of the two, not the combined value of them.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the (very elegant, sadly) "tech view" version of tooltips that showed all the ways a ship would be upgraded by gaining a mark level.<br />
** That was overwhelming as an amount of information, but also there's just no place where we'd actually be asking you to see that anymore. Now you upgrade techs that hit a bunch of ships at once, and so this per-ship-type comparison stuff just has no place in there anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Vision Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete vision rework. Planets are all now either<br />
** Unexplored: You have no vision of what is on this planet. You also cannot send ships to or through Unexplored planets.<br />
** Explored: You can't see exactly what's on the planet, but you can see who owns it and the sidebar works. Chris has a TODO to figure out how to show stale data/interesting visuals when you try to look at an Explored planet.<br />
** Watched: This state means "Explored and you have ships there". You can see what's on the planet, but when you no longer have ships there the planet will go back to Explored.<br />
** Permanently Watched: you always have vision here<br />
<br />
* At the beginning of the game, all Player Homeworlds and adjacent planets are Permanently Watched, and all planets 2 hops from a player homeworld are Explored.<br />
<br />
* Capturing a planet or killing an AI command station automatically Explores all adjacent planets<br />
<br />
* You can also Explore a planet by hacking an unexplored planet, as long as you have an adjacent Explored or Watched planet (otherwise you could just explore random planets around the map which seems less interesting to me)<br />
<br />
* You can Permanently Watch a previously Explored planet by hacking (but the AI will launch a small counterattack at you when you do so).<br />
<br />
* The game now tracks the specific gamesecond that entities were created, and when they entered planets, versus "how long ago."<br />
** There are helper methods for getting the familiar "how long ago" data, however.<br />
<br />
* Now that we know the last gamesecond we had vision of a planet, and the gamesecond that ships entered planets, on planets where we do not have current intel we are instead showing the effective last-known data on the sidebar, as well as actually showing the ships visually (through the distortion), even moving around if they are. <br />
** This won't show any ships that have been more newly added to that planet, though, and the sidebar notes that. So there might be a huge hunter fleet moving through there and you'd have no idea, for instance.<br />
<br />
* For planets that are completely unexplored, you cannot directly send ships there anymore, nor can you select it on the galaxy map or send your view there.<br />
** It IS still possible for your ships to path through completely-unexplored planets, for the time being, however.<br />
<br />
* Trying to make it so that player ships are completely unable to pathfind through unexplored planets is rather more than a bit of a nightmare. With that in mind, they are now simply disabled if they wind up going into unexplored space for whatever reason.<br />
** We can make this more sophisticated in the future, but for now that should handle anything exploity.<br />
** Players can use various tricks on the sidebar to click to the fleet leader heading through unexplored space to see such a planet, but they'll wind up seeing nothing there, so they gain very little. And meanwhile, the ships of the player are unable to shoot but still able to move, and enemies are able to shoot and are completely invisible to them, so that's... quite a bit of "fun."<br />
** Main thing we probably want to do at some point is get player ships to try to prefer not going into unexplored territory if at all possible.<br />
** Edit: nevermind, player ships should not be able to path through them at all. So yay! But if they do, they'll be disabled.<br />
<br />
* The "explored" status for planets has been split into "explored by natural means" and "explored by distant hacking."<br />
** This mostly doesn't matter and isn't something we're making a big deal about in most places. But using spy nanites basically is no longer a way you can expand how much your empire gains in vision every time you capture a planet.<br />
** The "explore next to explored" logic basically ignores stuff that was spy nanites. Maybe there should be a conduct later that makes it not ignore that, since that ALSO would provide some interesting strategic options, but frankly for now that seems like overkill. We shall see.<br />
<br />
* When you don't have vision of a planet, there is now a fancy distortion effect that is part grainy-tv and part slow-matrixy-refraction.<br />
** There's not a way to disable this effect, because it shouldn't be fast enough to make anyone nauseous, and there's no real point in looking at planets that you can't see anything at, anyway. This just makes it clear why you can't see those planets (the sidebar says no vision, but why did all the ships just disappear?)<br />
<br />
==== "Hard Mode" For Scouting ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Scout Adjacent Only" conduct, with the following description:<br />
** TLDR: This is harder and will make you take a lot of planets. For advanced players only.<br />
** Details: Normally when you capture a planet, all planets adjacent to ANY explored planets become explored. Unless the map is very narrow, this causes you to get exponentially more planets you can see as the game goes on. Even further than that, there is a minimum number of planets it will explore for you when you take a planet, depending on the number of planets in your galaxy, so that snake maps and other really narrow maps aren't unplayably hard.<br />
** With 'Scout Adjacent Only' enabled, it tosses all that out the window. Instead it just explores any planets adjacent to the planet you just captured. This will make snake maps almost impossible to play (so that's a bad combo), but on maps with more cross-connections it can lead to... a certain added strategic challenge. This still seems masochistic even in the best case, but have fun with that if you want.<br />
<br />
=== Removed/Revamped Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Science Labs, Hackers and Scouts are removed. Scout functions of the Sentinel Frigate and Sentry Starship are removed.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Starships are now per-planet cap, cannot use wormholes, are built directly (like turrets) and die to remains.<br />
** They're effectively Decloakers from Classic, but far more convenient.<br />
<br />
* Engineers are per-planet cap, cap reduced significantly and can't use Wormholes.<br />
** The new Combat Engineers are able to use Wormholes and are a type of Strikecraft instead.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Space Dock and Mobile Builder are not unlockable or buildable, and are instead capturables.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Builder is now the Basic Battlestation, and is capturable.<br />
** And now there are actually like 5 variants of this, thanks to Puffin.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Factory is now the CombatFactory, and is capturable.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Fortress is now a form of Battlestation called Citadels.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Remains Rebuilder has been removed, and the RebuildingRemains metal_flow has now been granted to all of the player command stations and the player mobile builders. It's no longer something that is assist-line-distance-based, nor is it something that requires a dedicated unit to run around doing things with.<br />
** This is one of those streamlining bits that people have requested for a while, but Chris in particular was noting that engineers and rebuilders need to be two separate functions (and they do). But making this instead essentially work like claimables and "just happen" solves the issue that people were complaining about without getting into territory of making the AI for the engineers likely to be bonkers.<br />
** Later we will need for all of our Battlestation types to have this, most likely, or things will get funky at times. This last is a note for Puffin.<br />
<br />
* Colony ships have been removed from the game, since that was a level of indirection that was not needed.<br />
** Similarly, hackers are gone, as are mobile builders in the classic sense.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers in the codebase are now gone. The concept of warheads, in the codebase, is now gone.<br />
<br />
* Starships are now called Frigates, including in the codebase itself. Docks are now called Factories in the codebase.<br />
<br />
* Golems as a standalone thing (for players) are now gone, as are Arks. They are now combined into being the Mobile Fleet Flagships. They are still called golems and Arks, but they're the centerpieces of your fleets at any rate.<br />
<br />
* Really key new limitation for drones, for the sake of sanity and not having nested fleets. This really only applies to player ships, in the main:<br />
** The drone producer must also be the fleet leader. So if we're talking about a player ship, it needs to be the Battlestation or Flagship of a fleet, and not something like a random Frigate as part of it.<br />
** On the AI and NPC sides, they don't really use fleets the same way normally, so anything that is a drone generator just becomes in charge of a new Drone fleet type.<br />
** This is probably going to be the source of some "fun" bugs. It will start spewing errors like crazy when this happens (once per second per ship that has this issue during gameplay), if it happens. It's possible to set this up with bad xml, basically.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for automatically building remains rebuilders and setting them to auto-FRD are both now gone, since so are remains rebuilders.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for "brave scouts" is also now gone, since scouts are also being removed and rejiggered.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers have been removed. They were not exactly exciting, and they don't make sense in the new method of AIs working with unlocked ships.<br />
<br />
* Schematic Servers (formerly ARSes) have been removed. Those also no longer make sense in the brave new world that is the new setup for fleets, etc.<br />
<br />
* The idea of CorruptedAIDesigns has been removed, as that was something that people weren't really using and it doesn't fit well with the new approach to AIs and fleets.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of stuff relating to Golems the way they used to be, including the entire Broken Golems faction, has been removed.<br />
** Golems are now another form of Ark, basically, and are capturable in that fashion.<br />
<br />
* Metal harvesters are now markless, rather than being upgradeable. This solves an issue with them being funky upgrade levels on enemy planets, and in general the ability to upgrade them is something that I was iffy about in the current system anyway. It was likely to be too powerful.<br />
<br />
* The home forcefield generator, which has existed since the first game as a last-ditch tool that you have until you lose it, is now something that you can rebuild.<br />
** It's also now markless and has its stats more directly set, so that you definitely never get more than one. It was kinda funky having it be mark 2 in this game from the start, and it also led you to having a cap of 2 instead of 1.<br />
** The whole purpose of this is so that you can rebuild it if it dies, since you don't otherwise inherently have access to any forcefield generators on your home planet at all, now. You have to put a battlestation or a citadel there in order to get a forcefield beyond the first, and depending on your playstyle you might choose not to do that.<br />
<br />
=== Capturing Planets ===<br />
<br />
* So long as you have a mobile fleet leader on a planet with no command station (enemy or otherwise), you can now capture it like you would have previously done with a colony ship.<br />
** Aka, just take any of your golems or Arks over to the enemy planet and destroy their command station and you're immediately ready to set up your own. Boom, simpler.<br />
<br />
=== UI Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Player profile stuff relating to choosing a default Ark type is now removed under the hood. It hasn't been on the front-end for quite some time now.<br />
** Note that a lot of the stuff with Arks having a story and a portrait image are thus now gone, although again this isn't new on the front-end. Arks simply have a new role now.<br />
<br />
* You are no longer asked to pick a Chief Adviser at the start of the game for your profile. That was a lot of confusion an un-needed choice on something rather trivial, and got in the way of getting you to the actual game.<br />
** Now it just has a screen for profiles that asks for a name and your default colors and that's it.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, you can no longer select a starting bonus ship type OR a starting Ark for your faction as a player. Neither of those make any sense anymore. Now there's something new:<br />
** The game now lets you choose from special starting fleets, of which at the moment there are 5 handcrafted ones. The player can choose which one they want in the game lobby, just like they could with Arks.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" are now able to, and in fact required to have, a description.<br />
** They also now have tooltips in the lobby, which show these descriptions, thus explaining what the heck they do.<br />
<br />
* The conduct for "start with planets explored" has been removed, as that's really cutting out a core part of the game now.<br />
** The scouting being so much more automated now kind of makes it a bit different from other games where you can turn off fog of war. Despite the first game having the option to turn off fog of war, that really takes out the entire flow of the game when it comes to this game.<br />
** Scouting isn't some hassle thing "that you have to do but might want to skip" anymore, but now is part of the reward structure for capturing planets, and so turning that off just would have... a lot of balance issues, among other things.<br />
<br />
* Added the following description to the Experimental: AI Civil War conduct, which is the only pre-existing conduct currently remaining. This may or may not be fully accurate:<br />
** If there are multiple AI factions, they all hate each other and will fight each other. They still hate YOU, too, but all this chaos and infighting is assumedly to your beneit. Then again, you might just find yourself in the crossfire of AIs who are getting more powerful more rapidly due to aggroing each other... so it's anyones's guess as to how long you'll last.<br />
<br />
* Working on making the tooltips for ships substantially more brief while still conveying the important information. Some of them are getting ridiculous for sure.<br />
<br />
* Added a new type of control for our settings menu, which is an integer slider. This is preferable to the textbox or dropdown for some cases.<br />
** We're now using that for the auto-build engineers, which also defaults to 2 now instead of 0.<br />
** We're also now using that for the various volume controls, which were inexplicably textboxes before.<br />
** We're also now using this for the minimum autosaves to keep, and the autosaves interval.<br />
<br />
* When planets are explored via you having just capturing a planet or whatever, it now shows a message log entry saying what planets were discovered and how many of them there were. This way it's clear that scouting is even happening!<br />
<br />
* display_name_for_sidebar has been added for entities, as it lets us give a more brief name to appear on the sidebar while still having a fuller name in tooltips.<br />
** This is optional and will just use the full name if it needs to. But if the sidebar is having bad wrapping of some text, then this should be filled with something shorter. Case in point is the home forcefield generator.<br />
<br />
* There used to be some logic about automatically opening certain windows when you selected certain kinds of ships (build menu when selecting command station, science menu when selecting science lab, etc), but since so much of that is all centralized or otherwise non-ship-related now, or all related to centerpieces, this just led to the UI kind of oddly seeming to do its own thing at times now. This has been removed.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for factories now show which fleets they are supporting, and what the status is of all the individual line items they are building for that fleet. This is super satisfying to just watch, turns out.<br />
<br />
==== Intel Tab ====<br />
<br />
* Something I talked about on the podcast is an new form of objectives, which is an idea that I've been refining since then (and had already been prior to then).<br />
** However, the "objectives" on the sidebar as they stand right now are not something I want to get rid of at all (most of them), given that they are kind of a "todo list of things you might want to do," and that's a pretty important tool to have.<br />
** With that in mind, the Objectives sidebar has instead been renamed to Intel, and over time we'll probably take out some things like the beginner tips and the primary objectives and so on. For the primary objectives we'll likely just recontextualize the same thing, but the beginner tips we'll probably fold into the new objectives (actual objectives system, separate from this intel system).<br />
** All of the really time-consuming-to-add and detailed "objectives" stuff about where we found things to capture and hack and kill, and where we should be scouting, etc, is all going to stay. It's just under the name "intel" instead, now. Really, that's what it is: information that lets you make decisions yourself, be that diverging from your main objectives or defying them or whatever else.<br />
<br />
==== Build Tab ====<br />
<br />
* The "Direct Build" sidebar has been completely reworked from scratch.<br />
** It's no longer based on icons and tiny buttons, but instead has much larger buttons in categories. This may lead to more scrolling in some cases, but it also should be way more legible AND in general the player should have fewer things that they can build at any given planet unless they've stacked a lot of battlestations and citadels there.<br />
** Each line item not only shows what type it is, but also has to include what fleet it goes with -- so if that's the planet fleet, or one of the battlestations or citadels, that is relevant.<br />
*** Why is this relevant? Well, those things can be upgraded independently, for one. And for another note, it's possible that you might choose to move a battlestation or citadel to a new planet, thus making all of their units on this planet stop functioning. So it does play into the strategy if you plan on moving around your battlestations and/or citadels (as you likely will).<br />
** These also now show the cap directly in a 0/3 fashion or similar, with it showing how many have been built out of how many are possible. It's possible that you might have more built than are possible to build, which it will show properly, but with a red warning.<br />
** It also more directly shows the cost for construction -- super useful -- and grays out the text of any entities that you have already built to the full cap so that they are not so noticeable.<br />
** This whole setup is really geared around having many fewer TYPES of things that you can directly build at a given planet, and that's the intention for the long term. We don't really want dozens of options here, but rather a smaller and more interesting selection that you can build from contextually depending on the planet.<br />
** At this point you can actually construct new direct-placement units!<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch of changes have been made to the way the tooltips look in build mode for entities, and also to how things are hovered-over in the build menu and galaxy in terms of what highlights, when.<br />
** It's stuff we'll refine further with time, but if something seems off, please let us know.<br />
<br />
* When a Zenith Trader is visiting, you'll see a bunch of stuff on the sidebar under various categories, noted in pink as being from the Zenith Trader.<br />
** This is different from past versions of the game where there was a specific category for all the Zenith Trader stuff regardless of what its function was. This actually makes it a lot easier to find things by function, particularly if the amount of wares on offer goes up a lot in the future.<br />
** For things like the Station-Keepers (Chained Dark Spire Eidolon), there is now a per-planet cap higher than 1 for these. That's pretty nifty, and it works!<br />
** Note that even if you don't have the metal for these projects NOW, while the trader is visiting, you can start the projects and pay for them over time. This is as before and is by design. The UI might be a bit confusing on this, not sure.<br />
<br />
* In the build sidebar, turrets and "other defenses" have now been properly split out. Before they were all kind of mixed together in "defenses," which got confusing.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Frigates are now part of the Station Keepers sidebar instead of Other Defenses.<br />
** This is meant to be the case for anything that is mobile, essentially.<br />
<br />
==== Hotkeys ====<br />
<br />
* The hotkey for opening the tech tab now only opens that, versus opening that or the hacking tab contextually.<br />
** Given that the docks tab is gone, the build hotkey now only opens the build sidebar directly as well, kind of implicitly.<br />
<br />
* There are now separate hotkeys for opening the hacking (H) and fleet (R) tabs.<br />
<br />
* The "split selection" keybind that was previously L in this game and the original is now semicolon.<br />
<br />
* The "Unload Transports" (U) hotkey has had its description reworked as follows:<br />
** Any mobile fleet flagships that you have selected will immediately unload any ships they are presently transporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new hotkey (L): Load Transports<br />
** Any ships that you have selected which are part of a mobile fleet will immediately get inside their flagship for transport if their flagship is on the same planet.<br />
** Note that the need for this to be separate for unload is that it will be common to have partially-loaded transports and you don't want to get into funky toggle situations with ships getting in and out when you really meant "keep getting in" or "keep getting out."<br />
<br />
* The keybind for "select all scouts" has been removed, since scouts are removed.<br />
<br />
* SelectNextUnitType and SelectPreviousUnitType have both been removed, as they were buggy like crazy in general, and also don't really make all that much sense in the new workflow of things.<br />
<br />
* Trigger Current Master Menu Action 1-12 are now gone as hotkeys, as they only worked in the escape menu (since the rest of the master menu was gone as of over a year ago) and it was using up a lot of hotkeys for something not all that useful anymore. Once upon a time this was brilliant, it just doesn't fit anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Savegame Format Revamp ===<br />
<br />
* The default serialization style for things the game saves is now Byte arrays rather than the char arrays. This will make savegames vastly smaller than before, although not as legible (as if they were before) to edit by hand.<br />
** This is great for a variety of practical reasons, but among them it causes fewer transient garbage collector allocations. And it also makes it so that large integer numbers are no longer something that make the savegame larger. Rather than one char's worth of bytes per digit in the number (1-6 bits, per UTF-8 specs), it now just has a fixed 4 bytes for the number regardless of how many digits it has.<br />
** This breaks all the previous savegames, but they were already broken anyway.<br />
** Player profiles and settings are still using char arrays so that they can be edited by hand as desired.<br />
<br />
* There was previously a "too smart for our own good" method for "compacting" integers down that were used as primary keys. This could cause all sorts of bugs when used incorrectly, and aside from known bugs that this fixes, we happened to see a few other bugs in passing as we were removing it.<br />
** Note that this was needed almost exclusively because of the char arrays serialization that we were using. Now that we're using byte arrays, this compacting is not just bug-prone it's actually not any more efficient in the first place. So it's really good to have that out of there in general.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting a particular bug caused by this.<br />
<br />
* Items that are truly deprecated, but that we still want some record of for whatever reason, are presently moved into a new GameData/Pre900Deprecated folder.<br />
** This way we still have the xml, but the game never looks at it. Normally the purpose of deprecating something is to make sure that savegames that are older can still be read in. With 0.900 we're breaking the savegames anyway, so clearing out the deprecated stuff is only natural.<br />
<br />
* As part of this release, we had switched to writing our savegames in a binary format. However, this wasn't really working fully properly because it was trying to transcode that into unicode, which in turn would sometimes complain with the "Unable to translate Unicode character XXX at index YYY" error.<br />
** This was also notably less efficient in terms of GC usage. Now we're just directly writing the binary file.<br />
** In fact, now we're writing a BuzzsawBinaryByteArray, which is 449kb where even the binary array was 3.2mb, and the char buffer was even larger.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "external data" (aka modder-type data or data that was being saved into the external projects) is saved used to be based on using a sub-serializer that then itself got written as a string back into the main serialization stream.<br />
** This was probably done as a way to isolate freaky bugs introduced into savegames by modders, but with our new serialization logging that's really no longer a worry. As it stands, the sub-serialization may have instead been preventing us from properly saving sub-data and getting it back reliably. Also it was vastly less efficient in the new context.<br />
** Anyway, given that the new context is such that doing the data saving of external data just fully inline without any wrappering is more efficient, that's now what we're doing. Based on the serialization logs, this seems to work great.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging Additions ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Savegame Serialization Logs" setting into the debug section of the game settings.<br />
** When saving a game, write WorldSerialization.txt, and when loading it write WorldDeserialization.txt -- both in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if a savegame won't load for some reason; this lets us do a diff of the two files and figure out where they are diverging.<br />
** Note that this won't help with an existing broken savegame. This will only help if you have it turned on prior to creating a savegame you expect to be broken. This is basically a way for us to test the savegame creation and load process, which otherwise can be incredibly opaque and take a lot of time to hunt down.<br />
** It's hard to understate just how big a deal this tool is. This is an area that could have us searching for hours or days for a problem, and now we can find it in minutes, potentially.<br />
*** The specific genesis of the feature was in fact Chris spending hours searching for something and not finding a solution, and finally thinking there had to be a better way. We should have thought of this 10 years ago, honestly.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Mapgen Log" field in the debug part of the settings.<br />
** When generating a new map in the lobby, write MapGen.txt in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if mapgen isn't really doing what you expect for some reason, or you just want some detailed insight into what is happening and in what order.<br />
** To hook into this as a modder for your own purposes, you simply write to MapgenLogger.Log(). If you're doing anything CPU-expensive or that involves string concatenation or similar, then you can wrap that inside an "if ( MapgenLogger.IsActive )" statement. This simply avoids slowing down mapgen at all when logging is not active.<br />
** There is some serious funkiness going on with some data being null when it should not be, and this is how we're going about figuring out when and why that is happening. But this also lets us see the results of maps that are generated without having to scan with our eyeballs all over a big map so much. Given how much has just changed in mapgen and elsewhere, this is handy, even if we didn't have an immediate bug issue.<br />
<br />
* The fleet centerpiece "repairs" no longer get dumped to the log unless a new debug setting is enabled. This was essentially just spamming the log for no good reason at the moment, but it's useful to be able to see it in some limited cases, hence the new option.<br />
<br />
* Put in a buuuunch of debugging code for figuring out where excess notifications that hang out at the top of your screen are coming from.<br />
** The tooltips for the excess notifications should now explain what the problem is.<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Early Access Starts!]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Arrival_of_Fleets&diff=35606AI War 2:The Arrival of Fleets2019-05-29T20:20:57Z<p>Ovalcircle1: /* Nanocaust Buffs */</p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== Known Issues ==<br />
* The lobby interface is currently temporary, and undergoing a complete overhaul.<br />
** It's suggested that you use the quick start option instead.<br />
<br />
* Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is temporarily disabled''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.<br />
<br />
* There are a variety of ships/units that don't have final graphics at the moment, though they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
* We're in progress with a major revamp of some systems based on cumulative feedback in order to push the game even more towards the feel of the original game... despite further divergence from it at a mechanical level.<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After 3 months of Early Access and 2+ years of development, we've reached a point where we know what we want the 1.0 version of the game to look like. SO very much about this game already works well, but there are some major deficits coming into this phase when comparing this sequel to the original game. The aim of this phase is to close those gaps and make this clearly the superior product in terms of playability, fun factor, the amount of fun thinking-about-interesting-challenges you do during gameplay, and so on. <br />
<br />
There's also of course still more polish and bugfixing that we want to get done, and the lobby redo is still scheduled of course (but quick starts are an awesome alternative, and have helped us to defer a final design for the lobby as we formed up some other bits of the game first), but we're feeling really good about this final sprint toward 1.0. We still do need to also finish some graphics for the existing ships, but they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
There is some more content coming as part of this phase, kind of by definition -- fleets as a concept Change Everything in a good way -- but the focus is on taking what is a pretty awesome game with a lot of depth and pushing it to a level that we hope beats the pants off the original, finally. Stay tuned.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.862 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories could produce ships beyond a fleet's cap if you were fast forwarding during construction.<br />
<br />
* Antagonized Dyson Sphere rebalance. <br />
** Every so often the Dyson Antagonizer will level up and increase the income of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere. To compensate, the initial strength of the Antagonized Dyson Sphere will be weaker<br />
** Prompted by a discussion with Democracy<br />
<br />
* Put periods at the end of all the Descriptions of minor factions and map types for consistency<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Probably fixed the bug with marauder outposts causing savegames to break. Have not tested it, but found a definite bug in the code (one variable being serialized twice but deserialized only once) and fixed that, so unless there is also a second bug in this area it should be good to go now.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Hunter Fleet budget from Instigator bases wasn't being spent <br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting<br />
<br />
* Increase the Macrophage's base income<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the comments<br />
<br />
* Instigators are now allied to the player in Friendly AI mode<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where normal waves weren't sending<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Tweak the anti-minor-faction wave code to make sure the waves are all at a minimum size. Also increase the anti-minor-faction waves against the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to Oval for pointing some more code paths out<br />
<br />
* If you have 0 hacking points and haven't finished the hack, the hack should now fail instead of giving you negative hacking points<br />
** Thanks to x4000 for the mantis ticket, but I assume someone else originally reported the problem (on Steam?)<br />
<br />
* Paralyzing a ship with a cloaking device no longer gives it full cloaking points once it's unparalyzed again. Particularly infuriating with the Raid starter fleet, the Cursed golem stuns for just enough time to have ships recloak before the next shot fires.<br />
** Minor downside - If you manage to stun ships with an AoE effect (Nanoswarm is the only ship capable of doing this off the top of my head), it will no longer be briefly unstealthed. Very minor since this situation happening is unreliable at best.<br />
<br />
* Marauder Mark 3 Outposts once again spawn Raiders<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Avoided a bug that would temporarily break save games once the game version rolled around to 1.0<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "Singular Freaky Surprises" map generation item for real this time. Golems should be a common appearance for Golemite AI now, and rare (1 / 1001) for other AI types again.<br />
<br />
* Keep the Main Menu Music in the Game Lobby; don't switch to 'in-game' music till you really start the game<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the request<br />
<br />
* On difficulty >= 7, the AI will start dumping most of its budget into the Hunter Fleet when you are attacking the AI Overlord or an adjacent planet<br />
** The feeling I get is that the actual AI Overlord combat isn't as exciting as it could be, so hopefully this will be more interesting.<br />
<br />
* Add a Raid Engine Notifier. Untested, but hopefully it works?<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it<br />
<br />
=== Nanocaust Buffs ===<br />
<br />
* Give the Nanocaust stronger defensive fleets when the Hive is under attack. <br />
* Give the Nanocaust more income.<br />
* Created ships start in Attacker_Full. <br />
* Nanocaust ships should not start patrolling until there are no enemies on the planet<br />
* The Nanocaust is not allowed to kill Command Stations until it has a significant advantage on a planet<br />
** Prompted by discussions with Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the a bunch of the Nanocaust's weapons weren't firing due to some missing XML<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for reporting<br />
<br />
=== New Ship Mechanic ===<br />
<br />
* Knockback (translocation for AI War veterans) has been put in the game!<br />
<br />
* The knockback mechanic has two methods of functioning:<br />
** The first calculates the knockback direction based on the angle between the ship that fired the shot and the shot that hit (aka directly towards or away from your ship) and functions with all types of weapons: single target, laser, self-centered AoE (tesla ships), and enemy centered AoE (Seige frigates).<br />
** The second calculates the knockback direction only for secondary targets hit by an AoE (non-laser) weapon. Ships will be pushed or pulled towards the point where the shot hit, making enemy ships group up together to make other AoE effects more potent.<br />
<br />
* Each method works with both pulling ships towards, and pushing ships away from the target.<br />
<br />
* Knockback is currently only limited by mass. There is a maximum mass that will be able to be knocked back, and the closer a ship is to that maximum mass, the less knockback the ship will take (down to a minimum of 50% of the listed knockback). The equation for this is Effective Knockback = Knockback * ( 1 - ( Ship Mass / (2 * Mass Limit ) ) )<br />
** As an example: If a knockback had a strength of 1000 and a mass limit of 4, a fleet ship of 0.2 mass would take 975 knockback, and a guardian of 4 mass would take 500 knockback<br />
<br />
* Ships are immune to knockback if they are: Too heavy, are protected by a bubble shield, are projecting a bubble shield, are currently tractored, are immobile (turrets), or are immune to damage.<br />
<br />
==== For Modders ====<br />
<br />
* XML tags are as follows for creating ships with knockback:<br />
** knockback_to_ships_mass_tx_less_than="Mass Limit" - Needed for knockback to function at all, sets the max mass that will be affected<br />
** base_knockback_per_shot="Base Knockback" - For markless and mark 1 ships, this is the knockback that the shot will deal. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** added_knockback_per_shot_per_mark="Added Knockback" - For mark 2 ships and up, this is how much extra knockback is added to the shots. Positive numbers push away, negative numbers pull towards.<br />
** knockback_at_target_location="true/false" - Setting this to true means that AoE weapons will make ships be pushed or pulled away from the center of the AoE. Defaults to false. Must have a defined AoE on the weapon for this to work.<br />
<br />
* C# methods<br />
** int EntitySystem.CalculateKnockbackPowerAgainst( GameEntity_Squad Target ) - Returns 0 if the weapon has no knockback effects, or if the ship is immune. Otherwise return the knockback from the equation above.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.TakeKnockback( int KnockbackAmount, float angle ) - For custom knockback effects, this method ignores any convention of towards or away, and just pushes the ship at an angle that you want. This method has no immunity checking in it currently, so make sure the target is actually mobile, not bubble shielded, and not tractored.<br />
** void GameEntity_Squad.AddKnockbackSourceForFramePlan( int KnockbackAmount, EntitySystem FiringSystemOrNull, GameEntity_Shot ShotThatHitOrNull, bool KnockbackAtTarget, ArcenSimContext Context ) - If KnockbackAtTarget is false, log the source of the knockback from FiringSystemOrNull.GetWorldLocation() and power from int KnockbackAmount. If KnockbackAtTargetis true, check that the ship this is called from is not the same ship that ShotThatHitOrNull hit, then log the source from ShotThatHitOrNull.Target.Ref.WorldLocation and the power from int KnockbackAmount. Get's called by TakeDamage automatically.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== Mines ====<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mine types from 1 minimum, 2 maximum, to 2 minimum, 3 maximum in "Minelayer" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Increased the count of Mines in "Minelayer" and "OtherDefenseFocus" Fleet Designs.<br />
<br />
* Logistical Command Stations now have 20 Paralysis Mines instead of 10 normal Mines.<br />
** Existing Stations in save games will still have their old Mines in addition.<br />
<br />
* Area Mine damage 20,000 -> 2,000, hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Differentiates it from normal Mines.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine hits maximum of 10 targets instead of spreading amongst everything in range.<br />
** Stops it from paralysing an absurd amount of ships.<br />
<br />
* Area and Paralysis Mine explosion radius 500 -> 1,000.<br />
** These mines had a tendency to detonate on the first target that came in range, and not hit much around that. This should hopefully let them get more out of each detonation.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Mine paralysis time 8s -> 12s.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Parasite damage 20 -> 60, reload time 6s -> 4s.<br />
<br />
* Paralysers now have the correct target evaluator and should be better at actually paralysing.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Ion Cannons and Orbital Mass Drivers should now be shot at automatically, if nothing else is really around as a target.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== Translocation ====<br />
<br />
* Ark One now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 2000, increases by 500 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Stations now uses the Translocation mechanic.<br />
** Knockback 3000, increases by 750 each Mark.<br />
<br />
* Military Command Station reload time 6s -> 2s, shots per salvo 6 -> 8, damage 1,300 -> 800.<br />
** Allows it to use Translocation more effectively. Is also a damage upgrade.<br />
<br />
==== Reinforcement ====<br />
<br />
* Removed the increased turret limit that AI planets with guard posts get.<br />
<br />
* Slight increase to the bonus strike craft a planet can reinforce per guard post, 25% extra --> 30% extra<br />
** This still lets the AI build up a "wall", but strike craft are different from turrets in that there's more gameplay to them (i.e. they become threat if you outnumber the AI too much)<br />
** Thanks to the Discord for the talks, Puffin for posting on the bug tracker.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.861 Strength Of Remains==<br />
(Released May 17th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Added a new PlannedWaveOptions struct that is great for sending specific groups of options to the PlanWave() function without it having a million optional parameters.<br />
** This also lets us have specific static Create() methods set up that have just the parameters that we want to set, which reduces the chances of bugs via typos or misalignments.<br />
<br />
=== Gameplay Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* When "Ally to AI" mode is selected, the player gets vision of all planets at the beginning of the game<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion.<br />
<br />
* Ships that get unloaded from fleet centerpieces now inherit orders such as wormhole move commands and behaviors such as pursuit mode.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Turrets and ships that are remains, not claimed yet, crippled, or in the process of being built are now not shown as strength in either galaxy view or local view.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror and Trillioneyes for noting that this made it hard for players to judge at a glance when the AI is outnumbering them.<br />
<br />
* Cross planet waves now display the source planet of the wave to match the other wave types.<br />
<br />
* Improved the feel of dropdowns by making it so that you can click the dropdown a second time to hide it, just as you can in most other applications in the world.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that caused things that produced multiple types of drones (certain AI guard posts, AI drone guardians) to produce only 1 drone at a time and at a reduced rate.<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Anti-Player Zombies were also hostile to the AI. Note that this fix only affects newly created game, existing games will still suffer from this bug.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting<br />
<br />
* Put in a probable fix to exceptions that could happen inside UpdatePositionAndSize() on the tooltips. This is almost always indicative of some worse problem, but it's worth having this not compounding the problem at least.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the most recent report of this.<br />
<br />
* If there are errors during map generation (sometimes this is "valid", in the case of things like too many factions for the available planets), it now pops up a harmless but hopefully-informative error message log and doesn't just start the game in an invalid state.<br />
** Long-term obviously we want it to not be in a position to generate an error like this, but realistically modders can do all sorts of things and we need errors to happen gracefully.<br />
** Have tested this and it works as expected. However, it requires that all errors during mapgen use a new method which is Engine_AIW2.Instance.LogErrorDuringCurrentMapGen() if it would previously have used ArcenDebugging.ArcenDebugLog( Verbosity.ShowAsError ) or equivalent. If there are any remaining cases of the latter, then those would not get caught by this new code.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting the issue.<br />
<br />
* Previously there was a bug where if you set the number of planets in the lobby, but then just hit Start Game without hitting Generate Map first, it would not actually use the correct number of planets.<br />
** This was... kinda old, kinda-new. If there isn't enough room to seed whatever factions you have selected, it's now super duper fast to change the number of planets and hit start game and see if it works, etc. Without slowing anything else down in the lobby responsiveness in general.<br />
** Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where if you had one faction selected and then changed the faction, the colors would not update properly for them in the lobby.<br />
** This was not a problem limited to just the colors, and it probably was display-only in terms of problems, and it doesn't solve the issue with the human player colors, but this is still nice to have fixed.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The various custom data for the individual map types (how many arms on the octopus, etc) now all do a much better job of actually retaining and showing their proper values, and never have a stale view on the interface itself.<br />
** This was another old and new problem, but is now fixed for both cases.<br />
** Thanks to hawk and BadgerBadger for the original reports.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug in the TextMeshPro dropdowns where if one was in a sub-panel and opened, then clicking another one to open the other one would not close the first one. It led to much visual confusion.<br />
** Why exactly this was happening is actually a bit of a mystery, but we just gave the dropdowns some memory of "dropdowns that think they are still open," and those all close themselves when a new dropdown is clicked. Problem solved.<br />
** Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Previously, there was an extra custom field definition for the human player colors compared to the other faction colors, and this wasn't really needed now and probably just confused things.<br />
** So removed and consolidated that, although it didn't fix the sync issues with human player colors not being settable.<br />
<br />
* Integrated revised versions of the Steamworks .so files for linux, and the related files for OSX as well.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for chasing down what needed to change on Linux; please let us know if it still isn't showing you as logged in properly in the new builds in either of those two OSes, because that would likely mean that something didn't get copied properly in our build scripts.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.860 The Lobby Ate My Factions?? ==<br />
(Released May 16th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Raid Engines could trigger a null reference if set off by the Dark Spire<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the event that for some reason the game tries to queue a GameCommand with an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 (this seems to happen from time to time during the game and now once in the lobby), it will complain at the time of it trying to queue it, and give a stack trace from there, and not actually do the queuing of it.<br />
** This should help us figure out when and why these things are occasionally happening. It's probably related to a pooling error of some sort, but it's hard to be sure. If the commands are valid at this point and then later have ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 when being read back, then we know we have a different problem entirely and can approach that from another way. Either way we'll start having more info soon on this rare and elusive error.<br />
<br />
* Put in a second place where we now early-assign the ExecuteOnFrameNumber when GameCommands are created. This may then later get reassigned in OnServer_CheckForSendingServerBatchMessageToClients, which is fine, but this should hopefully prevent those rare issues where a command falls through the cracks and has an ExecuteOnFrameNumber of -1 for some reason.<br />
<br />
* Math fixes from WeaponMaster:<br />
** Fixed claim repairing being way out of wack, causing 500,000 metal cost Arks to be built in less than a second by a single engineer.<br />
** Also fixed self construction metal flow healing, metal now heals for a ratio of hp:metal like claim and repair flows now.<br />
** Also made it so self construction metal flows (and the assist construction flows helping it) heal shield too.<br />
** Note: it's possible that things are now wildly too expensive to claim, now that you actually have to pay the metal for them to claim them. If that's the case, please let us (Puffin?) know, and we'll adjust their claim costs.<br />
<br />
=== More Lobby Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Improved the lobby error messaging when it can't find a custom field for a map type so that it now says what it was looking for. Helpful for anyone making custom map types.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the Simple map type where it was trying to look at a setting for the realistic map type (and then not even use it) and thus was throwing an error now that the settings are per-map-type rather than being stored in the global central settings file.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* In the "remove a faction" bit of code, it now throws a cleaner and more informative error if for some reason it's out of range. It doesn't fix the problem, but should help us fix the problem in the future if we don't find it in the meantime.<br />
** Thanks to Mckloshiv for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The long-range planning cycles (background threads) are no longer run when you're in the lobby.<br />
** This probably makes next to no difference to anything, but might make a few things slightly faster or even avoid some potential issues in the future.<br />
<br />
* Some changes have been made to make the dropdown selection changes more synchronous (instant) rather than on a slight time delay. This allows for a few things to be controlled a bit better... in theory.<br />
<br />
* Wow, a whole heck of a lot of wrappering and rework has been done on dropdowns to make it more clear when and how data is being set.<br />
** We were actually still having the same problem with factions getting erased as soon as they were added in the prior build, along with some other known issues like dropdown stuff getting out of sync quickly that we did know about.<br />
** All of this is traceable back to how the dropdowns handle data updates to themselves, and it's another question of "how did this ever work?" This one was a Chris area, not a Keith one, just in case anyone gets the wrong idea that any of the early code problems were all from one source (far from it).<br />
** Issues fixed:<br />
*** still couldn't add more factions<br />
*** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
*** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated<br />
** Remaining known issues:<br />
*** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct.<br />
*** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby, although it's not causing errors per se.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.859 Lobby Raid ==<br />
(Released May 15th, 2019)<br />
<br />
Note: We no longer plan to break savegames going forward from here. Looks like that won't be needed, and it would break a bunch of bug reports. So hooray!<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Mobile Support Flagships now show that they are building things in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the analysis of this problem<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Objectives (in the intel tab) for capturing battlestations and flagships now shows the supported units<br />
** This was annoying me<br />
<br />
* Both of the modal popup types (the OK window and the Yes/No windows) now support scrolling text, aka way more info than before. Before if the text got too long, it would just cut off.<br />
** This is useful for all sorts of things, such as if we want to have things like header items that you can click (AIP display, for instance) that would give you a readout of a bunch of new details about the state of all the AIs (salvage amounts, reprisal status, whatever else we feel like).<br />
<br />
* There is now a "tall" version of the modal "OK dialog" that is able to tell you info. This is particularly useful for info dumps versus just a quick notice regarding whatever it was going to tell you.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a variety of fonts that were too small, particularly for dropdowns, in the lobby in recent beta versions.<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Allow the Dyson Sphere to free itself if it was reconquered. Otherwise you have to babysit the Dyson Sphere once you free it<br />
** Note this may cause the AI and Dyson Sphere to fight more often, since the AI is apt to try to recapture it repeatedly. May need further tweaks<br />
<br />
* The AI will now wait until a wave is "strong enough" before sending it, rather than potentially sending very small or empty waves<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Allow the Nanocaust to kill Black Hole Machines, since they were otherwise an excessively effective counter to the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting this, including Mosrael<br />
<br />
=== New Features/Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Add a "Ally player to AI" option in the game lobby.<br />
** This prevents you from playing the game normally, and is intended for people who want to play the game in Sandbox mode, watching the AI fight various minor factions, or an AI Civil War (or both)<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines function and are in use again.<br />
<br />
* Like we have had description_appender_dll and description_appender_type for quite some time, we now also have per_second_custom_logic_dll and per_second_custom_logic_type.<br />
** The former calls void AddToDescriptionBuffer( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntityOrNull, GameEntityTypeData RelatedEntityTypeData, ArcenDoubleCharacterBuffer Buffer ) on a IGameEntityDescriptionAppender.<br />
** The new one calls void RunEntitySpecialPerSecondLogic( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntity, ArcenSimContext Context ) on a IGameEntityPerSecondSpecialLogic.<br />
** This allows us to have all sorts of crazy AI watcher units, including AI Eyes or whatever else, that run some completely custom logic once per second. It's easy for modders to define, etc, etc.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Don't allow drones to generate salvage<br />
** Suggested by Democracy<br />
<br />
* Player engineers are no longer able to repair friendly zombie ships.<br />
** A previous change to make zombies attrition every minute was effectively just a metal sink because they were still able to be repaired.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where hydra head ships (that spawn from hydras such as Stingray Hydra) weren't properly attritioning or being set to pursuit mode.<br />
** They will die faster thanks to the attrition working now, but hopefully be more useful as they'll chase enemies automatically.<br />
** For modders, this can be enabled for any ship by defining self_attritions_X_percent_per_second_if_parent_ship_not_on_planet="X" and adding the tag always_self_attritions="true" to your ship. Doing this for any ship except those spawned from another ship dying is kinda pointless though.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Factories and Support Fleets were spending less metal than intended when producing more than one type of ship at once.<br />
<br />
* Fix a logic problem with neutral planet hacking which prevented you from being able to Watch-Hack a neutral planet<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Factories will now only produce strikecraft and frigates for fleet centerpieces that are fully claimed.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a TextMesh Pro setting to "disable warnings," the builds of the game will no longer complain about missing glyphs in fonts that don't need them.<br />
<br />
* The debug output code for what a GameCommand contains now has its line breaks fixed up so that it's actually legible!<br />
** Also some options have been put in to make it output a bit more intelligently, ie only saying what it is doing and not all the empty things it isn't doing.<br />
<br />
=== Various Fixes and Changes to Zombie Fleets ===<br />
* There is now a defined minimum and maximum amount of zombie ships that get randomly sent out when zombies decide to raid another planet. This is currently set at 30 and 50 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The group of ships that get sent out when deciding to raid a planet is now randomized. Previously the ships that got selected to raid were always the first ones created on the planet, now the group that gets selected is chosen randomly.<br />
<br />
* Zombies that are in the process of going through a wormhole ("Raiding") are left out of patrol/raid logic so they don't get conflicting orders.<br />
<br />
* Planets that have less than 0.05 strength of hostile units on them (basically only a warp gate and command station) are considered not hostile and so zombies will run their patrol/raiding logic.<br />
<br />
* Zombies now correctly lose only 1% of their hp per minute. Previously, ships with high shields were losing much more hp per minute.<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Guts Revamp (Visually No Improvements Yet) ===<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the inner guts of how the lobby keeps track of changes that you're requesting, and how it then goes about updating and syncing the game and the UI, respectively.<br />
** It's a lot more responsive-feeling now, although we can get it even better than this. And it also provides a basis for us to be able to make this properly visually better soon.<br />
** This also fixes a number of problems that have existed where people in multiplayer making changes at the same time would have conflicts and lost data.<br />
** Essentially this is now doing differentials of changes rather than wholesale copies, and it keeps track of a separate "setup as per the lobby" that only the lobby can touch, and a "long term settings" that the game reads from later on.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a number of things with the map type sub-controls so that it is now fully modder-friendly, and multiplayer-safe.<br />
** You can now mod in you own map type sub controls without having to edit the central files (which of course would be overwritten next time there's a release).<br />
<br />
* Made the game way more robust when it comes to having a map set up that doesn't include any factions for whatever reason.<br />
** It's possible to make this happen in the lobby code if you mess up other things, and it's much easier to just have this be robust so that we can see the real errors.<br />
<br />
* A variety of the map types now have much easier-to-digest names for their options, and all map types now have proper spacing between the words in their names and their options.<br />
<br />
* A new settings option has been added to the Debug section: "Write Lobby Setup Changes To Log"<br />
** If something strange is going on with the lobby, in multiplayer or otherwise, this is a way for the log to have a variety of data sent about what changes are being requested, and when.<br />
<br />
* New options for writing the full contents of a GameCommand have been added, to get all the details of what's in each list being sent, etc. This is now used a variety of places that can benefit from that extra clarity (all error-reporting-related or otherwise debug stuff).<br />
<br />
* GameCommands have been expanded to allow for a third RelatedString, which is needed by some of the new lobby stuff.<br />
<br />
* Automatically-created controls (such as in dynamic interfaces like the lobby) now can have a string control code sent to them along with the two integer control codes.<br />
** This again is needed for the lobby, and makes some of the new modder-friendly map stuff possible.<br />
<br />
* Some data during mapgen was previously stored in the Factions object, and others in ConfigurationForFaction in the WorldSetup object, and still others off in settings, etc.<br />
** The game now properly stores all that data inside the WorldSetup object, so that it can be copied around and separate versions can be read at various times (for display versus for mapgen asynchronously, etc), and so that it plays nice with multiplayer.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen logging now includes a new entry for ControlledByPlayerAccounts_DuringGame, which is now split between Factions (for ingame) and the WorldSetup (for the lobby), as noted in the above note.<br />
<br />
* A ton of debugging data about the state of the WorldSetup objects, and the basic faction data as well, can now be exported via either ToString() or WriteDetailsToStringBuilder().<br />
** This lets us actually look inside and see what is happening, which is kinda relevant!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the initial fleet not being serialized properly in the WorldSetup.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section of the settings menu: "Show Debug Details Button In Lobby"<br />
** When enabled, a 'Debug Details' button appears in the lobby, which you can click to have it pop up all the relevant information about the current setup from a very low-level debugging style.<br />
<br />
* Some changes Chris has wanted to make for a VERY long time are now in under the hood in the lobby. Basically the game now only does a "partial" generation of the map whenever things change in the lobby, which means that the map generation is now vastly faster than before.<br />
** But as part of this, it has to go back and do the full generation of the map based on the final data when you actually click Start Game, and it now does that, too. This also has the benefit of being safer in terms of making sure things are ultra consistent with whatever the UI says when the game actually starts.<br />
<br />
* When you are changing things in the lobby that don't change the map topology _as it is visible in the lobby_, such as factions and conducts and faction options, it no longer causes the map to regenerate itself.<br />
** This feels more responsive by far, and in multiplayer (or if we get any super slow-to-generate maps in the future) it will have an amplified effect.<br />
** But also... this mysteriously fixes the problem we were having in the last few builds where you couldn't add factions.<br />
<br />
* The game now includes an implementation of DiffLib (https://github.com/lassevk/DiffLib), which it uses to calculate the differences between Setup states in the lobby export at the moment. Though certainly one imagines there could be other uses for this in some sort of other in-engine analysis data in the future, whether by us in some bowels of the UI for looking at enemy data, or something modders cook up.<br />
<br />
* Several lobby fixes, including to where we were setting the local player's color so that it wasn't getting out of sync. For multiplayer lobbies this will later need to be expanded further, but that's a task for later and not a huge deal right now.<br />
<br />
* '''Known lobby issues:'''<br />
** setup is being triggered when clicking to the factions tab, still, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** opening the MORE button for a factions tab still does a regeneration, probably because the intermediate data is incorrectly populated (and this is not new until the unity upgrade).<br />
** the colors for the player are out of sync between the dropdowns and the visual display area VISUALLY, even though the underlying data is now correct?<br />
** custom data can be stale when switching map types in the lobby<br />
<br />
== Version 0.858 Hotfix: The Lobby... Ate My Galaxy? ==<br />
(Released May 9th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed the Vanguard Hydra Head benefiting from Heavy Tech instead of Light like their parent unit.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug in the prior version that threw invisible harmless errors while loading the game because it was trying to find the settings for the galaxy map before the settings had been properly loaded.<br />
<br />
* Guardians will now have a chance at spawning with waves. If maxGuardianTypes is larger than 0, a random value between 0 and maxGuardianTypes is chosen as the minGuardianTypes. Random bags of anyGuardians are chosen until the minimum is reached.<br />
** Right now guardians only get added if the strikecraft fail to completely fill numDifferentShipsToSpawn. This can be changed easily by removing the comparison ( chosenUnitTypes < numDifferentShipsToSpawn ) in both the if statement and the while loop.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug introduced in the prior build where if you changed anything in the lobby or even clicked to the factions tab of the lobby, then you'd get control of a ton of planets and be under fire on all of them and probably lose the game instantly as well. Very amusing in small doses, but that's quite enough, thanks, game. ;)<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, WeaponMaster, Gerard, Mosrael, and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.857 The AI Strikes Back... Hard ==<br />
(Released May 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* The name of the currently playing music track is now shown in the Escape menu, for people like me who can never remember the titles<br />
** Prompted by music nostalgia from Puffin and Democracy in discord<br />
<br />
* There are now Achievements for winning in Civil War mode<br />
** Untested, like most of the other Achievements<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now be less afraid of distant enemies<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now consider enemy forces when choosing how to route to a target, so they don't accidentally suicide into a heavily defended planet on the way to somewhere else<br />
<br />
* The AI now has an "overconfidence ratio", where on lower difficulties Threat will overestimate its strength when choosing whether it's strong enough to attack. This makes it more aggressive, but also more likely to lose when it attacks<br />
** Finding ways to differentiate the AI difficulties is good<br />
<br />
==== AI Civil Wars ====<br />
<br />
* An AI will only give resource to to its own Hunter and Warden Fleet(s)<br />
<br />
* The AI Civil War now includes Warden and Hunter fleets. Each AI's warden/hunter is now hostile to other AIs and other Hunter/Warden Fleets.<br />
<br />
==== AI Homeworld Battle Changes ====<br />
<br />
* If an AI homeworld is attacked:<br />
** AI Threat ships on the homeworld will fight to the death<br />
** Ships Guarding planets near to the homeworld will become Threat. The higher the difficulty the more planets will be turned to Threat.<br />
** Threat ships will converge on the homeworld. Threat already waiting against a strong target will just join the Hunter fleet<br />
** That AI's Hunter and Warden Fleets will immediately converge on the homeworld<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a number of people for noticing the AI homeworld battles could be dull, including Nameless Terror from Steam. Thanks to StarKelp for a helpful save game to let me test this.<br />
<br />
==== Changes to AI Reinforcement ====<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft were being counted as turrets when loaded in a guard post, limiting the amount of turrets the AI could rebuild<br />
* Fixed a bug where the strikecraft currently on an AI planet were calculated incorrectly, allowing the AI to infinitely reinforce strikecraft if it never built guardians<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft inside the AI Command Center were not being counted as guard strength for reinforcement<br />
** These bug fixes improve more defensive AI types like Turtle, as these two issues combined usually meant that the AI could never reinforce strikecraft or turrets<br />
<br />
* The AI can now reinforce an extra 25% strikecraft and Turrets per living guardpost on alerted planets<br />
** AI planets are alerted when there is a human command center adjacent to them<br />
** Destroying guardposts on planets next to human planets is now much more important, as they can reinforce to be much stronger than they started out as if left untouched<br />
<br />
* These are large changes that are mostly untested, let us know if this ends up making the game too hard or frustrating<br />
<br />
=== New Settings Options For Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Galaxy Camera setting: Extra Background Hexagon Intensity<br />
** If you would like the background to be more stylized hexagons, then you can turn this up.<br />
** Nobody was really asking for this, but Chris had mixed feelings about his defaults and so figured why not.<br />
<br />
* The previous amount of bloom on the galaxy map was a bit on the high side, with an intensity of 2.06. That has been reduced to a new default of 1.4.<br />
** However, a new setting allows you to configure it between 0.4 and 4, which are two fairly extreme ends of it.<br />
** New galaxy camera setting: Bloom Intensity<br />
*** How glowy would you like the galaxy map to appear? More looks more computer-screeny, but can be distracting depending on your contrast settings on your monitor.<br />
** Thanks to Badger and danny for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== New Debug Commands ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to decrease AIP<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to kill all AI units and structures on the currently viewed planet<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== When a flagship of yours gets crippled... ====<br />
<br />
* Having a Flagship crippled by the AI now gives the AI a nice burst of Salvage, enabling them to power up reprisal waves. This is intended as a penalty for losing Flagships.<br />
** Different flagship types generate different amount of salvage. Officer flagships generate more than Support or Transport, for example. The Regenerator Golem will generate much less salvage than other flagships<br />
** The AI will generate less salvage if it cripples a flagship on a neutral planet (but still some)<br />
*** All the tunables are in XML for this<br />
<br />
==== When you don't have enough energy... ====<br />
<br />
* Claimables that would cost you more energy than you have available now can't be claimed, and it shows that in their tooltip.<br />
** Previously it could just claim stuff and throw you into negative energy.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Similarly, if you don't have enough spare energy to create something out of a factory (strikecraft, frigates, whatever) then it will only build up to 100% and then will stop and not actually emerge.<br />
** Same with drone production; it won't produce the next drone, but just will stick at 100%.<br />
** In both cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Any units that are currently trying to self-construct, and you don't have enough energy for them (or negative energy in general) will completely stop constructing (unless they either don't consume energy or produce it).<br />
** In the relevant cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== AI Overlord Phase 2 ====<br />
<br />
* Now uses a Plasma Overdriver in place of the old Plasma Torpedo, affecting everything in a large radius.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Bolt damage 4,000 -> 6,000, shot count 40 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Fusion Bomb damage 30,000 -> 50,000, added 2x bonus multiplier vs targets of mass >= 5.<br />
<br />
==== Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Guardians on AI planets.<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian Fusion Bomb Bypass 0.6 -> 0.9.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian damage 350 -> 450.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian damage 1,000 -> 300, shot count 1 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Temperamental Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Fragmenting Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% for Tantruming Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tantruming Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Fragmenting Guardian Shard health increased 50%, damage 800 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian damage 1,200 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 220 -> 330.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Guardians now have a bonus multiplier vs albedo >= 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Guardian damage 3,500 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Increased health of Pike, Nucleophilic and Grenade Launcher Dire Guardians to match the others.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guardians, excluding Forcefield - still increased.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guardian shot count 5 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian explosion size 300 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Dire Pike Guardian damage 6,000 -> 4,000, shot count 3 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian shot count 3 -> 6.<br />
<br />
* Dire Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 1,300 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* AI Hunter / Killer shields 1,000,000 -> 2,000,000, Fusion Bomb shot count 25 -> 35.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for an AI Hunter / Killer to be chosen in place of a Dire Guardian.<br />
** This thing spawns as Mark 5 if it does, so be really careful.<br />
<br />
==== Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Guard Posts excluding Forcefield.<br />
<br />
* Increased health by 25% of Forcefield Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10, reload time 4s -> 3s, range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Sabot Guard Posts increase their bonus multiplier with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Guard Post damage 480 -> 240, shot count 8 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 1600 -> 2,200.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for non-Swarmer AI planets to have a Swarmer Guard Post.<br />
<br />
* Increased frequency a bit of Forcefield Guard Posts (as well as Forcefield Generators).<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Dire Sabot Guard Post damage 3,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guard Post shot count 6 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Parasite Guard Post damage 6,000 -> 3,000, shot count 12 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Spider Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 2,000, shot count 12 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 8,000 -> 10,000, shot count 3 -> 6, range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Gravity Guard Post damage 12,500 -> 2,000, reload time 1s -> 2s, shot count 1 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
==== Drones ====<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, damage 4,000 -> 8,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
==== Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Golems (Player and AI).<br />
<br />
* Increased health of all Arks.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% of all Spire Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Combat Factories.<br />
<br />
* Increased shields by 25% of all Citadels.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette shields 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Molotov explosion size 500 -> 650.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot base damage multiplier 3x -> 6x.<br />
<br />
==== Science, Tech and Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced Upgrade Costs of Battlestations and Citadels a bit.<br />
<br />
* Starting Science 20,000 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Science gained from Spire Archive Extraction 5,000 -> 8,000.<br />
<br />
* Increased secondary response strength of some AI hacks.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cap multipliers on Transport Flagships a bit.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a tooltip typo that incorrectly identified the StrikeCraft version of the Intragalactic Coordinator as increasing the turret cap.<br />
<br />
* Only explore new planets when a Player kills an command station. Otherwise the Nanocaust and Civil War were giving tons of free vision<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations can now build multiple energy collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting, and puffin and ptarth for debugging assistance<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug causing fleet centerpieces to not cost any metal to claim.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the metal cost to claim capturables, this was causing most capturable things to cost less metal than intended. <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hunter Fleet was refusing to enter defended planets<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the internal drone construction logic that was previously present in the 0.850+ branch, but which was really only rearing its head on the new internal versions. Curious.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the seeding of SingularFreakySurprises where the chance for a golem to appear was being rolled once per galaxy instead of once per planet.<br />
** No more galaxies full of golems.<br />
<br />
==== Trying and Failing To Fix The Lobby ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the lobby regenerates the galaxy map is now slightly less direct. Rather than just directly updating things every time any dropdown value changed or similar, it now queues up those changes cumulatively and then applies them all 100ms after the last change.<br />
** This is because we can have situations where one dropdown changes, causing others to change, and that was causing repeat and often incomplete commands to be sent.<br />
** This was what we thought the disappearing-factions bug from the last few builds was, and we assumed it had to do with the dropdowns handling onValueChanged differently. That may be the case, but we can't really see how that's the case from a code review.<br />
** So this does seem to help with not missing things like some of the smaller secondary data for factions for instance, but it wasn't the complete solution we had hoped it would be.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, put in some defensive code to prevent certain errors when the game is trying to show a row for a faction that is out of bounds.<br />
** We get a lot more info about what went wrong when this is happening, at least. These errors are also no longer silent, but instead pop up a good error message with a useful stack trace.<br />
<br />
* Split the internal CodeDirectiveTag int on the ArcenUI_CreateElementDirective struct into CodeDirectiveTag1 int and CodeDirectiveTag2 int.<br />
** The purpose of this is so that we no longer have to do any crazy bitshifting to get the data out of a single integer for the faction index and field index in the lobby. This approach was mathematically clever, but had legibility issues at bare minimum.<br />
** Various parts of the lobby were incorrectly reading the data back as just faction index with no bitshifting going on, and maybe that was correct for those fields (??), but we're not really sure and that lack of sureness is not worth a tiny bit smaller struct.<br />
** This may or may not fix some bugs, but at least things are clearer.<br />
<br />
* Did NOT manage to fix the lobby with all these various changes.<br />
** But have managed to make ourselves wonder how it ever functioned at all.<br />
** Simply opening the MORE options next to a faction will change what is available in there, fun fact. That broke as heck, and probably isn't completely new.<br />
** Going through all this is, on the plus side, giving us a vastly better idea of how we want to rearchitect the lobby from a technical standpoint while keeping as much of what is there as possible. It looks like the "new lobby" is going to be a feature for 0.900-era AI War 2, simply because of all this.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.856 Clever Girl ==<br />
(Released May 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Ships that are in the process of loading into the fleet centerpiece no longer collide with other ships when near the centerpiece; faster loading with less micromanaging required.<br />
<br />
* Beam weapons now optionally support maximum_number_of_targets_hit_per_shot in the XML.<br />
** If the max is defined, ships hit past the maximum split the damage of the maximum equally between all ships.<br />
*** As an example, if you had a 10,000 damage beam with a max of 2 targets and it hit 4 targets, each target would take 5,000 damage only ( 2 max / 4 hit ).<br />
<br />
* Tweak the text for some hacks to fit the text in boxes.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators now cost AIP when the AI kills them<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror on steam for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The AI is now allowed to send waves against Unowned but defended planets in Civil War mode. The AI also gets buffs to its "anti-other-AI-planet" waves in civil war mode.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy now have an Objective to destroy them<br />
<br />
* Changed the way science hacking scales to be more intuitive<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it.<br />
<br />
* When transferring units between factions, clear any previous orders and set the units to be in Attacker mode. This was causing issues when transferring units to the Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having crippled flagships on a planet could sometimes cause hacks to fail<br />
** Someone complained about this but I don't remember who it was.<br />
<br />
==== Improved AI Attack Coordination ====<br />
* When the AI chooses targets for the Threat Fleet, it has a mild preference for attacking planets with critical player structures like Zenith Power/Metal Generators and Intra-Galactic Coordinators<br />
** The tunables for how strong that preference is (as opposed to going for more poorly defended targets) is an XML tunable per AI type<br />
<br />
* The AI now takes into account incoming wave strength when considering whether it is strong enough to attack a target when a wave is < 20 seconds out<br />
** This should allow Threat/Hunter ships to coordinate attacks with incoming waves when appropriate<br />
<br />
* When calculating whether a planet is a good target, the Hunter/Warden fleets now also include allied ships on their way to the target, as well as those currently at the target. <br />
** More coordination improvement code<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboats should now actually decloak.<br />
** Thanks to Mac for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Gravity effects cannot reduce a units speed below 20%, up from 5%.<br />
** This is to stop being able to stack Gravity and effectively replicate Tractor Beams.<br />
<br />
* Target priority lowered for Tachyon Sentinels and Arrays.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY for reporting the bullet magnets these were.<br />
<br />
* Decreased the time for AI Threat to join the Hunter Fleet, from 15 minutes at all difficulties, to starting at 10 on Diff 1, lowering by 1 for each Diff higher, maxing out at 3 minutes on Diff 8, 9 and 10.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.855 Galactic Markings ==<br />
(Released April 30th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for waves. The hovertext now shows the Target planet name in the colour of the planet's owner, and the planet with the warp gate in the colour of the faction sending the wave.<br />
** Thanks to Ptarth for making sure I did this right<br />
<br />
=== Hacking Improvements And Science from Neutral Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new hacking mechanism to allow extracting Science from neutral planets. It currently costs 5 AIP as well as a few hacking points. Performing this hack will cause the AI to launch a wave at you.<br />
** The AIP is part of the "AIP for taking a planet". So if you killed the command station there's actually no AIP cost (since you paid it when killing the command station). If another faction destroyed the command station then it will cost 5 AIP, but if you eventually capture the planet it will only cost 15 AIP when you capture instead of 20.<br />
** Note that this allows for you to collect Science much more quickly than normal by killing the command station and then doing this hack before capturing the planet, at the cost of some hacking points and the AI getting a bonus attack at you.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, DD the GerbilStrangler, Nameless Terror, themouthofsauron, x4000, Puffin and Apthorpe for useful discussion<br />
<br />
* If a Flagship becomes crippled mid-hack, the hack fails. Also Crippled Flagships are no longer allowed to start hacks.<br />
<br />
=== Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map's bloom settings have been updated a huge amount, giving the entire scene a bit of a computer-screen glowy vibe.<br />
** The blue hexes in the background have been adjusted and the scanline effect is now less noticeable, as part of this, though. It was just a bit too much visual distraction.<br />
<br />
* All of the roman numerals for mark levels have been switched to a more thematic sci-fi type font.<br />
<br />
* All of the graphics for planets on the galaxy map are now more consistent in size, and generally smaller, as is the selection radius around the one you're viewing right now.<br />
<br />
* The positioning of all the font stuff on the galaxy map has been changed around a lot, to be tighter around the planets but no longer ever overlapping with the overlarge planet icons (that no longer are overlarge).<br />
** In general this keeps things more compact and hopefully also more legible.<br />
<br />
* The little icons for "important ships at planets" are also now a bit smaller and more compactly-placed under the planet on the galaxy map.<br />
** They should still be plenty legible, but no longer oversized compared to some of the planet stuff they are essentially orbiting.<br />
<br />
* As you zoom out on the galaxy map, the planets (and their text and icons) no longer stay quite as large as they previously did, instead shrinking down more.<br />
** On most screens this should remain legible, while at the same time keeping them from overlapping.<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.001" to galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.0007" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalVisualConstants\CMP_VisualConstants.xml file.<br />
<br />
* The amount of time the icons and text now stay next to planets on the galaxy map have also been changed dramatically, so that they remain around until almost the last possible amount of zoom (and it's kinda useful having a super far zoom that gets rid of that clutter, at least at first thought).<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="1500" to galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="2000" and galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1300" to galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1700" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalConstants\KDL_VanillaConstants.xml file.<br />
** Particularly with how it's easier to see at a glance what the mark levels of planets are, and if you have current intel on them, this final-decluttered stage seems particularly useful. If you disagree, there are actually sliders in the options for changing it so that it declutters sooner or later.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Add a mechanic to allow anti-AI zombies to self-attrition over time. Currently set to 1% self-attrition per minute. This isn't very fast, and your engineers will repair them, but it's something?<br />
** Done after seeing some games where HeartHunter seems to have zombified the entire Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Reduced the power of Mark 5, and greatly reduced the power of Mark 6 and 7.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels should have more Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Beam Cannons and Plasma Turrets in "Monochrome Turret" designs.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Frigates in "Frigates With Support" designs.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Mass Driver damage.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem shots per salvo 80 -> 50.<br />
<br />
* Player Botnet Golem damage 750 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Changed the scaling of most Tech Upgrade costs to somewhat match what they used to be before Fleets.<br />
** Some are cheaper, some are more expensive, and some just have the Marks evened out.<br />
** This is something that will probably always be a bit off somewhere, but hopefully this is an improvement.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Turret range 10,100 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon and Heavy Beam Guardian range 15,000 -> 12,000, reload time 4s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Allow far more Anti-AI zombies to leave their current planet whenever that event occurs.<br />
<br />
* Mugger does a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Array range 2800 -> 4200.<br />
<br />
* Doubled count of Tractor Arrays in almost every player-available source.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator shields 250,000 -> 350,000.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Generator shields 150,000 -> 500,000.<br />
** Extreme, but these are apparently tiny roadbumps currently. They're rare, so this shouldn't be obnoxious.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator size increased.<br />
<br />
* Shield Guard Post shields 90,000 -> 150,000.<br />
<br />
* Focused Gravity Generators and Gravity Guardians now only slow things below engine_gx 14, rather than 15.<br />
** There were a few units that should've been resistant to this but weren't due to a minor error.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestations will now always have Minefields as well as Engineers, instead of just Engineers.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix some issues with the science hovertext, where it was still listing planets even after you'd taken all their science.<br />
<br />
* Handle the case where a player might have Overspent building a unit. This can happen if a player was building a unit after spending X metal, saves the game, then changes the metal cost of the unit to < X via XML and reloads the game.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Updated the Steamworks integration library that we use (and the Steamworks dll/so/dylib files from Valve) to their latest versions.<br />
** More details are here: https://github.com/Facepunch/Facepunch.Steamworks<br />
** On windows, we can confirm that now it actually shows you as being logged in properly, and also lets you see the proper main menu visuals rather than a blank space background.<br />
** To check on your OS that this is working, please look in the bottom right hand corner of your screen on the main menu and it should say "Logged in as [your username]." If it says "Not logged into Steam" or similar, then achievements won't be working properly for you later on. And in general it's something we'd want to know about.<br />
** Mostly this is a compatibility thing with the newest version of Unity, so far as we can tell, but we also have some new capabilities that we might flex at some point in the future.<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators for turrets and strikecraft should now work properly.<br />
** On any ship, there is now an is_strikecraft="true" flag, and an is_turret="true" flag that you can apply in order to have them be considered strikecraft or turrets for these (and later potentially other) purposes.<br />
** We didn't use the special_type field because it's possible that these things might be strikecraft or turrets and something else at the same time, and the case of being a strikecraft or being a turret isn't "special" enough to warrant the special_type field usage.<br />
** Note that it's also possible that some of these will be both is_strikecraft="true" and also have a special_type="Drone". In those cases, it won't give the ship cap bonus regardless of the is_strikecraft="true" being there. So drones don't have to un-set that, in other words.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Invert Mouse Zoom" setting in the All Cameras section.<br />
** Normally when you spin the mouse wheel forward, you zoom closer; backwards zooms you away. This lets you flip that functionality. OR, in the case that your hardware or OS is inverted for whatever reason, this lets you correct it to work like everyone else.<br />
** There is a bug in Unity 2019.1 on linux machines that causes mouse scrolling to be inverted, so this lets us work around that: https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/linux-input-dot-mousescrolldelta-returns-reversed-values-in-linux-player<br />
** Note that this won't help with inverted scrolling with dropdowns and other scrolling areas, unfortunately.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.854 Garbage... Collected! ==<br />
(Released April 26th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Known issue: in the bottom right corner of the main menu, it says you're not logged into Steam even though you are, and also if you are logged into Steam the backdrop for the main menu might be just stars instead of the usual colorful thing with ships flying by. We'll be upgrading our Steam integration dlls next build, which should fix that. Hopefully it causes no other issues.<br />
<br />
* Known issue: the intra-galactic coordinators for turrets and strikecraft do nothing right now. We wanted to get this build out asap, since it's beta anyway.<br />
<br />
=== Quality of Life and Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Player mobile defensive ships in planetary fleets now start in FRD mode<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Hovertext for incoming wave notifications now colours the target planet name for ease of reading<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Science in the resource bar now shows the planets science is being extracted from and the amount of science remaining for each.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Ship AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to targeting logic from WeaponMaster, where the code was accidentally prioritizing the worst possible targets.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Add some new Zombifying targeting code, where ships with zombifying guns will prefer to attack things they can zombify<br />
** Thanks to Jonesmz for the suggestion and WeaponMaster for the code<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* If the top unit of a cloaking Stacked Squad dies, the next ship to spawn inherits its cloak state. So if you've decloaked it, killing the top unit doesn't allow the next unit to recloak.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix some typos in the Experimental: Civil War conduct text<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix typo on Encapsulated map type description<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Intra-Galactic Coordinators were increasing the unit cap for Energy Collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some debugging code to catch a null reference exception in the Warden Fleet Long Range Planning code<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for making us aware of a problem in this area<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Flagships that are crippled can no longer pick up units for transport. Flagships that were transporting units and become crippled now unload all their units immediately. This fixes a few ways players could abuse the Crippled mechanic.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Split Intra-Galactic Coordinators abilities. Instead of buffing all ship caps, there are now three, one for each of Turrets, Frigates and Strike Craft. Note that each Coordinator now gives a bigger buff.<br />
** Note that this doesn't work for strikecraft and turrets yet in the current build, we just didn't have time.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleet Centerpieces should now all Rebuild Remains.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting confusion in this area.<br />
<br />
* "Light" and "Heavy" Tech Upgrades cost more at higher levels.<br />
<br />
* "Disruptive" Tech Upgrade costs slightly more at all levels.<br />
<br />
* Battlestation, Citadel and Ark Tech Upgrade costs reduced.<br />
<br />
* "Spire Core" Tech Upgrade cost reduced a bit.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate reload time 9s -> 12s, damage 25,000 -> 20,000.<br />
<br />
* Tamed Macrophage metal cost increased to 2 million, energy consumption increased to 25,000.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Scrubbed Abomination metal cost increased to 350k.<br />
<br />
* Muggers and Brawlers now cost their proper amount of metal - 300k - instead of 3 million...<br />
** Muggers sure lived up to their name.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting this! <br />
<br />
=== AI Threat Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Thanks to ptarth for a great save game that led to all these changes<br />
<br />
* The AI now has a per-AI Type tunable, RatioOfFearOfRemoteEnemies, which informs how seriously the AI takes into account your forces on planets near the planet it is attacking. This reduces the AI's tendency to be terrified of nearby large player/nanocaust forces.<br />
<br />
* The AI is now capable of having Threat that it uses only against minor factions. There was a longstanding bug preventing this from working correctly. This threat is "Dumber" then general purpose (aka "anti-player") threat.<br />
** Treat threat specifically against a player as "general purpose"<br />
<br />
* Improve the way the AI handles Threat adjacent to the player home planet.<br />
** If the Threat is Waiting against your home planet (since you have fortified it too heavily to attack) and there are much easier targets, it will prefer to take your other planets out first rather than just building up a giant fleetball.<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to units keeping track of the fact that they are Threat. Failing to do this was confusing the AI's Strength Counting, leading to the AI believing it was weaker than it should have been<br />
** When Threat gets an order to attack another planet, make sure to stay in Threat behaviour.<br />
** Fix a bug where Retreating AI ships would sometimes lose track of the fact that they should have Threat behaviour.<br />
** Copy Orders when splitting a stack (via the Split GameCommand or when the top unit in the stack dies) to preserve Threat behaviour.<br />
<br />
* Also improve debug hover tooltip for squad orders/Threat behaviour and improve some code commenting/readability<br />
<br />
=== Unity Engine Upgrade (To 2019.1 - Now With Incremental Garbage Collection!) ===<br />
<br />
* Upgraded the game to Unity 2019.1.0f2! The prior version was on 2018.2.0 or something along those lines, so this is a big jump.<br />
** The really big improvement is time-sliced garbage collection: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-incremental-garbage-collection/<br />
*** Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhfzzLyG7_w<br />
** This also has numerous bugfixes, and lets us upgrade from a VERY old version of TextMeshPro to the newest version, which in turn fixes a variety of bugs relating to text, blurry text, textboxes, etc.<br />
*** That said, as part of this, we knew this was going to happen, but it breaks ALL the references to any sort of text-based thing inside of any of our unity projects.<br />
*** But we kind of needed to go ahead and have this done before we started in on a bunch more UI updates or else it was just going to be creating even more work for ourselves in the future.<br />
** There are also a variety of stability improvements to the unity engine in general, and a few performance improvements. I think that Linux machines will see the biggest boost.<br />
*** There are some new capabilities that we can in theory use in the future, too, and nested prefabs are an amazing thing for sure. But we're not really needing those bits in this specific project right at the moment.<br />
** Oh and this does upgrade us to the latest version of the post processing stack v2, as well, which means probably better performance and some edge bugfixes for some folks in that area, too.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so we've been using the mcs.exe compiler for the last two years, and it turns out that doesn't support the newer versions of C#. It would have been nice if that had been more clear.<br />
** Instead, when we were updating our TextMeshPro component or a few other things -- or trying to, anyway -- we would instead get mysterious "System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: "Void System.Array.Reverse(!!0[])" compilation errors. Good luck googling that, almost nobody has that.<br />
** The solution is to STOP USING MCS.EXE, and instead use csc.exe. That's the new Roslyn compiler that Micrsoft created and unity is using for the newer C# 6.0+ features.<br />
*** The !fun! part about that is that all the syntax is different, and also it requires references to... a whole bunch of dlls that are the "reference dlls" instead of the "runtime ones."<br />
*** If you ever find yourself referencing a dll called System.Private.CoreLib.dll, or anything like that, STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING and try a different dll.<br />
**** Even though the compiler just told you that what you need is in that dll, it's actually lying.<br />
**** Actually what you need is in... good luck figuring that out!... but probably it's in the REFERENCE version of System.Core.dll or similar. It has nothing to do with "netcoreapp" or "netstandard," unlike the few non-unity-related references to this on the internet would have you believe. That's unrelated to unity, and is just a fun thing on some web servers and various other software.<br />
**** What the heck is a "reference dll" in terms of what the compiler needs? Well, it's a fuller version than is used at runtime, I suppose. I haven't explicitly seen that said anywhere, but that seems to be the general feeling I'm getting. Why they needed this split I'm not sure, but I'm guessing different compiler flags or perhaps the ability to have different per-platform versions. Something like that.<br />
**** Where do you find those reference dlls?? Ha! Good luck with that. Some of them seem to be in the Roslyn compiler folder... except not really, some of them have way too small of sizes. Others are almost certainly in your [UnityInstallLocation]\Editor\Data\Managed\UnityEngine folder, but there again it's not perfect.<br />
***** Generally you're going to find yourself searching around inside the unity install folder, and you might even find yourself (if you're on windows) searching around inside C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.6.1\ or whatever your equivalent is. Nicely packaged for you? NO.<br />
** So that explains one of the big mysteries that Keith and I have been scratching our heads on for a couple of years now.<br />
*** But even with that "solved," I couldn't get all of the aspects of LINQ working, and some of our third-party networking code uses LINQ, so I moved that into an external dll that will get loaded at runtime. That's more efficient anyway, but annoyingly indirect.<br />
*** All of the network code has been open-sourced by the original authors anyhow, so that actually will work out extra well for us when we get to that point. But in the short term it's another pain in the rear we didn't need.<br />
<br />
* One bonus of all this upgrading of unity-stuff is that the editor is no longer complaining about our external dlls being something that will crash the editor and so something they refuse to load. That's... always a plus. And is related to the whole compiler saga.<br />
<br />
* Okay, nested prefabs from the latest versions of unity are actually indeed insanely useful and we're starting to use those more than we otherwise might have.<br />
<br />
==== Complete Overhaul Of All Fonts ====<br />
<br />
* ALL of the fonts in the game have been reworked (in terms of how they are imported into TextMeshPro and thus how they look in general).<br />
** And a bunch of new fonts have been added to the game as options for us to use in various contexts.<br />
** And we've completely redone what fonts we are using in almost all contexts as it is.<br />
** There was a lot of complaining about the fonts not feeling properly militaristic, or otherwise being non-thematic, and hopefully this helps.<br />
<br />
* The background story is again its own window and scrolls rather than is paginated, but this time is a lot more condensed, uses an improved version of the more-recent rewritten version, and uses strategic coloration to make it easier to read quickly.<br />
<br />
* The little notification icon/panels at the top of the screen now show up with a new font (as with most other parts of the game), but this is a particularly good font for condensed/confined places. It should let you read more things without them trailing off too ellipses, while it also not looking tacky in terms of how it's crammed in.<br />
** Also, the TextMeshPro upgrade itself seems to do a better job of choosing when to go to ellipsis instead of just drawing the raw text of whatever it is. So some of the planet names that were drawing ellipses very much too soon now won't.<br />
<br />
* As an aside, it's quite possible that the following issues are present somewhere in the game now, and we'd love to know about it:<br />
** Some sort of text not wrapping properly or being outright invisible, or cut off.<br />
** Some sort of text section making it impossible to click something near it, or picking up clicks from way further away than it should have.<br />
** Some sort of text section having the wrong font, or being misaligned in a subtle or not-subtle way.<br />
** We tried to correct all these that we could find, but bear in mind that this was a couple of dozen interfaces that we had to edit BY HAND for this version, so we probably missed something.<br />
** Honestly this was another reason we did this now, during the beta period, versus during a non-beta time. Thanks for being our guinea pigs to all the testers helping on this!<br />
<br />
* Given that we're changing so many of the fonts, and may choose to do so even more as feedback rolls in, we've now codified the in-code font-sizing a bit in a new FontSizes class.<br />
** Essentially size 12pt in font A might be waaaay larger or smaller than 12pt in font B. So we needed a way to normalize the offsets from the defaults of whatever we decide makes sense with a given font.<br />
<br />
==== Various Changes to our Post Processing Stack ====<br />
<br />
* Oh, I'm sorry, did we say we were going to be using the new unity Post Processing Stack V2? Blah, that really doesn't play nice with what we wanted to do.<br />
** Instead we're now using Beautify again, stripped down into performance mode but using it for vingnetting and tonemapping. We continue to use amplify bloom for the bloom effects, because messing with that again would be... insanely time consuming.<br />
** Overall this does mean there's a subtle shift to the look of the game yet again -- and, wait, no we're not using that now, either. Sigh. We'll figure out the tonemapping at some point, but frankly our general lighting is doing the heavy lifting on its own.<br />
<br />
==== Splitting Some Network Code Off Into Its Own Area ====<br />
<br />
* A bunch of the networking code has been offloaded into its own dll now, which we're able to more easily update as needed.<br />
** This actually makes our iteration time on that sort of code faster in the future.<br />
** In the process of getting this working, we managed to waste about two hours trying to figure out why the entire game was broken (and it was a one-liner typo). Fun!<br />
<br />
== Version 0.853 An Officer And A Bunch Of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 22nd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Only the offensive (strike and officer) type of fleets are now auto-assigned numbered hotkeys.<br />
** If people want to manually assign hotkeys differently in the future, they can (when that interface is in place), but this really is the most likely use case most of the time.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Command stations can once again die to remains.<br />
** This means that if you have a battlestation or a citadel on the planet, then they can rebuild the command station for you automatically just like remains rebuilders would have done once upon a time. Yay automation!<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes, Badger, and Nameless Terror for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Ability To Scout With Nanites Properly Works (And Related Visual Effects) ===<br />
<br />
* Unlike all the other versions since 0.850, you can now click over to planets that you have never explored.<br />
** This lets you actually use the Explore With Nanites hack, which is kiiiinda important, honestly. Or at least it's important to a lot of people, depending on playstyle.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and others for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The visual effect for viewing a planet where you have stale intel (but have seen it before) was before a bit confusing and a bit much.<br />
** Much as Chris liked the matrix-y effect, that has been ditched and things are a lot more Factorio-like in terms of just being darkened and grainy.<br />
** The effect is subtle enough not to be irritating, but to be definitely noticeable. Given the sidebar notes Stale Intel, and things don't look super duper crazy in terms of the visual distortions, hopefully we don't need any bigger onscreen messages to explain what is happening to players.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, Nameless Terror, and RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* There is a NEW visual effect for viewing a planet where you have never even explored before.<br />
** Through the distortion here you can barely even read the wormhole names, and all you can see are the planet graphics and wormhole graphics (not even metal spots, etc).<br />
** This one is heavily stylized, but is so TV-like and the sidebar is utterly empty and saying "you have never explored here" and similar that hopefully it's really clear what is going on.<br />
** This is needed simply because we're allowing players to click into planets that are unexplored so that they can do the nanites hack against them to explore them.<br />
<br />
=== New Background Story ===<br />
<br />
* A new and brief, paginated story has replaced the longwinded scrolling-based "background story" section of the main menu.<br />
** The old story was complicated and no longer really accurate to the game. This does mean all those character portraits that Chris created are now completely gone from the game, but such is life. The initial pre-game story is super simple and that's kind of how it always has been. We want the rest of the story, what there is, to be based on what happens during your gameplay.<br />
** The new story reads:<br />
*** After an 800-year civil war between humans fighting amongst the stars, they finally birthed a force that would end all human wars forever: Artificial Intelligence.<br />
*** Quickly eclipsing the humans in power and taking control of most of their automated forces, the AI nearly wiped the human race from the face of the galaxy. Only scattered pockets remain, hiding amidst the scattered wreckage from the civil war and the AI-led extermination that followed.<br />
*** You are in command of the last substantial remaining human military force. It is so small that the AI is either unaware of it, or just doesn't care.<br />
*** Potentially coincidentally, something outside the galaxy seems to have distracted the AI far more than humans ever did.<br />
*** You must grow your forces, capturing and reactivating fleets from the old wars... but you must be careful not to grow so strong that the eye of the AI turns back toward you.<br />
*** Gain just enough power, capture just enough fleets, take back just enough planets, that you can destroy the massive structures known as 'AI Overlords' and end this new war before the AI is even fully aware it has begun.<br />
*** If you are too greedy, if you make yourself too threatening, if you let the AI realize you might be a true threat... expect us all to lose everything.<br />
*** You must use discretion, avoid distraction and temptation, and wield your forces like a scalpel. Take risks, be bold, but don't try to be a conquerer.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Removed the "build remains rebuilders" intel tab entry, since that is outdated.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The strength of waves that are incoming should now be correctly stated, whereas before it was not since we switched the AI costs and strengths to be two different things.<br />
** Some internal variables have also been renamed to be more clear.<br />
** This has not been tested, so it might still be wrong.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new capturable_can_seed_at_all="false" flag, which is now applied to the Cloaked Ark One and the Agile Cursed Golem.<br />
** These two entities should no longer seed at all in the galaxy, since they were only ever supposed to be granted via the starting fleet choices anyhow. This won't fix existing savegames, but if you see them in new savegames as something you can capture, please do let us know.<br />
** Thanks to vinco and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases should now seed at more appropriate distances from you.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding and fixing, and reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where you could not select the starting fleet without it always just defaulting back to classic.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for the fix, and HeartHunter7 and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes so that if you have invalid/mismatched options (custom or otherwise) in the lobby, it will now complain about them properly and let you know that things are failing.<br />
** With this we found that the team colors for Instigators and the AntagonizedDysonSphere were not working properly, for instance.<br />
<br />
* Attack warnings in the top bar should now properly show stacked ship counts when you hover over them.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Some complicated code fixes from WeaponMaster have been put in place to hopefully solve the "multi-shot doesn't function when there's an enemy fortress or other super important item present" issue. Please let us know if this doesn't fix it, or any other strange cases wind up happening, but things seem okay from some limited testing so far.<br />
** Big thanks to WeaponMaster for the fix, and to KMan_Gladiator for the initial report!<br />
<br />
* Fixed some internal bugs with "last second we saw a planet" that was causing some oddities in the local tab's reporting of what you could see of enemy strength, etc.<br />
<br />
* The local tab summaries now include strength and ships that are inside other ships, aka drones and reinforcements not yet deployed, etc. It's way more accurate now.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips in the local tab were showing the strength values as being 1000x what we show them elsewhere in the UI. Oops, fixed.<br />
** This bug is old as the game itself, more or less. Wow.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting this right as we also discovered it!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where in the post-0.850 builds you could get too much intel about various other planets if you clicked to them in the first 2 seconds of gameplay. This wasn't as big a deal until we changed it so you can click to unexplored planets.<br />
<br />
* The little "battle at a planet" notification cards at the top of the screen now properly show all the ships that are inside other ships, making it so that their ship counts now match that of the sidebar (which is itself only newly correct in this version).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the incoming wave notifications had strength values that were laughably tiny and wrong. It was only tallying the strength of the first ship of each type, which meant that if there were 1000 ships in a wave, it was 1/1000th the value it should have been.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Strike Fleets vs Officer Fleets ===<br />
<br />
* There was previously a general "mobile combat" (MobileCombatFleetFlagship) category for fleets. This has now been split in two:<br />
** MobileOfficerCombatFleetFlagship - this is the style that we had before, where the centerpieces are either an Ark or a Golem. These are big centerpiece fleets that have small and medium craft but also something big and scary at the center.<br />
** MobileStrikeCombatFleetFlagship - this is new, and is just basically a transport with a "super meh" fusion bomb weapon at the center. Basically this is meant to be the big groups of your ships that are moving around doing the most of the fighting, and the transports are there for... transport! And for ships to pop out of during construction.<br />
<br />
* There are now EVEN MORE fleets seeded around the galaxy for you to find, although many more of them are the "strike" kind of combat fleets instead of the "officer" sort.<br />
** This gets back to the main playstyle for most people from earlier version of this game and from the base game; having big centerpiece units is great, but let's not overdo it. And for those who don't prefer that kind of gameplay, they can entirely skip it.<br />
<br />
* The number of certain types of Arks and Golems that can be seeded has been drastically reduced from what they were before (those that are part of fleets, not lone ones).<br />
** You should still see almost as many of these types of fleets as before, but a greater diversity of them. And in general way fewer armored golems, for instance.<br />
** On really large maps, you will find that you're maybe not getting quite as many of these as you once were, though.<br />
** The ultimate goal is for these to feel more rare and powerful over time, and a lot of them are seeded a bit further away, now.<br />
<br />
* The "Drone" specialtype has been split into DroneGeneral and DroneFrigate.<br />
** This lets us better use the multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_drones and multiplied_nonfrigate_ship_cap_for_drones xml entries when relevant.<br />
** Most stuff is just DroneGeneral, though, as it is.<br />
<br />
* We now have two new entries, multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_mobile and multiplied_strikecraft_ship_cap_for_mobile.<br />
** These let us make fleets larger or smaller based on what the centerpiece is, separate from the fleet design itself. This is intended specifically for the officer and strike fleet types, to let us have them share the types of fleets but to let the non-officer fleets be larger in general.<br />
** Note that officer fleets and non-officer fleets are NOT intended to be balanced with one another (officer fleets are more powerful, naturally), but the officer fleets are more rare and more powerful as well as more expensive in general.<br />
<br />
* There are several variants of tranport flagships, which all look the same and have the same name, but which seed at different frequencies and have much larger frigate, strikecraft, or some mix of the two caps.<br />
** The idea is that if you want really huge fleets of smaller ships, then these are where they come from.<br />
** The balance of all this new stuff is very untested, but the seeding of them seems to work at the very least.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring these various changes.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Overloader Combat Factory speed boost increased from 20% to 40%.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels that roll the OtherDefenseFocus design (i.e Tractors, Tachyon, etc) now have Turrets as intended.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation shields increased from 350k to 500k.<br />
<br />
* Shifted Strength values around (mainly Guardians are lower).<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleets should now always have at least two unit types.<br />
** Finding a Fleet with just one unit type was rather bad, and kind of doomed that Fleet to being relatively useless.<br />
** This was especially bad if it happened to the one adjacent to your Homeworld.<br />
<br />
* Most units for the AI now cost twice as much for it to purchase.<br />
** Guardians and Turrets cost 50% more, Frigates cost 33% more.<br />
** At the same time, the starting AI defenses are increased to make them roughly the same, as that seemed mostly okay, it was mainly the sheer wave sizes people were getting.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Armored Golem hull into shields.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the inspiration.<br />
<br />
* Economic and Military Command Stations store 300k metal instead of 100k, Home Command stores 2.5 million instead of 2 million.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for mentioning a problem here.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate durability upgraded a fair bit, the "Railcannon" variant has a 50% damage increase on the Railcannons, and the "Laser" variant loses the damage bonus in place of simply firing a lot more shots.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes and ptarth for bringing the issues up.<br />
<br />
* Citadels have some weapon boosts.<br />
<br />
==== Speedier Flagships! ====<br />
<br />
* Player Golem Arks speed doubled.<br />
<br />
* Ark speed increased to 1400.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Player Arks and Spire Frigates move 50% faster after entering a planet for 5 seconds.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Decloaking Capabilities For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories now spawn with Combat Sentry Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Engineers For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new category of ship_cap_group for fleet memberships, this one called Civilian.<br />
** Turns out that we just completely forgot to add in the ability to generate more engineers via battlestations and citadels, that that was most definitely supposed to be a thing.<br />
** This won't affect existing savegames, but you should be finding caches of engineers that you can construct along with your battlestations all over the place now in new games.<br />
** The idea isn't to increase the ship cap for engineers on a given planet by adjusting the planet itself (unless you want to change command station type), but rather by which types of stations you put there, and what engineering caps they have. That was always the plan with fleets, but was just a complete oversight.<br />
** The reason for the new Civilian category is so that we can have caps of engineers (and later maybe a mix of something else) that is separate from the OtherDefenses, turrets, and whatever else. Basically to let them not compete with other types of defenses while still being added new.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== No More Mysterious Metal Increases As Marks Go Up ====<br />
<br />
* There is no longer any added metal cost to having higher-mark units.<br />
** Some may lament this, but this was the only downside to increasing the mark of units, which is otherwise an all-positive thing to do. It was such a sharp negative that you could actually tank your economy without warning.<br />
** The first game made good use of this because you could choose to build cheaper low-mark units at any time, and then more expensive high-mark units later, and the higher metal and energy costs, as well as lower ship cap, were all deterrents to the higher marks being overly relied-upon. That was an interesting system, but we moved away from that well over a year ago, if not more, when we combined all the ships of yours into being the highest mark of whatever their line is.<br />
** This new system is one that does stress your metal reserves less, probably, but you're gaining so many more ships over time (by capturing more fleets) that you're still going to need more metal later in the game than what you start with. It's just due to increased ship counts in this game, not due to your units suddenly and unexpectedly costing more.<br />
** Thanks to Karhax for reporting the root issue here.<br />
<br />
==== No More AIP Increases From "Too Many Fleets" In A System ====<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the "too many fleets at a planet" logic entirely, at least the current version.<br />
** It simply felt punitive and un-fun, and there was no version of that style which was likely to be fun. Nonetheless, we still just commented it out for now so someone can build something on that if desired in the future. We are also going to be working on some things to prevent players going absolutely nuts with how they stack things, but they won't be so opaque or so likely to unexpectedly bite you.<br />
** Thanks to basically everyone playing the betas for complaining about this. Honestly that didn't hugely surprise any of us, but the discussion it sparked was interesting. In particular thanks to Nameless Terror, Ecthelon, themouthofsauron, Karhax, and probably some folks we missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.852 Directness Is Better==<br />
(Released April 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Rather than being markless, Sentry Frigates are now mark 1 but only get upgraded by the fleet itself upgrading (which isn't a working mechanic yet, it's coming!)<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for noticing this.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Tooltips setting option: "Show Weapon Activity Details"<br />
** If enabled, then each weapon in your tooltips shows you a bunch of info about how long until it reloads, why it didn't fire most recently, and other such info.<br />
** Previously this info was just always shown, but now it's off by default.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips -- for player ships or anything on the build sidebar -- now tell you if the ship is unable to be upgraded, or what techs upgrade it if any do, or if they are of the sort that only upgrade when their fleet itself upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reminding us just how important this is, although we were already going to do it.<br />
<br />
* One crippled mobile fleet flagship among several functional ones could previously erroneously prevent you from building command stations. Fixed.<br />
** Additionally, now battlestations/citadels are able to build command stations, not just mobile fleet flagships.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== AI Reconquest Command Stations ===<br />
<br />
* There once was a specialtype of "NormalAICommandStation." This has been removed, and split into:<br />
** AICommandStationOriginal, which is used in the majority of cases.<br />
** AICommandStationReconquest, which is used for cases where the AI reconquered a planet.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "AI Reconquest Command Station," which is now what the AI will seed after taking back a planet during a reconquest wave.<br />
** This acts just like the original command stations of the AI, with the following exceptions:<br />
*** It has twice as much health and shielding.<br />
*** It doesn't have any confusing messages about AIP going up if you destroy it (that already wasn't the case, but the interface made it sound like it did).<br />
*** It can't be hacked for science extraction. Go build your own command station there if you want that science, sonny.<br />
*** It doesn't grant any scouting intel when destroyed, so you can't use any exploity type of behavior to let the AI take a planet back and then destroy the reconquest station in order to get more scouting intel AIP-free.<br />
** Note that in existing savegames, any existing command stations the AI put there because of reconquest will still be of the original sort. So you won't see this until the AI does a reconquest wave in this version or newer.<br />
** Fun fact, the humans-don't-autotarget-this rules are still the same here, for now at least, but this can be changed in xml if we really want to. We left this not because of an AIP cost (which is why the original has it), but because there might be a very valid reason you want to let the AI keep the planet (aka them wasting reinforcements on a planet that has been neutered). So having your ships go into auto-kill mode would probably break some valid advanced strategies.<br />
** Thanks to BadgerBadger, TechSY730, and Exlium for suggesting and reporting various issues that led to this.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Rallying Out, Direct Orders Inheritance And Position In ===<br />
<br />
* All concept of ships rallying to... anything... is now gone. It was annoying and full of edge cases that would cause players to have their fleets not behave how they wanted them to as refleeting was in progress.<br />
** Now all ships that are created for a fleet by a factory now pop straight out of the fleet centerpiece, with all the orders from the fleet centerpiece (including stance).<br />
** This gets around some of the most annoying logistical issues, and because the centerpieces of the fleets are so large it makes enough logical sense to not cause huge amounts of cognitive dissonance. Putting gameplay first, this is the only thing that really solves our age-old (literally like a decade old) problem.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 and others for reporting, although here again we were already leaning in this direction because of our own frustration.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.851 Drones And Economies==<br />
(Released April 19th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Player Command Station Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the economic command station description:<br />
** Economic variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variant gives greatly improved metal and energy output, but lacks the ability to directly defend itself very well. It doesn't even have any means of decloaking enemies directly. Planets with these should either be protected by a powerful citadel or battlestation, or so far back from the front lines that they are safe.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The matter converters and energy collectors were higher on the logistical command stations, and now that has been swapped with the economic command stations.<br />
<br />
* Logistical command stations now come with 20 mines built in, and also two focused gravity generators. More stuff to help them be more tricky and dangerous directly.<br />
** They also now get 2 forcefields while the military variants only get 1 instead, swapping those two.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the logistical command station description:<br />
* Logistical variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at finding cloaked enemies, tractoring enemies, and even laying traps (mines!) for enemies. Beyond that it's kind of a halfway point between the military and economic drives of its peers. They also get two forcefields where their peers only get one, and way more engineers.<br />
<br />
* Military command stations now get 5 beam cannons and 15 ambush turrets, making them by far the most able to defend themselves without the help of a battlestation or citadel.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the military command station description:<br />
** Military variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at defending itself, and perfect for dangerous border planets. It also gets the most factories, making it probably the best way to resupply your fleets near the front lines.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The lost spire frigate faction has now been properly removed from the game.<br />
** We had already folded the functionality from that into the main game itself, so the faction was pointless and just broke things if you enabled it. If you enabled it in your savegames, then those savegames are probably now broken.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding issue where if we removed game settings from the game, then old settings files that were loaded in would complain about UnrequestedXMLAttributes.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that are owned by no faction (aka not claimed yet) should no longer have their cloaking devices function until they are claimed. Tested and works as expected.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The seeding logic for NormalPlanetNastyPicks, SpireArchives, and CivilWarTriggers was... nonsensical? The code did some kind of strange things.<br />
** It should now work properly and not do things like putting spire archives on AI homeworlds.<br />
** It also now logs what it is doing to the mapgen logger if you have that turned on and want to see what it is doing.<br />
** We've not tested this at all.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with beam cannons where they were being upgraded by the Melee tech instead of Splash.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where it would register a double-click if you were clicking too rapidly between different parts of the screen. Mice are fast! Now if you've moved the mouse more than 10px, it doesn't consider it a double-click. Probably. We need to test that.<br />
** Fully fixed (and verified the fix) to the double-clicking stuff.<br />
** Thanks to Bobtree, Talkar, Kaleopan, and Exlium for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "MISSING LOCALIZATION: AIPChangeReason_FleetConcentration" bug.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* It is now possible to explicitly set up in the xml that units cannot be stacked. Use the tag cannot_be_stacked="true".<br />
** This also now automatically happens on all AI guardians (dire and regular), drones (that got exploity), lone golems, and NPC centerpieces.<br />
** All of the marauder raiders and similar can no longer be stacked because of the tag, to prevent issues with them.<br />
** Astro Trains also can no longer be stacked, since that's just odd.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where drones were never being set up properly on drone controllers at all (hive golem, etc).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories would help with drone production.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that was preventing drones from ever being deployed even if they were internally created. Fun with boolean inversions!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a whole nest of bugs where drones that were a part of non-drone-specific fleet types could never be spawned by their spawner.<br />
** Aka this was breaking things like hive golems, but drone producer guard posts would have been fine (though that bit is untested).<br />
<br />
* Fixed some issues with the drone caps getting higher when the mark level of the drone controllers was higher. It should be the same ship cap for those drones regardless of cap, unlike with regular non-drone ships.<br />
<br />
* The data and tooltip info for AIs unlocking new ship types has been removed, as that mechanic actually isn't a thing anymore.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Irritation Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* AI guard posts that are no longer on AI-controlled planets now lose their cloaking. This also just seemed like a needed thing to avoid an annoying bit of cleanup you otherwise have to do. Typically they would be sitting around doing nothing, since all their defenders fled. Tested and works as expected.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking fleet leaders (centerpieces, flagships, command stations, whatever) now selects or deselects all the stuff in their fleet, rather than all the things of their same type.<br />
** For individual ship types, like fighters or whatever, it works like it always has.<br />
*** HOWEVER, when it comes to individual ship types, it no longer considers spinoff units (Daggers, etc) something to select along with the main unit type that you might have clicked. Sharing a common ancestor is no longer good enough for the selection stuff to work that way, particularly given the ludicrous number of variants we now have.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 for suggesting the change to double-clicking on centerpieces.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips now specify how many undeployed drones there are inside an entity.<br />
** Additionally, you can see the construction percentage on each drone that is getting created inside.<br />
<br />
* In preparation for some upcoming changes, the Ships tab has been renamed to the Local tab, and says "At Local Planet" instead of Ships up at the top.<br />
<br />
* On the fleets tab, it now has a new piece where it will show the hotkey assigned to that fleet, if there is one assigned.<br />
<br />
* You still can't manually assign hotkeys to fleets, but hotkeys are now automatically assigned to fleets as you acquire them early on in.<br />
** This is something we want to have happen so that the use of these hotkeys is encouraged by the large numbers of people (including some of us on staff) who never bothered to use them in the past.<br />
** But obviously prior to 0.900 we want it to be something you can control directly, too.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Dire Guard Posts no longer increase AIP on death.<br />
** Was intended to mimic the AIP Floor increase from Classic, but didn't play well with the random Post count and multiple AIs.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlords Tachyon system is a bit shorter range and decloaks at half the speed.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where this was a major roadblock - more than intended.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida and Shredder Guard Posts fire every 3 seconds instead of 1.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where a Tethuida was actually far scarier with the gun than intended - it's meant to use the drones, mainly.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation and Rorqual Hegira Ark have much larger forcefield radius now.<br />
** Things are bigger in general, so you weren't able to fit as much as you used to under these.<br />
<br />
* All Citadels except Interceptors now have a weapon range of 10,100.<br />
<br />
* AI requires higher AIP before increasing its tech level.<br />
** Used to be, starting from Mark 2: 150, 300, 450, 600, 800, 1200.<br />
** Now is, starting from Mark 2: 225, 450, 675, 900, 1125, 1350.<br />
*** The AI no longer pays more for higher Mark units, and so it was having very large power spikes relatively early on.<br />
*** Although, Mark 7 is actually triggered not much slower than what it used to, so really annoying the AI is still going to hurt a lot.<br />
<br />
* All Battlestations shield points increased to 350,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.850 The Arrival of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
''We are breaking '''all''' the savegames again, sorry about that. This series of updates leading up to 0.900 should collectively be the last time '''for real''' for real, although we've said that before. It's not our practice to do this sort of thing at all, typically, but this game has been going through a lot more pre-release evolution than most of our titles have. The old savegames won't even make sense in the new version, really.''<br />
<br />
* This got super long and we wanted to show what we were working on as we went, so we wound up also having this: [[AI War 2: 0.850 Raw Chris Changelog]]<br />
<br />
* And in general if you're not clear why we're doing all this, then here's a really long document that explains it: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/16dJvDOWckK4vfnW2Mwut7wv2OF_bCn17XuspBlPBymQ/edit#heading=h.wkf7np25ov5 AI War 2 - Unit Construction / Fleets Rework].<br />
** Although we went much further than the document laid out, moving into territory like making the AI planets more unique from one another, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Misc ===<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres will remain antagonized much longer after hacks.<br />
** More hacks against a Dyson Sphere will increase the antagonization time.<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI to spawn Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy. Only Dyson factions with high enough intensity can spawn antagonizers.<br />
** Antagonizers affect all Dyson Factions, so if you've enabled 3 dyson factions, the AI will spawn antagonizers for each dyson faction, and you have to kill all the antagonizers before they will become friendly again.<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers follow similar spawning rules to Instigator Bases; they need to spawn close to the player at lower AIPs, and at high AIP can spawn anywhere.<br />
** To compensate for this, the Dyson's income has been slightly buffed.<br />
<br />
* Gives some units unused voice lines, and the Dyson ships the Zenith voice.<br />
** Engineers and other similar civilian ships now actually talk!<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map now has more of a "military screen" style look to it again, although this doesn't yet apply to the actual icons and lines and so on. But it has that same sort of scanline effect and whatnot as in the first game, though more involved now and fancier with some hexagons, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts and Tutorials Gone for Now ===<br />
<br />
* The old quickstarts have all been moved to QuickStartsOld, since they no longer function with the new system in general.<br />
** Because of the way Steam updates work, the QuickStarts from now on will be loaded from QuickStarts2 instead, which is presently empty and needs to be for the next little while. But at least it won't be throwing errors when players try to start quickstarts in the new build.<br />
<br />
* The pre-existing tutorial has been completely disabled, since it is probably nonfunctional in general and tries to teach you a lot of things that are no longer relevant. We're going to be majorly redoing that in the future, but for now we don't want people accidentally going in there.<br />
<br />
=== Fleets Added ===<br />
<br />
* Fleets are a new concept in the game, which are basically collections of ships in one of a few different categories. The AIs and NPCs don't really use these, per se, although there's nothing stopping them from doing so. But on the player side, this basically is now the central grouping of units for your stuff, and you use these offensively and defensively. You can get waaay larger ship caps than before, but each group is... well, automated as well as being a distinct flavor unto itself.<br />
<br />
* The concepts of destruction points and Ark Upgrade Points are both gone, and replaced by Fleet EXP instead. This works similarly to both of those other things, in that if your fleet centerpiece is on a planet with an enemy ship that dies to your forces, then that fleet gains some EXP. More for big-ticket items.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of logic for how fleets are selected and moved around, which was previously related to control groups, is now in place.<br />
** The logic for how to assign fleets to keybind indices (fleet groups, essentially) for now is going to be clicking-the-interface-only, since that's really confusing in keybinds. We may wind up reintroducing keybinds for this at some point in the future, but more likely would be a better interface for organizing fleets into the keybinds directly, since this would avoid the confusion factor for players.<br />
** The big sticky spot for confusion is people thinking they're making a control group of ships, when really it is of fleets, in essence. Even this explanation is confusing. ;)<br />
<br />
* The various things that you can purchase from the Zenith Trader are all now planet-bound, even if they are normally mobile. They go into the fleet of that planet, and are on permanent station-keeping there.<br />
** In theory we could later have something that can let you purchase new ships for mobile fleets from the Zenith Trader or otherwise, but that would need a new UI and new general mechanics. That would be fun, but in terms of replicating the experience of the Zenith Trader thus far, here's how it needs to work for this part.<br />
<br />
* The various kinds of command stations now each come with their own hand-designed fleet styles, which are of the type that just use the max cap of each type they can have inside of their categories. That way they are always predictable per type, but you get more forcefields with a military command compared to economic, etc.<br />
** Things like minefields and the gravity generators don't go with any of these, but rather have to be gotten via Battlestations.<br />
** When it comes to factories, some of the command station types grant more factories per planet than others.<br />
<br />
* The Battlestations in general are set up, although most of them just seed randomized template-based fleets. The Ensnarer one has an example instead of a specific type of fleet that it uses in place of a template.<br />
** Bear in mind that there are several different ways to set up how a fleet leader (Battlestation or mobile) might have its fleet design created, and if none of them are set up then you'll have a lonely empty fleet. Right now the game doesn't warn the designers about that.<br />
** In general there is a looooot more that could be done here in terms of making new and unique things, but right now the procedural fleets themselves are enough that probably that's not a big priority.<br />
<br />
* The general strikecraft and frigates are all now set up so that they'll populate some interesting different procedural fleet designs in (currently) 9 different overall flavors. But even within those 9 flavors, there's a huge amount of variety likely to be found.<br />
<br />
* The game now actually seeds the Battlestations and fleet flagships, and makes sure that they have their fleet designs populated right from mapgen start.<br />
** First it tries to seed 1 item with tag "MobileCombatFleetArkOrGolem" on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed 1 more two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least eight more, but up to 1 per 25 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** It's possible that it won't have enough types or will run into blockages, and that's A-OK to happen.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 Battlestation (based on the SpecialEntityType directly) on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least five more, but up to 1 per 50 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** In both cases, if it couldn't seed a thing closer in, then it will retry with it further out. This is mostly only relevant for snake maps and other things with very few direct and secondary connections from planets.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 item with tag "MobileSupportFleetFlagship" on a planet two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least two more, but up to 1 per 150 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** The reason it uses the SpecialEntityType directly for Battlestations is because that's the most direct thing. For the other two categories, those both have a MobileFleetFlagship type, and so those tags help specify a bit more if they are regular (and thus more common), or are "support" (and thus less common and further out).<br />
<br />
* The Battlestation special entity type has been split into two: BattlestationBasic and BattlestationCitadel.<br />
<br />
* The MobileFleetFlagships special entity type has been split into three: MobileCombatFleetFlagship, MobileSupportFleetFlagship, and MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship.<br />
** The third in this category is for the things that don't have a fleet with them, namely right now the spire frigates.<br />
<br />
* The seeding for battlestations and mobile fleet flagships has been updated, as you might guess.<br />
** The existing logic for mobile fleet flagships now applies to MobileCombatFleetFlagships, and MobileSupportFleetFlagships still also work the same.<br />
** The existing logic for battlestations now applies to BattlestationBasic.<br />
** MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship is now seeded "kinda wherever" and is both rarer but also no longer counts against the normal combat fleet flagships.<br />
** BattlestationCitadel is following the general pattern of the basic battlestations, but with the following differences:<br />
*** It only ever seeds one on a planet, not two at a time.<br />
*** It seeds one within 2 hops of a player starting planet if possible.<br />
*** It then seeds a smaller number of citadels out in the galaxy, mixed between the middle-distance and far out. These are in addition to the basic battlestations, not in place of them.<br />
** With all this, there's a better sense of control of what exactly the player can look forward to out there, but also in general there are yet more capturables out there, and they can continue to be balanced in their niches: we can add more lone wolf stuff without swamping the main mobile flagships, and we can add more citadels or regular battlestations without affecting their relative mixes.<br />
<br />
* The various MobileSupportFleet flagships now are able to get upgraded from Mark1 to higher marks based on their fleets being upgraded. They have no techs that benefit them directly.<br />
** This fixes an issue with them referencing an Engineer tech that was nonexistent.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each faction as their "loose" fleet.<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just used for all their ships, more or less, and doesn't really get used for much. Drones don't go in there, but that's it. Actual useful fleets can be created as-desired in the future, but for anything not using something specific, it uses this.<br />
** For the players, there is a PlayerLoose fleet, which is basically "remainder units" that are not in a fleet. Odds are that this won't be used, but it's an overflow valve in case we have a truly odd case or potentially even a bug that we want to fail more gracefully.<br />
*** Oh! Actually, we are using this now for ships that are being captured via zombification. So there you go, a use for it already.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each PlanetFaction as their "fleet of that planet."<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just a reference to their parent loose fleet from the faction itself.<br />
** For the players, these are unique fleets that are what the command stations go into and put their stuff into.<br />
*** It's entirely possible for a command station of a player to die, but in those cases the fleet must live on.<br />
<br />
* When the game creates a new ship/structure, it now REQUIRES that the appropriate Fleet.Membership be passed into it.<br />
** This solves all sorts of bugs where fleet membership was never being set previously.<br />
** In the case of fleet leaders or ships that create drones, it ignores this membership, however, and creates and populates its own fleet.<br />
<br />
* Added a whole bunch of ways to calculate the strength and health percentages of fleets based on their type, which is more complicated than you might think.<br />
** For command station fleets, or the battlestation ones, it's based around the total power out of what you've DECIDED to build (and what has died to remains or is hurt or whatever).<br />
** For drones and mobile fleets, it's out of the total things that would be auto-built, since you get no decision-making in whether to fully stock those fleets or not (aside from keeping them away from docks).<br />
** This is surprisingly complex when it comes to things like the ships being transported in fleets, or undeployed drones, etc, etc.<br />
<br />
* A new destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command xml tag has been added.<br />
** This is used only in a really narrow set of circumstances: it was a planet that a human player controlled with one kind of command station, and they now have a different kind of command station there.<br />
** Basically, different types of command stations give you different numbers of engineers, basic turrets, energy collectors, etc. This prevents you from having too many left over after you switch from a military to an economic command station, for instance; there were all sorts of games you could play with that to exploit things.<br />
** What this does NOT do is destroy units after your command station has died on a planet; in those circumstances, whatever is there continues to live on until you build a new command station. Presuming you rebuild as the same type, nothing gets destroyed.<br />
** This flag is also explicitly NOT on certain units like the human home forcefields and the various things you get from the Zenith Trader. They will frequently be over-cap (since their command station type doesn't always include it but you might have bought it separately), and so these are always assumed to be valid.<br />
** Confusing? Basically this just shuts down an exploit and doesn't affect much else.<br />
<br />
==== Docks Sidebar Tab Gone, Fleets Tab Added ====<br />
<br />
* The docks tab is gone, and a new fleets tab has taken its place.<br />
** The fleets tab has a bunch of sections which show first your fleets at the current planet, and then all of your fleets in the entire galaxy, by category, after that.<br />
** The categories, in order, are:<br />
*** Current Planet<br />
**** A quick view of all your fleets at the current planet.<br />
*** Mobile Combat<br />
**** The most versatile of your fighting forces: generally intended for offense, but quite able to come and defend your own planets as need be.<br />
*** Mobile Support<br />
**** Unusual supporting fleets that are able to either act as a force multiplier for your offensive or defensive fleets, provide remote supply on deep strikes, or perform surprising other secondary duties.<br />
*** Lone<br />
**** Unusual single 'lone wolf' massive ships that forego having attending ships in exchange for a simply awe-inspiring amount of direct power. Use them offensively or defensively, as you see fit.<br />
*** Battlestations<br />
**** General battlestations that are useful for either defending your planets or for setting up offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Citadels<br />
**** Citadels that are much stronger versions of your general battlestations, packing a huge punch in their own right as well as providing access to defenses for your planets or for offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Planet Cmd Stations<br />
**** Each command station you have on a planet has a small force of mostly basic, utility, or economic nature. However, if you've made purchases from the Zenith Trader or found other unique capturables throughout the galaxy, you might have some fixed-position weapons of surprising power here, too.<br />
** For the time being, the tooltips over the actual fleets just shows the tooltip for their centerpiece. This won't always be the case; they'll later have their own unique tooltips that are more informative.<br />
** For the time being as well, clicking these does nothing but show you a message saying that the fleet management interface is coming soon.<br />
** The individual fleet entries show the name of the fleets, their health percentage, their total ships out of their EFFECTIVE ship cap (for the stationary things, that's out of what you've deployed), their planet name, and their total effective strength if they were fully powered at the level that is chosen for them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new specific tooltip for the fleets in the fleet sidebar.<br />
** This gives a lot of the same info you could already see on the centerpiece's tooltip, but in a slightly more focused and condensed format.<br />
** You can also now right-click to center your view on the centerpiece and select the entire fleet. The tooltip now tells you this. You can also hold shift to select multiple fleets quickly by doing this, as you would have with selecting control groups previously.<br />
<br />
* Given that the fleets in the fleet sidebar can be shown twice -- once for their current planet, and once for their other category -- we decided to add some color to the ones for the current planet to set them apart. This helps to keep it clearer visually what is happening.<br />
<br />
==== Hand-Designed Fleet Capabilities ====<br />
<br />
* Normally it's nice to only have... one way to do things when setting up the XML, right? I mean, that's the most clear thing, eh?<br />
** However, in a few cases it is sometimes nice to be able to have parents talk about their children, rather than children always being the ones talking about their parents.<br />
** This is most notable for hand-designed fleet templates, where we don't want auto-modded stuff to be added in a bunch.<br />
** Thankfully, we can do both things, with both coexisting and neither acting in exclusion of the other.<br />
*** Basically, NORMALLY, you should definitely still use the fleet_membership nodes on ships in order to get them into fleets. This is more modder friendly and more flexible in general.<br />
*** THAT said, now you can also define ship_membership nodes in the fleets themselves, which basically are just the inverse of a fleet_membership node. They say all the same things, but say "a specific ship is being added to my fleet," versus the other way around with a ship adding itself to a specific fleet.<br />
*** This is now in use in a new CMP_StartingFleetDesigns.xml file, which uses a new design_logic of InitialPlayerFleet.<br />
**** Basically: we want to have 5-7 starting player fleets that are hand-designed including what their centerpiece is as well as what their ship compositions are. This lets players start off the game with something they are excited about, and move forward with whatever they find procedurally generated after that.<br />
<br />
==== "Control Groups" Are Gone ====<br />
<br />
* Fleets basically handle the same thing. But better. Some of the interface for this won't be until an upcoming build, though.<br />
<br />
==== "Supply" From Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new IsConsideredOutOfSupplyOfParentFleetCenterpiece bool, which is calculated based on ships within a human mobile or defensive fleet not being on the planet of their centerpiece.<br />
** This is done separately because that way it can only be calculated once per second, which is a lot more efficient.<br />
** This then gets used by things that are checking to see if ship systems are disabled -- aka guns, engineers, etc. These ships can still move, but they're neutered on purpose.<br />
** If the centerpiece is itself kind of hobbling along half-dead, it's okay because the ships are still able to draw supply.<br />
** For the stuff that is either considered "loose" or part of a command station's fleet, these things don't have the concept of supply at all, because their fleet leaders can legitimately be destroyed permanently and they need to still function. Or the loose ones don't even have a fleet leader.<br />
** The goal of the fleet leaders thing is to keep the mobile fleets, and the Battlestation stuff, remotely in the same area as one another. You can't start segmenting your fleets and sending them off to fight WAY off, only raiding neighboring planets. This is for balance purposes more than anything else, and is similar in reasoning to the old Supply concept from AIWC. Funny how things like that come back around!<br />
<br />
==== Squads Removed ====<br />
<br />
* Intra-Squad Formations have been removed, as have the concept of squads, the counts of "visual things per subsquad," and so on.<br />
** The whole "squads" idea was mainly to have more ships without having more ships, and that just wasn't working out for a variety of reasons. Now it's just ships instead.<br />
* large_ship_scale_multiplier has been removed, so that all marks of a starship or whatever are now the same size. This lets us define them in ways that are best for being able to see them without them getting too stupidly huge.<br />
<br />
* Various parts of the game referred to "squads" and "ships" as separate things, and there were internal mechanics for repairing lost ships in a squad, etc.<br />
** That's all gone now, but there are some code remnants (to say the least) that still refer to squads. If you run into anything in the front-end (aka actually in the game) that mentions squads, we'd appreciate a heads up so that we can correct that.<br />
** There ARE still visual groups of many of the smaller ships (V-Wings, etc), which is because those are just a single "3d model" made out of several smaller 3d models at this point. We can go back and correct that later, or we can leave it; we're kind of on the fence.<br />
<br />
==== Rallying Ships From Factories to Fleet Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* IF a mobile fleet of yours is on a planet with a factory, or on an adjacent planet, then the factory now produces ships for it as fast as it can.<br />
** In the interest of fairness, a given factory divides up its resources evenly between every possible ship that it can build for every fleet in range, and works on them all at once. So there are no queues, there is no order to set, there's just whether or not you accelerate the factories with engineers or not.<br />
<br />
* The various types of "ships rally to X location after construction" are now gone, with instead all the ships from docks rallying to their fleet centerpiece, whereever that may be.<br />
** This is highly automated and much more the default thing we want to have happen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of bugs with ships rallying to their fleet centerpiece (which is the only type of rally that now exists).<br />
** They should rally to where the centerpiece either is or is heading, and they'll stop rallying once they get very close to where the centerpiece is.<br />
** They stay in rally mode, continually updating their destination, until they reach the target. Initially the target can only be on the planet they are on or an adjacent planet, but it's possible that the target will move even further away while they are chasing it, and they should adjust to follow. That has been tested except when moving more than one planet away while they chase.<br />
** Note that you can't set the rallying directly at all, unlike prior versions of the games. Factories just make whatever is needed in order to bring a local fleet up to full fighting force, and those things automatically rally to their respective fleets. "Local" means on this or an adjacent planet.<br />
** On arrival, the rallying ships should take up the disposition of the ships that are at the other end, but that remains to be seen if that works as the interface for that bit isn't there yet. If you see problems with us, please do let us know.<br />
<br />
==== Procedural Fleet Names ====<br />
<br />
* The fleets for most fleets now have default names that are pulled from folders [FleetNames_Mobile_P1]+[FleetNames_Mobile_P2]. If anyone reading wants to add to these after this build is out, that's certainly welcome.<br />
** This wasn't a high priority item, but Chris needed a small mental break when starting the morning. ;)<br />
** These can be renamed later by players.<br />
<br />
==== AIP Penalties for Fleet Clustering ====<br />
<br />
* If you put too many ships from too many fleets on one planet, basically the AI notices, gets scared and angry, and the AIP starts increasing over time. It warns you about this.<br />
** You're allowed to have WAY more units in this version of the game compared to any prior one, but if you go putting them all one one or two planets the AI is going to kick back... hard. That whole "guerrilla warfare" bit goes out the window if you advertise your presence like that.<br />
<br />
* The fleet concentration AIP penalties will now only kick in at 3 fleets on an AI planet, and 5 on a player planet, rather than 2 and 4 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "too many fleets on a planet" code works has been reworked a fair bit, but not tested:<br />
** It now looks at all the human ships that are part of a mobile (flagship) fleet or a battlestation/citadel fleet. Before it was just looking at the fleet centerpieces, meaning you could have your centerpiece hide on an adjacent planet and send its ships in and the AI wouldn't notice.<br />
** It also now only looks at the ships that are actually on the planet, and not the total strength of the fleet. The strength must be at least 2 in order for it to care at all about it for these purposes. If you send in 10 fleets of strength 1 -- or a slice of them that is strength 1 -- then it won't care.<br />
*** This latter thing will probably encourage all sorts of bad behavior, but we'll figure that out in the future. For now it should feel more natural in general, but it will likely need further iterating.<br />
<br />
=== AI Behaviour Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The AI will now be less worried about distant mobile enemy forces.<br />
* The AI will no longer mistakenly count Guard units as Threat in some code paths<br />
* Make some improvements to hunter/warden fleet routing logic<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the Hunter/Warden save game<br />
<br />
* Each AI faction now has its own Hunter/Warden fleets. The units of each Hunter/Warden will just show as "Hunter Fleet" or "Warden Fleet", but there will now be multiple fleets acting independently. The goal of this is to make those fleets much more flexible in how they deal with enemies.<br />
** Only one Hunter and one Warden are visible in the game lobby. The other hunter/wardens will copy the colours but not the settings of the visible Hunter/Warden.<br />
<br />
* Add a new gameplay mechanic, "AI Civil War". At the beginning of the game, Communication Nodes are seeded near all the AI homeworlds. Destroying all of them will trigger the AI Civil War by making the AIs unable to communicate with eachother. This will make all of the AI factions hostile to eachother; they will send waves at eachother, use Threat on eachother, etc, just like they do against the player.<br />
** This will significantly strengthen all the AIs.<br />
** The Warden and Hunter Fleets will remain friendly with all the AIs. They are unaffected by the Communication breakdown and are quite confused. <br />
** If there is only one AI in the game then the Communication Node will not be in the game.<br />
** "AI Civil War" mode is also available as an option to the Game Lobby, which will start the game with AI's in Civil War mode. This is for testing and sandbox purposes.<br />
<br />
* The targeting code now treats XML-based importances as more important than 'amount of damage I can do'; this makes it less likely for units to ignore Command Stations and other high-value targets in favour of fleetships<br />
<br />
* Change how overkill is calculated; only count units that are actually in range of the target<br />
** This makes ships less likely to dance between multiple targets, unable to pick which one to attack.<br />
<br />
* Don't throw away Distance to Target information when choosing a target<br />
** This also makes ships much less likely to do the "can't decide on a target" dance<br />
<br />
* AIs no longer have any concept of "unlock points," and they don't unlock new ship types over the course of the game.<br />
** This was a neat concept in AI War Classic, kinda-sorta, but in a long campaign it just meant more chaos, honestly.<br />
** The original intent was to make it so that there was a feeling of progression and the AI doing new things with new tools as you go through the game, and that is now handled far better via the ship groups instead, and the planets being more unique, etc.<br />
<br />
* When the budget for a wave is over 3k, the AI no longer randomly gets guardians added in as a thing they can buy for the wave. Instead things are more hand-designed than that.<br />
<br />
=== Map Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Several map types have been improved by Draco.<br />
** Thanks Draco!<br />
<br />
* Make the Simple and Realistic map types more interesting by fixing a dumb bug in them.<br />
<br />
* The Max/Min number of planets in the galaxy is now defined on a per-map type basis rather than a global (since some maps scale up to larger galaxies better than others)<br />
** Some map types go up as high as 500 planets, others are capped at an AIWC-like 120 planets<br />
<br />
* The previous methods for some of the map seeding of AI things are also being... phased out in some ways, and made a lot more centralized and thus flexible.<br />
** This in turn lets us make the various AI planets a lot more unique, and lets modders add to things without replacing them.<br />
<br />
* The warden special forces hideouts were previously always seeding 4, but now it's sometimes more based on the size of the galaxy being larger.<br />
<br />
* The game is now able to seed multiple entities on certain planets if we so desire, during mapgen.<br />
** As the sole use of this so far, we're now seeding two battlestations/citadels on any planets that have those, to make those a lot more attractive as targets and also thus provide more firepower for defensive purposes for players without them having to capture QUITE so many planets for each of these that they get.<br />
<br />
* Did a fair bit of rework on some of the mapgen logic where it is trying to seed things close to the player homeworlds.<br />
** A while back we had some problems where things were frequently seeding too close, so we put in code to counter that. That was in turn preventing us from intentionally putting stuff there more recently.<br />
** Now there's a healthy balance between us being able to do that while still avoiding the old bug, and in general things seem to be working well.<br />
<br />
* There was some other funkiness with it being really unlikely to seed certain things very near to you.<br />
** That has been fixed, to start with, but then beyond that it also now tries to seed half the flagships and battlestations kind of in the middle-distance for you on the map.<br />
** In general this now gives you way more options for middle-game goals for making yourself stronger.<br />
<br />
==== Limited Ship Types For Each AI Planet ====<br />
<br />
* Essentially it's super boring when there are too many types of ships all over the place on every planet for the AI. So now it does this really interesting thing where it chooses a subset/theme for each planet, and some themes are harder than others, rarer than others, etc. Now you can actually see what is there, formulate a strategy of which of your fleets is best to send, and... well, send them.<br />
<br />
* Planets now remember what specific ShipGroup out of a ShipGroupCategory they are using for a given faction. This is where the theming comes in for these planets.<br />
** For the wormhole sentinels, it's actually only seeded at the start of the game, and each wormhole is unique rather than being homogeneous per planet. So those don't get remembered.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that AIs choose their "draw bags" for how to populate a planet's guard posts, strikecraft, turrets, or whatever, has been redone; but also the same is redone for waves and CPAs and the like. It's all using the new AIShipGroups and AIShipGroupCategories.<br />
<br />
* In the tooltips, you can now see how many ships and what strength is contained inside a guard post, as you used to be pre-fleets. HOWEVER, you can also now see exactly how many of each type of ship is inside there, to see what mix the AI is using at that planet without having to go aggro a guard post.<br />
<br />
* Basic definitions for ai ship groups and ai ship categories have been implemented. These are based around the excellent document that Puffin set up on the subject, but with some changes and additions here and there.<br />
** Note that this is ai_ship_groups_i_am_part_of, and it refers exclusively to how the AI uses ships. This isn't meaningful at all to fleet design stuff for players, which is a separate topic.<br />
** This also doesn't affect minor factions, although there's nothing stopping minor factions from adopting this new pattern in the future.<br />
** At the moment this also only describes strikecraft and frigates, and not turrets or other things of that nature. Those are coming soon. Puffin, if you want to set up the other categories and groups based on this starting template, probably ignoring the "singular freaky surprises" stuff, then please feel free as it would save me some time.<br />
** The overall rule with this usage of ships in groups is that anything that is a variant of something else shouldn't be in the same group with it. This is just a design thought, not a technical restriction. Warden and Hunter fleets will wind up having all sorts of strange mixing and matching, but by keeping to this rule we will ensure that planets and waves otherwise don't have that sort of strange mixing.<br />
** You'll also notice that for the ship group categories that are specific to certain AI types, like Turtle or Cloaking-Heavy or whatever, those also include some sub-groups that are unrelated to their type, but which will provide some... well, variety. Aka sometimes instead of being a cloaking-heavy wave, it will by an anti-structures wave. Sneaky! There's nothing worse than a predictable AI type, so having some variety in what they do, even if they are thematically heavy, is good.<br />
** It's also worth noting how the "draw bags" work, in this context. Essentially the number after the things that are included say "how many raffle tickets do I put into the draw bag?" And depending on how many other total raffle tickets have been put in, that's how likely it is to come out.<br />
*** In order to allow for granularity in definitions, our default number of tickets to add is 100. That way we can say "only do this 1% as often as most stuff" by putting in 1 ticket instead of 100.<br />
*** But even there, the odds of it coming out are not 1%, because it depends on what else is put into the bag. And by very definition, what is put into the bag is something that is meant to be unknowable at design time, since it can be modded, and expanded in the future. So we simply use something like "100" to mean "regular frequency, whatever that is," and then the other numbers like "25" to mean "about a quarter as often as usual, whatever that is."<br />
*** It is worth noting that not putting too many types inside a single draw bag is probably good in MOST cases, because it means that players will be facing a planet or a wave that has some sort of coherency to it that they can plan around. I'd say that 3 types is a sweet spot for waves, but sometimes having many more or fewer types is okay. Variety being the spice of life, it's okay that many of the things drift off the "normal" design parameters.<br />
*** Overall we'll find some situations where people go "wow there's way too many xyz unit in this circumstance," and we'll deal with that as need be. But most of these groups are intended for things that are not strictly numbers-bound (aka more than a handful of forcefields on a planet is terrible, so using them in these groups would be a Very Bad Idea since it would lead to occasional bouts of player dismay).<br />
**** Most of the time, we are likely to wind up with something like "holy cow that one planet is a nest of sniper like I've never seen in my life," and we just kind of sit back and go "yep! That will happen, in extremely rare cases. Either deal with it or go around, but that's the fun of this." The prior system was leading to a feeling of samey-ness on all the various planets, and so this is meant to break things up more into various thematic niches, some of which are more rare than others due to being either annoying or scary or hard or whatever. But we still want those rare outliers to happen, because those are either the places where good stories happen during AARs, or where the player's eyebrows can shoot up as they go "I'm glad I don't have to go THERE." Or sometimes it's just going to be the Wave From Hell that surprises players before going away again.<br />
** This whole thing is going to take a lot more defining and redefining over time, but it's really well set up for having lots of ship variants and strange outliers. In a lot of ways, this is intentionally pushing planets and waves a bit more in the direction of a RogueLite, where you never quite know what you're going to find. Chris was really missing some of the sense of exploration, and this is his way of trying to capture that again.<br />
*** And note that this is completely parallel to the player fleet waves and such, so the nice thing is that the AI, other factions, and players can all be thought of using completely separate structures and in completely different terms. As it should be.<br />
<br />
* Each planet belonging to an AI now seeds a single entity from SingularFreakySurprisesAIShipGroup on each of their planets at the start.<br />
** Note that this includes a fair bit of blank space, and that if it chooses blank space that is considered A-OK. So it won't really be every planet, and the frequency is actually determined in the xml rather than the code.<br />
** This lets things like the Golemite be set up a lot more directly, and without using tags.<br />
** The ONE downside of this is that the frequency can no longer be based around things like what the AI difficulty level is. But frankly, that's something that makes the AIs feel less unique and not just easier; if the game is meant to be easier, the player should still be facing the unique foes of that AI nonetheless.<br />
*** As part of this, the explicit seeding code for the Golemite to seed its golems has been removed, and it now uses the new central xml-based function.<br />
*** Note that, if we want to, there's nothing stopping us from using both the old method and the new one at the same time. The new one is mainly a convenience that makes for some powerful new xml-only modding capabilities that don't need to touch C# to add cool stuff to an AI.<br />
<br />
* Guardians now have their own AI ship groups, like Strikecraft, and are similar to them. Did the same for Royal, and it uses those for the wave and reinforcement ones as well, so interestingly it can vary what Guardians it has, or roll the same thing in Reinforcements and Guardians separately and really focus on one thing, or even have almost every kind, with an emphasis on this set, etc.<br />
** Just didn't like how planets were always a mess of Guardians. Sometimes they still will be, but that's a rare "Oh dear" thing.<br />
<br />
===== How The AI Guards Wormholes Is Way Cooler =====<br />
<br />
* The Stealth Wormhole Sentinels have been set up as something that only show up rarely, now that scouting is going to be working differently. This is useful for making planets feel a lot more varied, and not all planets so hard to sneak your stealth ships into.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Basic Minefield Wormhole Sentinels, possibly against our better judgement, to let a tiny minority of wormholes actually have mines around them that players can stumble into.<br />
** Since these should only really show up once, with the AI not rebuilding them, this should be an interesting thing for the player to run into well under 1% of the time. Thanks to Puffin for suggesting this; this should provide for some interesting traps without being too frustratingly common.<br />
<br />
* Actually jacked up the default NobodyHereWormholeSentinels draw bag count to 1000, and the StealthWormholeSentinels to 50, so that the 1 of BasicMinefieldWormholeSentinels is EVEN MORE RARE. Hopefully players run into one or zero minefields during a given campaign, thus making it more exciting.<br />
** Of course, if someone wants to make a minefield-heavy AI type, that is straightforward to do, now.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, there are now 5 different kinds of wormhole sentinel setups that are based around using tractor arrays and turrets, tesla turrets, gravity weapons and pike turrets, and whatever else.<br />
** These are also in the minority in terms of how frequently they will seed, but are way more common than the minefields and should make it so that some of the wormholes are a lot more interesting to face, now.<br />
** This gets back a bit more back to the original design of the original game, which is only possible now because of how some of the scouting changes will interact with the game here. We had had to move away from this because of tedium of automated scouting in other circumstnaces.<br />
** There are still quite a few wormholes that won't be directly defended at all, and it's possible for us to set up way more wormhole defensive types as desired in the future; these are mostly a proof of concept.<br />
** Note that with the sentinels at wormholes, the idea is that these will exist from the start of the game and never get upgraded or reinforced, unlike what happens at guard posts.<br />
<br />
==== Revamped AI Types Based On New Seeding Styles ====<br />
<br />
* Set up new "singular freaky surprises" that includes how golems are seeded for the Golemite now, and actually gives a very rare chance that some regular planets will sometimes have an AI golem.<br />
<br />
* The Vanilla AI type has been renamed to "Full Ensemble," referening the fact how it is basically the most well-rounded AI type that presently exists. It has the most varied surprises up its sleeves.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Simple Ensemble AI variant: Like the full ensemble in most respects, but minus some of the more esoteric ship variants. There's plenty going on here, but not quite so much craziness to discover as you explore.<br />
<br />
* The Starfleet Commander AI type has been removed, as now all the AIs kind of do what it was doing before. It no longer stands out as unique.<br />
<br />
* The Everything AI type has been removed, as it was kind of redundant now, and wouldn't have made for coherent gameplay anyhow.<br />
<br />
* Added in a completely untested new Thief AI type that was kinda-sorta defined previously but seemed to be missing, nonetheless.<br />
<br />
* Also added a completely untested new Zombifier AI type that uses a bunch of zombifying ships and other nasty things. It was kinda-sorta previously defined but again still seemed to be missing.<br />
<br />
* In general there were very few AI types removed, and instead they are all just a whole heck of a lot more vibrant, and we actually added a few.<br />
<br />
=== Hacking changes ===<br />
<br />
* Science Extraction hacking will now show the total cost for the remaining science on the planet in the tooltip<br />
** Requested by Ecthelon on Steam<br />
* Hacking has been feeling a bit too easy these days, so include AIP when calculating how strong the hacking response should be for hacks against the AI.<br />
** The formula is now NewHackingResponse = oldHacking Response + (oldHackingResponse * AIPMultiplier * CurrentAIP)<br />
<br />
* Add the Sabotage hack<br />
** This will kill a random NormalPlanetNastyPick structure on a planet. Many people have asked for this. <br />
<br />
* Allow hacks to be done against planets, not just structures<br />
* Allow hacks to be done without a local hacker on the planet<br />
* Allow the AI to launch an attack against the player after hacking is completed<br />
** These can be set on any hack with an XML tag. So all the previous hacking mechanics can continue to function as usual, but new options are now available.<br />
<br />
* Mercenary Beacons can be done without a local hacker on the planet. They are also nearly instant to complete.<br />
<br />
* Hacking the dyson sphere in order to download a ship design SHOULD now actually work, although it works differently from before.<br />
** Rather than unlocking a new ship line in general (type Dyson Defender), it now adds a permanent cap of 2 more dyson defenders to whatever the hacking fleet is that just did the hack. So it's a way to buff up the particular fleet doing the hack with some sweet new dyson tech that you get to keep forever.<br />
** In general this can now serve as a model for other types of the same thing that we can do, although there's a question mark of course as to whether this actually works since we've not tested it. But it's neat and should be useful in general for the future.<br />
<br />
* The hacking for the dark spire wraiths now works like the dyson hacking.<br />
<br />
=== Bug Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the entity hovering ui where it was incorrectly identifying energy overdrive as an attack penalty<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Zenith Trader (Traitor!) was allowing the AI to buy way too many goodies<br />
** Thanks to lots of people for reporting this, including Jannik2099 and Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when handling GameCommands<br />
** Thanks to jannik for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where v-wings were having damage multipliers based on buildings lack of engines<br />
** Thanks to weaponmaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Correctly flag the "Download Dyson Sphere Ship" hack as unavailable after that hack has been completed<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where vengeance generators were warping in already vulnerable to damage<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and zeusalmighty for the reports<br />
<br />
* Add an Objective for hacking the Spire Archive<br />
** Thanks to settemio for the reminder<br />
<br />
* Only seed one spire archive per AI<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the report<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive isn't invulnerable to all damage, meaning it properly dies after being hacked.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Spire Archives now show on the galaxy map.<br />
<br />
* The Superterminal now explodes after the hack finishes, instead of using a kludgy and bug prone mechanism to prevent it from being hacked multiple times<br />
** Thanks to Lifestrider and zeusalmighty for bug reports<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the settings menu for multiple AI types<br />
** Thanks to coldrage101 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug where the HRF Raiders were never spawning because of a typo in their tag.<br />
<br />
* Fixed that issue with the fullscreen resolution not being settable in recent internal builds.<br />
** Note that there is still some issue that may make you need to alt-f4 the program after changing between fullscreen resolutions or fullscreen to not-fullscreen, but it then shows up properly after that. I expect an upgrade to the unity engine, due in the next month or so, will probably fix that one part. And that one part probably isn't new. But the new part that was broken is now fixed.<br />
<br />
* The game now properly unpauses itself after you close the escape menu, if it paused itself going into there.<br />
<br />
* Units that are stacked, or units that are in transports, now cost energy the same as they do when they are outside of their hosts.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Renaming And Visual Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Cleaned up all entity names, from in the past when they changed function (i.e LaserTurret to NucleophilicTurret).<br />
* Also cleaned up and standardised all the entity system names, and cleaned out a few that were redundant.<br />
** This should make it a bit cleaner to work with in future, as there's no weird cases of there being a WidowGuardian, which is really the Paralysis Guardian, but it shows up as the Widow in all the internal files!<br />
<br />
* The Widow Mine is now the Paralysis Mine, and the Grenade Launcher fleetship is now Grenade Launcher Corvette - seeing as it has the Corvette icon and all.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Frigates are now Sentinel Gunboats.<br />
** Anything in future, like Lightning Torpedo Frigate will use the term Gunboat instead.<br />
<br />
* Fleetships are now called Strikecraft, and Starships are now called Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Space Docks are now simply called Factories, Mobile Space Dock is Mobile Factory, and the Starship Constructor doesn't exist at all now.<br />
** Both Strikecraft and Frigates come out of the same building.<br />
<br />
* Not a rename, but a recolour. Human Resistance Fighters and Marauders have a primary green that shows up better in game, and matches what it is in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Advanced Factory is now the Intra-Galactic Coordinator.<br />
** It's just a thing that increases your ship caps, essentially.<br />
** The ship_cap_multiplier actually works now in the new system. It won't increase the caps for anything with a cap of 1, though, just FYI. It also can't be used to reduce the cap.<br />
<br />
* Mentions of Shields such as the Shield Frigate, Shield Generator etc are all Forcefield now.<br />
** Apparently we were using both in kind of random places?<br />
<br />
* As Squads are removed, all the Strikecraft models are much bigger, with a single one taking up the same space the full squad used to!<br />
** In addition, things like Frigates, Command Stations, Turrets, etc are all bigger. Almost everything, really.<br />
<br />
* All icons in the game are displayed a bit higher above their entity. This gets them out of the way a bit, hopefully not too far that it's difficult to know what they're for.<br />
** With this and the above change, you can actually see the models a bit!<br />
<br />
=== Ship Variants ===<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Harasser" variant of the MLRS Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Porcupine" variant of the Pike Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ablative Troll" variant of the Ablative Gatling.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Dagger" variant of the Raider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Gunbot" variant of the Autocannon Minipod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Velociraptor" variant of the Raptor.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Stalker" variant of the Eyebot.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Tripper" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Railpod" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Pulsar Punk" variant of the Pulsar Tank.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Aggressor" variant of the Agravic Pod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Mirage" variant of the Space Plane.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Hydra" variant of the Vanguard.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Zapper" variant of the Inhibiting Tesla Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Terrier" variant of the Spider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Molotov" variant of the Grenade Launcher Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ranger" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Medic Gunboat" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Absorber" variant of the Vampire Claw.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Thief" variant of the Etherjet.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Paralyser" variant of the Stingray.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Cluster" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Nanoswarm" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Persuader" variant of the Parasite.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ripper" variant of the Warbird Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Brawler" variant of the Assault Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Devastator" variant of the Siege Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Siphoner" variant of the Shield Frigate.<br />
<br />
* The Hydra is now the Vanguard Hydra, and there's a new Stringray Hydra type to keep it company.<br />
** The Stingray version is markedly more strong in the sense that it subdivides but doesn't have worse stats. It's a quick bit of variance for planets or waves that are replicant-heavy.<br />
<br />
* Also added a Parasite Hydra to round it out even more, although made them thankfully lexss frequent.<br />
<br />
* Added Ghost Grenade Launcher Corvette and Ghost Concussion Corvettes, to round out the ghost strikecraft category a bit.<br />
<br />
* A new Station-Keeping Assault Frigate has been added to the loadout of military and home command stations (2x each), and logistical command stations (1x each).<br />
** As with the pike turrets that all the command stations now have, this gives you some more defensive options without having a fleet or a battlestation around.<br />
** Unlike the turrets, these don't require any placement planning, since they are mobile and able to roam around and hit enemies. Seemed like this would get around a variety of frustrating situations that even having turrets would not solve.<br />
<br />
==== New Variants For Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Cloaked Ark One variant, and this one is ONLY available via a new "Cloaked Fleet" (CloakedStartingFleet) that players can get in the lobby at the start of the game.<br />
** This offensive fleet is one of the first that players can choose from, and it's powerful and invisible and likely to make them feel quite powerful.<br />
** Led by the Cloaked Ark One, this has Raptors, Agravic Pods, Gunbots, and then Warbird Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Mugger variant of the Assault Frigate that gets parasitism (this needs to be tested).<br />
** This is ONLY available via the new "Parasitic Fleet" that players can choose at the start of the game.<br />
** The parasitic fleet in general is weak and small by comparison to others when it comes to direct firepower... but of course they create a bunch of zombies to work for them. Uh, and yeah there's a Botnet Golem at the center. So weaker might not be accurate after all.<br />
** Led by the Botnet Golem, these have 60 Parasites and 2 Muggers. This is by far the smallest ship cap fleet you can start with... until you start creating zombies.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Classic Fleet that players can start with.<br />
** This classic mix isn't good at any one particular thing, but is well-rounded against any foe. The forcefields just make things even better.<br />
** It's V-Wings, Fusion Bombers, Concussion Corvettes, and then a Forcefield Frigate, with the centerpiece being an Armored Golem.<br />
** This is a nod both to the first game as well as the classic starting loadout of ships in this game itself, which is now absent.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Raid Fleet for the starting player options, which also has a new "Agile Cursed Golem Ark" that is the Cursed Golem but with way faster engines.<br />
** The whole purpose of this fleet is being able to rapidly move around faster than any other purely offensive fleet in the game.<br />
** It also includes a new "Turbo Stingray" ship that is a faster version of regular Stringrays, and then Velociraptors and Daggers, which are normally already super fast.<br />
** All of these things share the same base (very high) speed except for the last and obligatory part of the fleet, Raid Frigates. These are able to move EVEN FASTER, and so can go off on their own away from the main body if you so desire.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Doorkicker Fleet" as another starting fleet option.<br />
** Mostly focused on crowd control, but with siege frigates along to punch giant holes in large targets when required.<br />
** Basically this is the taking the idea of the Attritioner archetype, but giving one bit of counterbalance to it. Led by a black widow golem, this has MLRS Corvettes, Grenade Launcher Corvettes, Inhibiting Tesla Corvettes, and then Siege Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== New Battlestation Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Revealer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tachyon Array.<br />
<br />
* Gravitic Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Gravity Generator.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has greatly improved shields that extend out around itself.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has very powerful engineering capabilities.<br />
<br />
* Ensnarer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tractor Array.<br />
<br />
==== New Citadel Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Metabolic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing many weak shots that turn targets into resources on death.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of high power Agravic Bombs.<br />
<br />
* Inhibitor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of shots that reduce enemy weapon output.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires multiple paralysis shots.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing small bursts of bolts that zombify victims.<br />
<br />
* Interceptor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, packing multiple railcannons that shred fast moving targets.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Tesla-class structures (Guardians, turrets, etc) now reduce incoming damage from far away by 99% instead of 100%. This allows the targeting code to identify Tesla units as potential targets (instead of ignoring them as if they were Invulnerable). Units in FRD (and minor factions) should now be able to actually attack Tesla turrets.<br />
** Many people have complained about this, including TechSY730 and Democracy.<br />
<br />
* Ark Energy Overdrive is removed for now. Find another place for it (likely in a changed form).<br />
<br />
* Sniper damage bonus requirement reduced from speed 1200 to 1000.<br />
<br />
* Sniper: Starting bonus multiplier 5x -> 8x.<br />
<br />
* Space Plane gets the damage resistance to anything beyond range 4600 instead of 5600 now.<br />
** Basically you have to be closer to it to do full damage. Also means that when using Pursuit, they try to stay beyond that.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units have half the shots per salvo, but reload in half the time.<br />
** Helps them retarget more often.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units get their damage bonus at 30% enemy hull remaining, instead of only 20%.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette, Grenade Launcher Corvette: Mass 0.21x -> 0.3x.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard: EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Raptors, Autocannon Minipods, Space Planes, Agravic Pods, Vampire Claw, Raid Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Eyebot, Stealth Guardian: Albedeo increased to 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette, Sentinel Gunboats, Snipers, Siege Frigate, Tritium Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Tritium Guardian, Concussion Guardian, Plasma Guardian: Armour reduced to 40.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette: Shields 2,800 -> 1,800, EngineGx 8 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Claw: Armour 40 -> 70, Life Leech reduced from 1.5x to 1x.<br />
<br />
* Raptor: EngineGx 7 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Raptor Hull: 2900 -> 1900.<br />
<br />
* Stingray, Etherjet, Metabolizing Gangsaw: EngineGx 7 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette only applies reload penalty to armour below 60.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate: Damage 2500 -> 25,000, spreads it among targets instead of hitting 10 for full damage, range 10,100 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard, Pulsar Tank (main gun only): Range changed to 4200.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard: Speed reduced to 400.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette: Hull 1,000 -> 1,400, shields 1,000 -> 1,600, EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Armour increased to 110.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Shields 2,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
* Etherjet: Damage 30 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Turrets have a similar damage bonus to Ablative Gatlings now.<br />
** Makes them a bit more interesting, and also some room for other changes.<br />
<br />
* V-Wing: Hull/Shields changed from 500/3500 to 2000/2000.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette: Armour 50 -> 70, range 8,000 -> 6,000, shields 200 -> 800, speed 700 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot: Hull/Shields 1,000/1,000 -> 800/800, armour 50 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod: Armour 50 -> 70.<br />
<br />
* Dark Spire get a bit less energy if they're the ones that killed something.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian: Armour 90 -> 50, albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian: Hull/Shields changed from 20,000/20,000 to 10,000/30,000, EngineGx 12 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian, Paralysis Guardian: Speed 1,400 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian: Range 15,000 -> 8,000, Armour 90 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Guardian: EngineGx 13 -> 7, Armour 90 -> 110, range 8,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian: Albedo 0.4 -> 0.3, EngineGx 14 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guardian: Armour 50 -> 70, EngineGx 14 -> 7, range 8,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Guardians now have Cloaking, but attack half as fast.<br />
** Stealth Guardian now has a friend that it shares a group with.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Plasma Turret.<br />
** Closer to Heavy Beams than the rest.<br />
<br />
* All Turrets except Beam and Plasma have 10% lower health, but 15% greater damage in exchange.<br />
** Turrets felt like they slap the enemy to death slowly while outlasting everything. This is minor, but speeds it up a tad.<br />
<br />
* Slow the increase in cost for Science hacking multiple planets<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Minefields are now all one use. Damage increased for normal and Area mines to compensate, Paralysis mines have a longer effect as well.<br />
** This fixes numerous problems with them, including somehow surviving and the AI being confused, being repaired mid-combat, overkill or Military Command Station boosts having weird effects, etc.<br />
** Also lets us put damage bonuses on more cleanly without worsening any of those previous problems.<br />
<br />
* Marauders have a per-outpost cap on the Raiders they can produce. Unfortunately, stacking causes raiders to lose information about their spawning outpost. As a backup, also introduce a global cap on the number of raiders that the marauders can have.<br />
** This should dramatically tamp down the power of high intensity Marauders late game, especially in sandbox games.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Hunter/Killer.<br />
<br />
* AI Co-Processors reduce AIP by 20 more when all destroyed.<br />
<br />
* Player Golems are much weaker now, but can be upgraded alongside Arks. AI Golems have minor upgrades.<br />
** With enough upgrades, the player ones will match then surpass their previous forms.<br />
** Initial testing of Golems as Flagships was...amusing.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos starts with the zombifying weapon already usable.<br />
<br />
* Arks are a bit faster, have a bit less health and a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate can be upgraded as well, has some weapon and health changes and has three versions of itself now.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Guard Posts and Forcefield Generators are now actually in use again, as rather rare finds.<br />
** Connected to this, AI Turrets are in a tighter spread around whatever they defend, so they actually sit in the forcefield instead of uselessly outside.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord Phase 2 should actually come after you on that planet now.<br />
<br />
* Mercenaries spawn at Mark 1 now, and level up with the players tech level.<br />
** They're also a bit weaker to compensate for that.<br />
<br />
* Carrier Frigates are, unfortunately, gone. For the player, Drone producers must be a Fleet Leader, instead of a random Frigate or whatever in it, to avoid having nested fleets.<br />
** Potentially it can return in a fashion as a Fleet Leader in future.<br />
<br />
==== Crippled Status ====<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Mobile Fleet Flagships are now automatically something that cannot ever die, per se -- instead they become "crippled" when their health is less than 10% of its maximum value.<br />
** This solves a whole heck of a lot of problems that we otherwise have, such as where ships should rally to, and it also avoids the "corpse run" problem. <br />
*** If there are lone golems that players are capturing that die to remains, or other similar things that are not fleet leaders in that way, then those can still be a source of corpse runs, so it's not like that mechanic went away. It's simply not being a major focus for these types of ships.<br />
*** For a while, we were having things like Arks (which fall into this new category) automatically warp back away to some sort of safe space, but that's no longer a thing, which is good.<br />
** Their weapons and other systems all go offline when they have less than 10% health now, which is actually a pretty new limiter on them since it gives them only 90% of their health in which to work, although there's no longer the risk of them dying if you're not paying attention. But for balance purposes it's worth noting that we may wind up needing to beef these out slightly.<br />
** Enemy ships will consider them an uninteresting target if they are already crippled. It's possible that actually shots won't do any more damage when hitting them and they are crippled, which if so is a bug I need to fix later. But them not bothering to target the enemy seemed to be the most important thing for now. If you have a savegame with shots not damaging these ships, then please let us know.<br />
** It's also possible that there will be some edge cases where these things actually DO die rather than being crippled, in which cases repro saves will be very welcome.<br />
** Mobile fleets with a crippled centerpiece now have an effective remaining cap of 0 for all the ships that factories might be sending to them.<br />
*** This makes it so that factories won't supply new things for them anymore until there is an un-crippling of the centerpiece. Otherwise there's no reason to bring said centerpiece home for repairs, it's just this strange invincible vessel to which lots of ships rally.<br />
*** The metal spent on partial construction of ships is not refunded, but rather is stored at the fleet and as soon as the centerpiece is un-crippled things will come back online and resume wherever they were.<br />
** Note that if any ships are set to reverts_to_neutral_on_death="true" in xml while being of one of these two types, that really won't matter because they should never die. So those should probably be removed.<br />
<br />
==== Costs of Repair vs Construction ====<br />
<br />
* We recently (in this giant build group) redid how the repair costs were working for ships, and it's unclear how that changed things cost-wise compared to what the costs used to be (the costs as they used to be were super unclear).<br />
** What IS clear is that we changed it to just be the equivalent to rebuilding the unit, aka repairing it 50% is the same as building half a new unit. This was by design and we didn't think much about it, but it is definitely something that was eating through metal prodigiously.<br />
** What's also clear is that we were charging this FULL amount for repairing shields, health, and engine health -- ouch. So really if you were at half engine health, half shield health, and half hull health, you'd spend 150% of what it would cost to just build a new unit. Not good! We'd much rather encourage repair in general.<br />
** We now have a variety of dials in the xml external constants to affect the percentage of the full metal cost that it will cost for various repair types:<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_hull_points: 50% cost for repairing hulls.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_personal_shields: 20% cost for repairing personal shields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_bubble_forcefields: 75% cost for repairing bubble forcefields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_engines: 10% cost for repairing engine damage.<br />
** This should make things quite a bit less constrained on the player income-wise (it was feeling pretty tight at certain points in the early game because of your much larger forces), and also encourages reuse rather than just refleeting.<br />
<br />
==== Costs For AIs Purchasing Things ====<br />
<br />
<br />
* There is a new field, cost_for_ai_to_purchase, which is an integer that replaces the old_strength values.<br />
** This is now what AIs use to purchase units, and it is separate from how strong the unit is seen as.<br />
** This is problably way out of balance for now, but it at least is something we can tune directly from now on.<br />
** "Strength" in the game is now properly only used for evaluating, well, how strong something is. Aka how the AI acts, or as information for the player.<br />
** This is NOT something that goes up by mark level anymore, unlike before, and that's by design as well. The AI should be able to afford equal numbers of ship type X on a mark 1 or a mark 4 planet. That's how things were in AIWC, but it was oddly not at all like that here.<br />
<br />
* There are a bunch of other related changes to making the game use the CostForAIToPurchase field instead of the Strength field -- and remember that this is on the TypeData rather than the ForMark data, and that this is by design.<br />
** This is probably buggy as eff. There's a ton of code in this area, written by a bunch of people over a long period of time. So AIs will probably wind up making some pretty strange purchases for a little while, until we find and fix whatever bugs there are, aside from the inherent data issues.<br />
** Nonetheless, now was the time to go ahead and make this change, because it was a fundamental deterrent to us being able to balance what the AI builds separately from how strong the AIs and players view a unit as being. And that was one primary driver behind all things being a very similar cost-to-benefit ratio, at least on paper... and ongoing headache for Puffin, with that. The headaches won't end because of this change alone, but they will shift to a new sort: balancing each of those two things independently of one another ("does the strength stated for that unit seem to match how scary the AI and players should think it is?" and "does that cost an appropriate amount for the AI in most contexts, or is it too cheap or too expensive for them?").<br />
** But in the short term, this will be extra complicated by the fact that the math probably has some bugs in it because probably some things that should be using the new AI budget stuff are still using the strength data. I would be shocked if that's not the case, despite looking at it very carefully until I was cross-eyed.<br />
** And then the other question of "how much should this cost" is now out of date compared to what the strength values were, so even if the math is all perfect we're going to have bonkers data for a bit. That part I do leave to Puffin for the most part, sorry about that. ;)<br />
** As a general design note, both the players and the AIs have been having fewer ships than I would prefer, thus far. For players it was because of the way the ship caps were -- pre-fleets. For the AIs, it was because of the way they were being "charged more" for higher-mark stuff when looking at their own budgets. At the start of the game, a mark 3 planet and a mark 4 planet should have the same relative amount of budget spent, but one gets better stuff from it. Previously, unlike AIWC, the mark 4 planet was getting charged a premium and so felt anemic by comparison to the mark 3 planet.<br />
*** This may in turn wind up with the AI having waaaay too many ships for a while, but if we pack those into the guard posts as contents that are not deployed yet, that should have zero performance impact. And it will be good for the humans who suddenly have a lot more firepower at their disposal. Overall the goal coming up is for everyone to have a whole heck of a lot more shooty things, but having them more spread out so that the mega-battles aren't individually any larger than they are now. It will take us a little while to get that part perfect, so please bear with us.<br />
<br />
* TryToSpendBudget_CPA has had some updates to how it deploys ships from itself, since the way it stores ships is different from the start. This may or may not cause demonic fumes to erupt, so let us know.<br />
<br />
* UnlockShipLineForAI() has been removed, as AIs don't work that way anymore, either.<br />
<br />
=== Achievements ===<br />
<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with each AI type enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with some of the Minor factions enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with various galaxy sizes<br />
* Add Achievements for controlling a given number of planets in a game<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have > X Metal/Energy/Hacking points"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Kill > X units", "Lose > X units" and "Kill > X && Lose > Y units"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have a campaign X hours long"<br />
** Note that the above types of Achievements can be added to the game with only XML changes<br />
** TODO: Add a UI to show the player which Achievements have been earned<br />
<br />
=== Science/Tech Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete rework of how techs function. They are no longer tied to individual ships like before, but rather there are actual technologies that are named and that benefit a variety of ships.<br />
<br />
* Ark Upgrade Points and Destruction Points are both confusing and have been removed from the game as a concept.<br />
** But never fear, something very similar with a clearer name and purpose is being added back: Fleet Experience Points.<br />
<br />
* The initial techs have been added, and applied to ships and turrets and whatnot.<br />
** This is, at best, a first pass for now. However, there are are present 14 distinct techs that you can upgrade that are more ship-abilities-focused, and which are generally shared between strikecraft, frigates, and turrets. This is the general intended design, even if exact matchings aren't correct or ideal right now.<br />
** The costs here are also potentially bonkers for real-world use. Additionally, there is a maximum number of times a given tech can be researched, and that is usually set at 4 right now, kind of arbitrarily. That does NOT mean that the max tech level of a ship is 4, however.<br />
*** Ship tech levels are a combination of all the techs that benefit them (some have more than one), as well as any upgrades to the tech level of their specific fleet. So some are much easier to get to a VERY high mark now, whereas others are almost impossible to do.<br />
** There is now a new UpgradeMeFromFleetOnly tech that isn't shown on the menu, but which we use in cases where we want to denote that this IS something we can upgrade, but only at the fleet level rather than the ship level.<br />
*** This is used for things like command stations, engineers, economic production units, and forcefields. That makes these things a lot more location-dependent in terms of how high quality your ships of those sorts are. This should be pretty interesting, actually, and it takes them out of contention for the main science upgrade costs more.<br />
** Overall the goal here is fewer science upgrades happening, but each one having a much larger impact. We may have gone too far in that direction with this first setup of the data, but at this point it's all an xml-based issue.<br />
** Note that all of these techs are based around upgrading all the ships that you have that subscribe to this tech via tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and that crosses fleets.<br />
*** This should benefit mercenaries, although that hasn't been tested.<br />
*** We did base this loosely around Puffin's classes/roles document, but this is meant to be... slightly both more and less granular than that document, and to be multi-categorized in many cases. So your document is still relevant (mainly for fleet design), but it's just semi-related to this specific use.<br />
** It's also worth noting here that some ships/turrets/whatever have multiple tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and those are going to go up in tech quality FAST by comparison to their peers. Assuming that players unlock techs synergistically. So some of the ones like the Light, Heavy, etc, might need to be a lot more expensive than they are right now.<br />
*** As noted already, the balance here is a bananas basic proof of concept right now, and I'm sure broken in a thousand ways. The only purpose of me throwing this together at the moment was to give a proof of concept unified design philosophy to look at, even if details are really wrong. This gives Puffin and others a chance to actually make it make a lot more sense while I move on to work on other things.<br />
** Note that the EXP concept doesn't come into play at ALL with these sorts of techs. These are purely science costs. The EXP is fleet-based stuff instead, and may not cost any science at all (fleets that auto-upgrade would be nice). But also spending some science on a specific fleet's upgrading would be nice, so that's something that will likely be possible. How that works at the planet level is still TBD, I have two different possible models for that and haven't been able to choose between them yet.<br />
** Also please note that for an individual ship/turret/whatever type, there's no risk of it going above its max mark level, which is either 7 or is explicitly defined as something lower, or is markless. If it subscribes to 2 techs that each have 1 upgrade, it would naturally be mark 3, unless it's capped at mark 2 in which case it will sit at mark 2. And if its fleet is also upgraded 3x, then it would be mark 6, unless it was capped lower.<br />
** A general note: This overall tech system has way fewer decision points than the old one, which is good because that makes them actually something that you can contemplate. However, as a byproduct of that, you'll often get some secondary stuff upgraded that you cared less about, and that actually provides opportunities for you to make new use of them in interesting ways if you so choose. Also also, you're a lot more likely to have really wide mark level disparities between parts of your empire (different planets and fleets), which is more in keeping with the first game albeit from a completely new angle. This is exciting.<br />
** Another general note: the overall ship caps per fleet will only be whatever they are, but the idea is to have larger effective ship caps for players by the late game because of a proliferation of fleets. In some cases in the late game you'll also have some fleets that are incredibly technologically superior to the AI, and other fleets that are incredibly behind the times. How this exactly plays out will be interesting to see from players, but in a theoretical sense there's nothing wrong with that; we may just have to adjust some balance dials over time to keep things from being TOO extra weak or strong, and/or to make the AI really reactive to overly-advanced forces if those exist. Here again this is an opportunity for more gameplay, rather than a real challenge in a negative sense.<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for science has been improved to be more accurate and also more descriptive:<br />
** Spend Science to unlock higher-level units and structures. It is gained primarily by claiming new planets and holding them for a while.<br />
** There is a limited amount that scientists can learn from what they find in each system, so you'll need to keep finding new research targets for them.<br />
** A single ship type can be upgraded by multiple tech upgrades as well as from its parent fleet gaining experience, so be sure to consider your options carefully.<br />
** More techs will appear in the tech sidebar as you capture fleets with ships that can benefit from them.<br />
<br />
* The tech sidebar is once again functional, and allows for you to unlock techs that benefits various ships that you have.<br />
** It looks and works a lot more like the hacking sidebar instead of the build sidebar, now, since the type of data it needs to show is very different. This makes it a lot more text-heavy and showing related costs and the mark levels of ships in a really clear and concise fashion. Yay! It does mean no real icons on here, though.<br />
** The tooltips for techs that you can upgrade are also now completely redone, and it shows you which ships will benefit as well as how many of them you have. It doesn't show you the mark level of the ships, because you might have several different mark levels of each ship type since they may be upgraded by fleet upgrades.<br />
** This was certainly needed in order to make the game all that playable in 0.850, but in terms of why we did it right now versus after the build menu, it's mainly because this was simpler and was therefore a nice dry run for the more complicated menus.<br />
<br />
* Ok! So we've already learned quite a bit about techs and how people will wind up using them. Clearly the new system works well, but is going to need refinement; chief among that is just how many upgrades a given line can grant.<br />
** One of the other things that was immediately most clear was that "Ark" as a technology was really not cutting it. This was way too broadly useful, and "Battlestation" was almost as bad.<br />
** First of all, these need to be more pricey, but some Arks should cost more than others, and some Arks should share techs, but not ALL Arks.<br />
** With that in mind, there's a new schema in place for various Arks and Battlestations broken out as follows:<br />
*** Ark Spirit (most basic stuff), Ark Heart (happy helpful stuff, less dangerous), Ark Armor (beefcakes you need to really pay for), Ark Fist (holy smokes these things are powerful, and thus expensive, and only have 3 marks rather than 4).<br />
*** Battlestation Shelter (protection-oriented), Battlestation Hand (grabbing or slowing enemies), Battlestation Architect (engineering or construction).<br />
** And it's worth noting that Battlestations are really oriented into those as well as the previously-were-fortresses Citadels that are way more combat-oriented, so splitting those also matters:<br />
*** Citadel Executioner (kill a lot of things), Citadel Protector (yeah, hurt them, but protect other stuff as the primary), Citadel Consumer (eat or steal the enemies).<br />
** And then there's the Spire Frigates, which really don't need to be lumped in with Arks or Battlestations or Citadels. I'm sure these will expand in the future, but for now we just have the new "Spire Core" (for all three types of Spire Frigate), and they're super expensive but can be upgraded 4 times.<br />
** The overall lesson here is that we CAN have more techs than we maybe were once thinking, particularly since they only show up conditionally. This also makes the Arks and Golems and so on a lot more unique in terms of how well they are upgraded (or not).<br />
*** This will get more crowded in the tech tab with time, unfortunately, as you unlock a lot of ships. For that reason they are now down at the end of the list below all the actual main ship lines.<br />
*** This may also hint that we want more tech lines in general for the other ships, and/or that they need some changes to their science costs, but we'll cross those bridges when we come to them.<br />
<br />
* The science intel message is now more brief in the sidebar, and more informative in the tooltip. Now everything fits.<br />
<br />
* On factions, there is now a InheritsTechUpgradesFromPlayerFactions serialized bool that should be set to true for any factions that the designer wishes to recieve all of the upgrades for the player techs.<br />
** Aka, if two players each have upgrades to Tech A, then the faction will get the largest of the two, not the combined value of them.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the (very elegant, sadly) "tech view" version of tooltips that showed all the ways a ship would be upgraded by gaining a mark level.<br />
** That was overwhelming as an amount of information, but also there's just no place where we'd actually be asking you to see that anymore. Now you upgrade techs that hit a bunch of ships at once, and so this per-ship-type comparison stuff just has no place in there anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Vision Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete vision rework. Planets are all now either<br />
** Unexplored: You have no vision of what is on this planet. You also cannot send ships to or through Unexplored planets.<br />
** Explored: You can't see exactly what's on the planet, but you can see who owns it and the sidebar works. Chris has a TODO to figure out how to show stale data/interesting visuals when you try to look at an Explored planet.<br />
** Watched: This state means "Explored and you have ships there". You can see what's on the planet, but when you no longer have ships there the planet will go back to Explored.<br />
** Permanently Watched: you always have vision here<br />
<br />
* At the beginning of the game, all Player Homeworlds and adjacent planets are Permanently Watched, and all planets 2 hops from a player homeworld are Explored.<br />
<br />
* Capturing a planet or killing an AI command station automatically Explores all adjacent planets<br />
<br />
* You can also Explore a planet by hacking an unexplored planet, as long as you have an adjacent Explored or Watched planet (otherwise you could just explore random planets around the map which seems less interesting to me)<br />
<br />
* You can Permanently Watch a previously Explored planet by hacking (but the AI will launch a small counterattack at you when you do so).<br />
<br />
* The game now tracks the specific gamesecond that entities were created, and when they entered planets, versus "how long ago."<br />
** There are helper methods for getting the familiar "how long ago" data, however.<br />
<br />
* Now that we know the last gamesecond we had vision of a planet, and the gamesecond that ships entered planets, on planets where we do not have current intel we are instead showing the effective last-known data on the sidebar, as well as actually showing the ships visually (through the distortion), even moving around if they are. <br />
** This won't show any ships that have been more newly added to that planet, though, and the sidebar notes that. So there might be a huge hunter fleet moving through there and you'd have no idea, for instance.<br />
<br />
* For planets that are completely unexplored, you cannot directly send ships there anymore, nor can you select it on the galaxy map or send your view there.<br />
** It IS still possible for your ships to path through completely-unexplored planets, for the time being, however.<br />
<br />
* Trying to make it so that player ships are completely unable to pathfind through unexplored planets is rather more than a bit of a nightmare. With that in mind, they are now simply disabled if they wind up going into unexplored space for whatever reason.<br />
** We can make this more sophisticated in the future, but for now that should handle anything exploity.<br />
** Players can use various tricks on the sidebar to click to the fleet leader heading through unexplored space to see such a planet, but they'll wind up seeing nothing there, so they gain very little. And meanwhile, the ships of the player are unable to shoot but still able to move, and enemies are able to shoot and are completely invisible to them, so that's... quite a bit of "fun."<br />
** Main thing we probably want to do at some point is get player ships to try to prefer not going into unexplored territory if at all possible.<br />
** Edit: nevermind, player ships should not be able to path through them at all. So yay! But if they do, they'll be disabled.<br />
<br />
* The "explored" status for planets has been split into "explored by natural means" and "explored by distant hacking."<br />
** This mostly doesn't matter and isn't something we're making a big deal about in most places. But using spy nanites basically is no longer a way you can expand how much your empire gains in vision every time you capture a planet.<br />
** The "explore next to explored" logic basically ignores stuff that was spy nanites. Maybe there should be a conduct later that makes it not ignore that, since that ALSO would provide some interesting strategic options, but frankly for now that seems like overkill. We shall see.<br />
<br />
* When you don't have vision of a planet, there is now a fancy distortion effect that is part grainy-tv and part slow-matrixy-refraction.<br />
** There's not a way to disable this effect, because it shouldn't be fast enough to make anyone nauseous, and there's no real point in looking at planets that you can't see anything at, anyway. This just makes it clear why you can't see those planets (the sidebar says no vision, but why did all the ships just disappear?)<br />
<br />
==== "Hard Mode" For Scouting ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Scout Adjacent Only" conduct, with the following description:<br />
** TLDR: This is harder and will make you take a lot of planets. For advanced players only.<br />
** Details: Normally when you capture a planet, all planets adjacent to ANY explored planets become explored. Unless the map is very narrow, this causes you to get exponentially more planets you can see as the game goes on. Even further than that, there is a minimum number of planets it will explore for you when you take a planet, depending on the number of planets in your galaxy, so that snake maps and other really narrow maps aren't unplayably hard.<br />
** With 'Scout Adjacent Only' enabled, it tosses all that out the window. Instead it just explores any planets adjacent to the planet you just captured. This will make snake maps almost impossible to play (so that's a bad combo), but on maps with more cross-connections it can lead to... a certain added strategic challenge. This still seems masochistic even in the best case, but have fun with that if you want.<br />
<br />
=== Removed/Revamped Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Science Labs, Hackers and Scouts are removed. Scout functions of the Sentinel Frigate and Sentry Starship are removed.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Starships are now per-planet cap, cannot use wormholes, are built directly (like turrets) and die to remains.<br />
** They're effectively Decloakers from Classic, but far more convenient.<br />
<br />
* Engineers are per-planet cap, cap reduced significantly and can't use Wormholes.<br />
** The new Combat Engineers are able to use Wormholes and are a type of Strikecraft instead.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Space Dock and Mobile Builder are not unlockable or buildable, and are instead capturables.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Builder is now the Basic Battlestation, and is capturable.<br />
** And now there are actually like 5 variants of this, thanks to Puffin.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Factory is now the CombatFactory, and is capturable.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Fortress is now a form of Battlestation called Citadels.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Remains Rebuilder has been removed, and the RebuildingRemains metal_flow has now been granted to all of the player command stations and the player mobile builders. It's no longer something that is assist-line-distance-based, nor is it something that requires a dedicated unit to run around doing things with.<br />
** This is one of those streamlining bits that people have requested for a while, but Chris in particular was noting that engineers and rebuilders need to be two separate functions (and they do). But making this instead essentially work like claimables and "just happen" solves the issue that people were complaining about without getting into territory of making the AI for the engineers likely to be bonkers.<br />
** Later we will need for all of our Battlestation types to have this, most likely, or things will get funky at times. This last is a note for Puffin.<br />
<br />
* Colony ships have been removed from the game, since that was a level of indirection that was not needed.<br />
** Similarly, hackers are gone, as are mobile builders in the classic sense.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers in the codebase are now gone. The concept of warheads, in the codebase, is now gone.<br />
<br />
* Starships are now called Frigates, including in the codebase itself. Docks are now called Factories in the codebase.<br />
<br />
* Golems as a standalone thing (for players) are now gone, as are Arks. They are now combined into being the Mobile Fleet Flagships. They are still called golems and Arks, but they're the centerpieces of your fleets at any rate.<br />
<br />
* Really key new limitation for drones, for the sake of sanity and not having nested fleets. This really only applies to player ships, in the main:<br />
** The drone producer must also be the fleet leader. So if we're talking about a player ship, it needs to be the Battlestation or Flagship of a fleet, and not something like a random Frigate as part of it.<br />
** On the AI and NPC sides, they don't really use fleets the same way normally, so anything that is a drone generator just becomes in charge of a new Drone fleet type.<br />
** This is probably going to be the source of some "fun" bugs. It will start spewing errors like crazy when this happens (once per second per ship that has this issue during gameplay), if it happens. It's possible to set this up with bad xml, basically.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for automatically building remains rebuilders and setting them to auto-FRD are both now gone, since so are remains rebuilders.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for "brave scouts" is also now gone, since scouts are also being removed and rejiggered.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers have been removed. They were not exactly exciting, and they don't make sense in the new method of AIs working with unlocked ships.<br />
<br />
* Schematic Servers (formerly ARSes) have been removed. Those also no longer make sense in the brave new world that is the new setup for fleets, etc.<br />
<br />
* The idea of CorruptedAIDesigns has been removed, as that was something that people weren't really using and it doesn't fit well with the new approach to AIs and fleets.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of stuff relating to Golems the way they used to be, including the entire Broken Golems faction, has been removed.<br />
** Golems are now another form of Ark, basically, and are capturable in that fashion.<br />
<br />
* Metal harvesters are now markless, rather than being upgradeable. This solves an issue with them being funky upgrade levels on enemy planets, and in general the ability to upgrade them is something that I was iffy about in the current system anyway. It was likely to be too powerful.<br />
<br />
* The home forcefield generator, which has existed since the first game as a last-ditch tool that you have until you lose it, is now something that you can rebuild.<br />
** It's also now markless and has its stats more directly set, so that you definitely never get more than one. It was kinda funky having it be mark 2 in this game from the start, and it also led you to having a cap of 2 instead of 1.<br />
** The whole purpose of this is so that you can rebuild it if it dies, since you don't otherwise inherently have access to any forcefield generators on your home planet at all, now. You have to put a battlestation or a citadel there in order to get a forcefield beyond the first, and depending on your playstyle you might choose not to do that.<br />
<br />
=== Capturing Planets ===<br />
<br />
* So long as you have a mobile fleet leader on a planet with no command station (enemy or otherwise), you can now capture it like you would have previously done with a colony ship.<br />
** Aka, just take any of your golems or Arks over to the enemy planet and destroy their command station and you're immediately ready to set up your own. Boom, simpler.<br />
<br />
=== UI Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Player profile stuff relating to choosing a default Ark type is now removed under the hood. It hasn't been on the front-end for quite some time now.<br />
** Note that a lot of the stuff with Arks having a story and a portrait image are thus now gone, although again this isn't new on the front-end. Arks simply have a new role now.<br />
<br />
* You are no longer asked to pick a Chief Adviser at the start of the game for your profile. That was a lot of confusion an un-needed choice on something rather trivial, and got in the way of getting you to the actual game.<br />
** Now it just has a screen for profiles that asks for a name and your default colors and that's it.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, you can no longer select a starting bonus ship type OR a starting Ark for your faction as a player. Neither of those make any sense anymore. Now there's something new:<br />
** The game now lets you choose from special starting fleets, of which at the moment there are 5 handcrafted ones. The player can choose which one they want in the game lobby, just like they could with Arks.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" are now able to, and in fact required to have, a description.<br />
** They also now have tooltips in the lobby, which show these descriptions, thus explaining what the heck they do.<br />
<br />
* The conduct for "start with planets explored" has been removed, as that's really cutting out a core part of the game now.<br />
** The scouting being so much more automated now kind of makes it a bit different from other games where you can turn off fog of war. Despite the first game having the option to turn off fog of war, that really takes out the entire flow of the game when it comes to this game.<br />
** Scouting isn't some hassle thing "that you have to do but might want to skip" anymore, but now is part of the reward structure for capturing planets, and so turning that off just would have... a lot of balance issues, among other things.<br />
<br />
* Added the following description to the Experimental: AI Civil War conduct, which is the only pre-existing conduct currently remaining. This may or may not be fully accurate:<br />
** If there are multiple AI factions, they all hate each other and will fight each other. They still hate YOU, too, but all this chaos and infighting is assumedly to your beneit. Then again, you might just find yourself in the crossfire of AIs who are getting more powerful more rapidly due to aggroing each other... so it's anyones's guess as to how long you'll last.<br />
<br />
* Working on making the tooltips for ships substantially more brief while still conveying the important information. Some of them are getting ridiculous for sure.<br />
<br />
* Added a new type of control for our settings menu, which is an integer slider. This is preferable to the textbox or dropdown for some cases.<br />
** We're now using that for the auto-build engineers, which also defaults to 2 now instead of 0.<br />
** We're also now using that for the various volume controls, which were inexplicably textboxes before.<br />
** We're also now using this for the minimum autosaves to keep, and the autosaves interval.<br />
<br />
* When planets are explored via you having just capturing a planet or whatever, it now shows a message log entry saying what planets were discovered and how many of them there were. This way it's clear that scouting is even happening!<br />
<br />
* display_name_for_sidebar has been added for entities, as it lets us give a more brief name to appear on the sidebar while still having a fuller name in tooltips.<br />
** This is optional and will just use the full name if it needs to. But if the sidebar is having bad wrapping of some text, then this should be filled with something shorter. Case in point is the home forcefield generator.<br />
<br />
* There used to be some logic about automatically opening certain windows when you selected certain kinds of ships (build menu when selecting command station, science menu when selecting science lab, etc), but since so much of that is all centralized or otherwise non-ship-related now, or all related to centerpieces, this just led to the UI kind of oddly seeming to do its own thing at times now. This has been removed.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for factories now show which fleets they are supporting, and what the status is of all the individual line items they are building for that fleet. This is super satisfying to just watch, turns out.<br />
<br />
==== Intel Tab ====<br />
<br />
* Something I talked about on the podcast is an new form of objectives, which is an idea that I've been refining since then (and had already been prior to then).<br />
** However, the "objectives" on the sidebar as they stand right now are not something I want to get rid of at all (most of them), given that they are kind of a "todo list of things you might want to do," and that's a pretty important tool to have.<br />
** With that in mind, the Objectives sidebar has instead been renamed to Intel, and over time we'll probably take out some things like the beginner tips and the primary objectives and so on. For the primary objectives we'll likely just recontextualize the same thing, but the beginner tips we'll probably fold into the new objectives (actual objectives system, separate from this intel system).<br />
** All of the really time-consuming-to-add and detailed "objectives" stuff about where we found things to capture and hack and kill, and where we should be scouting, etc, is all going to stay. It's just under the name "intel" instead, now. Really, that's what it is: information that lets you make decisions yourself, be that diverging from your main objectives or defying them or whatever else.<br />
<br />
==== Build Tab ====<br />
<br />
* The "Direct Build" sidebar has been completely reworked from scratch.<br />
** It's no longer based on icons and tiny buttons, but instead has much larger buttons in categories. This may lead to more scrolling in some cases, but it also should be way more legible AND in general the player should have fewer things that they can build at any given planet unless they've stacked a lot of battlestations and citadels there.<br />
** Each line item not only shows what type it is, but also has to include what fleet it goes with -- so if that's the planet fleet, or one of the battlestations or citadels, that is relevant.<br />
*** Why is this relevant? Well, those things can be upgraded independently, for one. And for another note, it's possible that you might choose to move a battlestation or citadel to a new planet, thus making all of their units on this planet stop functioning. So it does play into the strategy if you plan on moving around your battlestations and/or citadels (as you likely will).<br />
** These also now show the cap directly in a 0/3 fashion or similar, with it showing how many have been built out of how many are possible. It's possible that you might have more built than are possible to build, which it will show properly, but with a red warning.<br />
** It also more directly shows the cost for construction -- super useful -- and grays out the text of any entities that you have already built to the full cap so that they are not so noticeable.<br />
** This whole setup is really geared around having many fewer TYPES of things that you can directly build at a given planet, and that's the intention for the long term. We don't really want dozens of options here, but rather a smaller and more interesting selection that you can build from contextually depending on the planet.<br />
** At this point you can actually construct new direct-placement units!<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch of changes have been made to the way the tooltips look in build mode for entities, and also to how things are hovered-over in the build menu and galaxy in terms of what highlights, when.<br />
** It's stuff we'll refine further with time, but if something seems off, please let us know.<br />
<br />
* When a Zenith Trader is visiting, you'll see a bunch of stuff on the sidebar under various categories, noted in pink as being from the Zenith Trader.<br />
** This is different from past versions of the game where there was a specific category for all the Zenith Trader stuff regardless of what its function was. This actually makes it a lot easier to find things by function, particularly if the amount of wares on offer goes up a lot in the future.<br />
** For things like the Station-Keepers (Chained Dark Spire Eidolon), there is now a per-planet cap higher than 1 for these. That's pretty nifty, and it works!<br />
** Note that even if you don't have the metal for these projects NOW, while the trader is visiting, you can start the projects and pay for them over time. This is as before and is by design. The UI might be a bit confusing on this, not sure.<br />
<br />
* In the build sidebar, turrets and "other defenses" have now been properly split out. Before they were all kind of mixed together in "defenses," which got confusing.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Frigates are now part of the Station Keepers sidebar instead of Other Defenses.<br />
** This is meant to be the case for anything that is mobile, essentially.<br />
<br />
==== Hotkeys ====<br />
<br />
* The hotkey for opening the tech tab now only opens that, versus opening that or the hacking tab contextually.<br />
** Given that the docks tab is gone, the build hotkey now only opens the build sidebar directly as well, kind of implicitly.<br />
<br />
* There are now separate hotkeys for opening the hacking (H) and fleet (R) tabs.<br />
<br />
* The "split selection" keybind that was previously L in this game and the original is now semicolon.<br />
<br />
* The "Unload Transports" (U) hotkey has had its description reworked as follows:<br />
** Any mobile fleet flagships that you have selected will immediately unload any ships they are presently transporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new hotkey (L): Load Transports<br />
** Any ships that you have selected which are part of a mobile fleet will immediately get inside their flagship for transport if their flagship is on the same planet.<br />
** Note that the need for this to be separate for unload is that it will be common to have partially-loaded transports and you don't want to get into funky toggle situations with ships getting in and out when you really meant "keep getting in" or "keep getting out."<br />
<br />
* The keybind for "select all scouts" has been removed, since scouts are removed.<br />
<br />
* SelectNextUnitType and SelectPreviousUnitType have both been removed, as they were buggy like crazy in general, and also don't really make all that much sense in the new workflow of things.<br />
<br />
* Trigger Current Master Menu Action 1-12 are now gone as hotkeys, as they only worked in the escape menu (since the rest of the master menu was gone as of over a year ago) and it was using up a lot of hotkeys for something not all that useful anymore. Once upon a time this was brilliant, it just doesn't fit anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Savegame Format Revamp ===<br />
<br />
* The default serialization style for things the game saves is now Byte arrays rather than the char arrays. This will make savegames vastly smaller than before, although not as legible (as if they were before) to edit by hand.<br />
** This is great for a variety of practical reasons, but among them it causes fewer transient garbage collector allocations. And it also makes it so that large integer numbers are no longer something that make the savegame larger. Rather than one char's worth of bytes per digit in the number (1-6 bits, per UTF-8 specs), it now just has a fixed 4 bytes for the number regardless of how many digits it has.<br />
** This breaks all the previous savegames, but they were already broken anyway.<br />
** Player profiles and settings are still using char arrays so that they can be edited by hand as desired.<br />
<br />
* There was previously a "too smart for our own good" method for "compacting" integers down that were used as primary keys. This could cause all sorts of bugs when used incorrectly, and aside from known bugs that this fixes, we happened to see a few other bugs in passing as we were removing it.<br />
** Note that this was needed almost exclusively because of the char arrays serialization that we were using. Now that we're using byte arrays, this compacting is not just bug-prone it's actually not any more efficient in the first place. So it's really good to have that out of there in general.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting a particular bug caused by this.<br />
<br />
* Items that are truly deprecated, but that we still want some record of for whatever reason, are presently moved into a new GameData/Pre900Deprecated folder.<br />
** This way we still have the xml, but the game never looks at it. Normally the purpose of deprecating something is to make sure that savegames that are older can still be read in. With 0.900 we're breaking the savegames anyway, so clearing out the deprecated stuff is only natural.<br />
<br />
* As part of this release, we had switched to writing our savegames in a binary format. However, this wasn't really working fully properly because it was trying to transcode that into unicode, which in turn would sometimes complain with the "Unable to translate Unicode character XXX at index YYY" error.<br />
** This was also notably less efficient in terms of GC usage. Now we're just directly writing the binary file.<br />
** In fact, now we're writing a BuzzsawBinaryByteArray, which is 449kb where even the binary array was 3.2mb, and the char buffer was even larger.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "external data" (aka modder-type data or data that was being saved into the external projects) is saved used to be based on using a sub-serializer that then itself got written as a string back into the main serialization stream.<br />
** This was probably done as a way to isolate freaky bugs introduced into savegames by modders, but with our new serialization logging that's really no longer a worry. As it stands, the sub-serialization may have instead been preventing us from properly saving sub-data and getting it back reliably. Also it was vastly less efficient in the new context.<br />
** Anyway, given that the new context is such that doing the data saving of external data just fully inline without any wrappering is more efficient, that's now what we're doing. Based on the serialization logs, this seems to work great.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging Additions ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Savegame Serialization Logs" setting into the debug section of the game settings.<br />
** When saving a game, write WorldSerialization.txt, and when loading it write WorldDeserialization.txt -- both in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if a savegame won't load for some reason; this lets us do a diff of the two files and figure out where they are diverging.<br />
** Note that this won't help with an existing broken savegame. This will only help if you have it turned on prior to creating a savegame you expect to be broken. This is basically a way for us to test the savegame creation and load process, which otherwise can be incredibly opaque and take a lot of time to hunt down.<br />
** It's hard to understate just how big a deal this tool is. This is an area that could have us searching for hours or days for a problem, and now we can find it in minutes, potentially.<br />
*** The specific genesis of the feature was in fact Chris spending hours searching for something and not finding a solution, and finally thinking there had to be a better way. We should have thought of this 10 years ago, honestly.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Mapgen Log" field in the debug part of the settings.<br />
** When generating a new map in the lobby, write MapGen.txt in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if mapgen isn't really doing what you expect for some reason, or you just want some detailed insight into what is happening and in what order.<br />
** To hook into this as a modder for your own purposes, you simply write to MapgenLogger.Log(). If you're doing anything CPU-expensive or that involves string concatenation or similar, then you can wrap that inside an "if ( MapgenLogger.IsActive )" statement. This simply avoids slowing down mapgen at all when logging is not active.<br />
** There is some serious funkiness going on with some data being null when it should not be, and this is how we're going about figuring out when and why that is happening. But this also lets us see the results of maps that are generated without having to scan with our eyeballs all over a big map so much. Given how much has just changed in mapgen and elsewhere, this is handy, even if we didn't have an immediate bug issue.<br />
<br />
* The fleet centerpiece "repairs" no longer get dumped to the log unless a new debug setting is enabled. This was essentially just spamming the log for no good reason at the moment, but it's useful to be able to see it in some limited cases, hence the new option.<br />
<br />
* Put in a buuuunch of debugging code for figuring out where excess notifications that hang out at the top of your screen are coming from.<br />
** The tooltips for the excess notifications should now explain what the problem is.<br />
<br />
== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
<br />
[[AI War 2: Early Access Starts!]]</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=User:WeaponMaster&diff=35597User:WeaponMaster2019-05-27T01:28:54Z<p>Ovalcircle1: Created page with "Sittin’ in my office with a plate of grilled bacon, Call my man Dwight just to see what was shakin’ Yo Mike, our town is dope and pretty, So check out how we live in the..."</p>
<hr />
<div>Sittin’ in my office with a plate of grilled bacon,<br />
Call my man Dwight just to see what was shakin’<br />
<br />
Yo Mike, our town is dope and pretty,<br />
So check out how we live in the Electric City!<br />
<br />
They call it Scranton. What?<br />
The Electric City<br />
Scranton<br />
What?<br />
The Electric City<br />
<br />
Lazy Scranton the Electric City<br />
They call it that ’cause of the electricity<br />
<br />
The city’s laid out from east to west<br />
And our public parks and libraries are truly the best<br />
<br />
Call poison control if you’re bit by a spider<br />
But check that it’s covered by your health care provider!<br />
<br />
Are you hungry? Well quit your whining<br />
The new downtown has five-star dining<br />
<br />
You lack coal mines and you wanna see ‘em,<br />
Well, check it out, yo, the Anthracite Museum!<br />
<br />
The dope thing to do, that’s several and countin'<br />
The illest place to go is Montage Mountain<br />
<br />
Plenty of space in the parking lot,<br />
But the little cars go in the compact spot<br />
Spot, spot, spot, spot…<br />
<br />
Snack attack time, don’t lose your head<br />
We like Cugino’s for the tasty bread<br />
<br />
They call it Scranton<br />
What?<br />
The Electric City<br />
Scranton<br />
What?<br />
The Electric City<br />
Scranton<br />
What?<br />
The Electric City<br />
Scranton<br />
What?<br />
The Electric City</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War:AI_Types&diff=35578AI War:AI Types2019-05-18T20:52:56Z<p>Ovalcircle1: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{6.009}}<br />
{{OutOfDate}}<br />
<br />
The AI types you are fighting determine how the AI behaves and what ships and defenses it is able to use against you. Some types only give the AI access to extra units, while others radically alter its behavior. Some types are so defense-oriented they don't even launch regular waves, while others are extremely offense-oriented. The type you're up against can greatly influence how you play the game.<br />
<br />
There are four broad categories: easy, moderate, hard, and red/technologist (very hard.) Note that while not all the red types are technologists, sometimes the wiki and game still refer to them all as "technologist."<br />
<br />
If you give an AI a secondary type it almost always makes it more difficult, because where the two types would conflict with each other the AI always takes whatever would benefit it the most. For example, a Turtle/Mad Bomber will both send large waves and have heavy defenses on all planets.<br />
<br />
__toc__<br />
==AI Opponent Types by Expansion==<br />
<br />
[[AI War:Base "Fleet_Command" Game Features#AI Types|Base Game AI Types]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War:The Zenith Remnant#New ZR AI Types|Zenith Remnant Added AI Types]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War:Children of Neinzul#New CoN AI Types|Children of Neinzul Added AI Types]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War:Light of the Spire#New LotS AI Types|Light of the Spire Added AI Types]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War:Ancient Shadows#New AI Types|Ancient Shadows Added AI Types]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War:Vengeance of the Machine#New AI Types|Vengeance of the Machine Added AI Types]]<br />
<br />
[[AI War:Destroyer of Worlds#New AI Types|Destroyer of Worlds Added AI Types]]<br />
<br />
==AI Opponent Types by Difficulty ==<br />
<br />
<!-- Import multiplier values from http://www.arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI War:Why_Do_Enemy_Waves_Get_So_Large%3F --><br />
''Note on AI wave sizes and reinforcements: AI wave sizes and reinforcement budgets are calculated based on AIP, which is then multiplied by a factor shown in the columns below.<br />
<br />
=== Easier ===<br />
{| {{AIWarTableHeader}}<br />
! scope="col" | AI Name<br />
! style="width: 15%" scope="col" colspan="2" | [[AI War:Why Do Enemy Waves Get So Large?|Wave & Reinforce]] Multipliers<br />
! style="width: 25%" scope="col" | Additional Spawns and Unlocks<br />
! style="width: 45%" scope="col" | Description<br />
|- <br />
|'''Bouncer'''<br />
: {{ReqVotM}}<br />
| ?? || 1.00<br />
| ''On all planets:'' All [[Wormhole Guard Post]]s replaced with normal Guard Posts<br />
| This AI uses normal guard posts instead of wormhole guard posts next to each of its wormholes. The result is that you generally take more losses the first time you attack a planet but you have a much easier time keeping it from reinforcing if you choose not to take it. <br />
|- <br />
|'''Chivalric'''<br />
: {{ReqVotM}}<br />
| ?? || 1.00<br />
| (none)<br />
| This AI refrains from targeting irreplaceable structures (like Advanced Factories, Fabricators, etc) other than your Home Command Station, and instead gets a bonus to the size of its Cross Planet Attacks. When present in an AI with a secondary AI type, this type's "do not target irreplaceable structures" characteristic is dominant despite being a disadvantage. <br />
|- <br />
|'''Cowardly'''<br />
: {{ReqDoW}}<br />
| ?? || 1.00<br />
| (none)<br />
| Prefers engagements where it significantly outnumbers human forces, and is much quicker to retreat in other cases. <br />
|-<br />
|'''Entrenched Homeworlder'''<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| ''On many planets:'' [[Captive Human Settlement]]s<br />
| Planets are heavily defended, and they do moderate attacks on the players.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Fortress Baron'''<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00 <br />
| ''On many planets:'' [[Fortress]]es<br />
''On some planets:'' [[SuperFortress]]es<br />
| Planets are mostly moderately defended, but the core planets are incredibly heavily defended, and they do moderate attacks on the players. Their planets are frequently guarded by [[Fortress]]es, and sometimes by [[SuperFortress]]es.<br />
|- <br />
|'''Grav Driller'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.25 || 0.9<br />
| ''On many planets:'' [[Gravity Drill]]s<br />
| Aggressive AI with many gravity drill stations on its planets. [[Gravity Drill]]s nullify teleporting units and majorly slow down all other units, but when captured provide free resources and energy.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Mine Enthusiast'''<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| ''On all planets:'' [[AI War:Mine|Mines]], [[AI War:Mine#Area Mine|Area Mines]], and/or [[AI War:Mine#EMP Mine|EMP Mines]]<br />
| Planets are all moderately defended, but are heavily booby-trapped with various [[AI War:Mine|Mines]].<br />
|-<br />
|'''Neinzul Viral Enthusiast'''<br />
: {{ReqCoN}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| ''On all planets:'' [[Neinzul Viral Cluster]]s<br />
| Has [[Neinzul Viral Cluster]]s at every wormhole that spawns lots of [[AI War:Neinzul Viral Swarmer|Swarmers]], making the use of lightning warheads and similar against them... dangerous.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Shield Ninny'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| (1.00) || 1.00 <br />
| ''On all planets:'' [[Planetary Armor Booster]]s or [[Planetary Armor Inhibitor]]s<br />
| Planets are all heavily defended, often with special armor [[Planetary Armor Booster|Boosters]] or [[Planetary Armor Inhibitor|Inhibitor]]s, but this AI never launches waves at the players.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Sledge Hammer'''<br />
| 2.00 || 1.00<br />
| (none)<br />
| Waves are half as frequent but twice as strong.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Support Corps'''<br />
: {{ReqCoN}}<br />
| (1.00) || 1.00<br />
| Spawns units to attack waves of the other AI and defense of planets. Consists of [[Engineer]]s, Mobile Repair Stations, [[AI War:Munitions Booster|Munitions Boosters]], [[AI War:Shield Bearer|Shield Bearers]], [[Decloaker]]s. With [[AI War:Zenith Remnant|ZR]], add [[AI War:Decoy Drone|Decoy Drones]] and [[AI War:Armor Booster|Armor Boosters]].<br />
| Launches no waves of its own, but supports the waves of its ally by adding in various specialized units. Also supports its own planets and its ally's planets with those sorts of units.<br />
|-<br />
|'''The Tank'''<br />
| 1.25 || 0.9<br />
| Extra Unlocks: [[AI War:Space Tank|Space Tanks]] and [[AI War:Armor Ship|Armor Ships]]<br />
| Planets are all lightly defended, and they do slightly heavier-than-average attacks on the players.<br />
|- <br />
|'''Train Master'''<br />
: <small>''(requires the [[AI War:AI Plots#Astro Trains|Astro Trains AI-plot]] to be enabled)''</small><br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| Extra Units: Double the normal number of astro trains.<br />
| Uses many, many [[AI War:Astrotrain|Astrotrains]].<br />
|-<br />
|'''Turtle'''<br />
| (1.00) || 1.00 <br />
| Extra reinforcements<br />
| Planets are all very-to-incredibly heavily defended, but they do no waves against the players (Cross Planet Attacks and border aggression still happen).<br />
|-<br />
|'''Vanilla'''<br />
: {{ReqLotS}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| (none)<br />
| Has absolutely no unusual powers. Just a plain old basic AI, with whatever unlocks happen to come with the map seed.<br />
|}<br />
<br />
=== Moderate ===<br />
{| {{AIWarTableHeader}}<br />
! scope="col" | AI Name<br />
! style="width: 15%" scope="col" colspan="2" | [[AI War:Why_Do_Enemy_Waves_Get_So_Large%3F|Wave & Reinforce]] Multipliers<br />
! style="width: 25%" scope="col" | Additional Spawns and Unlocks<br />
! style="width: 45%" scope="col" | Description<br />
|-<br />
|'''Artillerist'''<br />
: {{ReqVotM}}<br />
| ?? || ??<br />
| Extra Units: all long-range ship-types. [[Lightning Torpedo Frigate]]s, [[Sentinel Frigate]]s, [[Sniper]]s, [[Zenith Bombard]]s, [[Zenith Electric Bomber]]s, etc.<br />
| This AI is fascinated with bombardment and focuses on throwing lots of (preferably long-range) artillery units at you. Its defense leaves something to be desired, however.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Assassin'''<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| (none)<br />
| Planets are all moderately defended, and they harass the strongest player with prejudice.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Backdoor Hacker'''<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| Warp access: Has an Exo-Galaxy Wormhole on each player's home planet.<br />
| Planets are all moderately defended, and they have a permanent path into each player's home planet (so creating the usual defensive perimeters won't work). This means that wave attacks and Exo-galactic strike forces can spawn at the home planet.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Bully'''<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| (none)<br />
| Planets are all moderately defended, and they harass the weakest player with prejudice.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Camouflager'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| (none) <br />
| All of its mobile ships look like harmless pieces of junk when stationary and not firing, in a manner like [[Zenith Chameleon]]s.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Counter Spy'''<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On all planets: [[Counter-Spy]]<br />
| Planets are heavily defended, and advanced scouting is much more difficult because of the counter spy defenses on each planet, which insta-kills cloaked ships including perma-cloaked scouts.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Exotic'''<br />
: {{ReqVotM}}<br />
| 0.2 || ??<br />
| (none) <br />
| This AI does not send normal waves, and instead sends small "exogalactic attacks" (similar to those provoked by the Fallen Spire, Broken Golems - Hard, etc) with methods of composition and approach very different from normal waves. Note: this AI will send counter-attack waves the normal way.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Experimentalist'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| Extra Unlocks: All experimental ships - {{fleetExp}}<br />
| Aggressive AI that uses a heavy mix of experimental ships along with its normal fleets.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Feeding Parasite'''<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| Extra Unlocks: All parasite ships - {{fleetReclaim}}<br />
| Uses parasite raids almost exclusively (which can be highly damaging).<br />
|-<br />
|'''Kite Flier'''<br />
: {{ReqDoW}}<br />
| ?? || ??<br />
| (none)<br />
| All of its ships "auto kite", maneuvering to stay just barely in firing range of their target.<br />
|- <br />
|'''Mad Bomber'''<br />
| 2.00 || 0.70<br />
| Extra Units: MOAR [[Bomber Starship]]s<br />
| Non-core planets are all lightly defended, but does extremely brutal attacks on the players.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Neinzul Cluster-Bomber'''<br />
: {{ReqCoN}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On all planets: [[Neinzul Cluster]]s and [[Neinzul_Bomber_Cluster]]s. ''(to confirm)''<br />
Extra unlocks of Neinzul ships? ''(to confirm)''<br />
| Builds Neinzul Clusters on all of its planets.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Neinzul Youngster'''<br />
: {{ReqCoN}}<br />
| 1.5 || 0.80<br />
| Extra Unlocks: All playable Neinzul ships - {{fleetN}}<br />
| Uses all Neinzul ship types. Its waves never have any ships other than Neinzul younglings, but its waves have only half the warning that normally is given. Its planets are comparably lightly defended, around the level of the Mad Bomber.<br />
|-<br />
|'''One-Way Doormaster'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| ''On all planets:'' [[Black Hole Machine]]s<br />
| Employs [[Black Hole Machine]]s on all of its planets, which makes each raid into its territory a one-way trip if the black hole machine is not destroyed.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Peacemaker'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On all planets: [[Warhead Interceptor]], [[Orbital Mass Driver]], possibly additional [[Ion Cannon]]s<br />
| Uses anti-golem, anti-starship, anti-warhead, (etc.) ships on all its planets.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Reservist'''<br />
: {{ReqVotM}}<br />
| ?? || ??<br />
| (none) <br />
| This AI gets a larger-than-usual strategic reserve and uses part of it to defend important planets that are normally not reinforced from the reserve.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Speed Racer'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| (none)<br />
| All of its mobile ships have been upgraded to move extremely fast - around speed 200 at Normal settings.<br />
: ''To confirm: does this change with epic/blitz?''<br />
|-<br />
|'''Spireling'''<br />
: {{ReqLotS}}<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| Extra Unlocks: All Spire fleet-ships - {{fleetSp}}<br />
| Fairly aggressive AI that uses only Spire fleet ships.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Stealth Master'''<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| Extra Unlocks: All ships with cloaking - {{fleetCloak}}<br />
| Uses stealth raids almost exclusively (which can be highly disconcerting).<br />
|-<br />
|'''Tag Teamer'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00 <br />
| (none)<br />
| A defensive AI whose guards are extra speedy and don't stay near their posts. This makes them more challenging to attack.<br />
: ''Note: see Speed Racer above. Also, do they attack?''<br />
|-<br />
|'''Teleporter Turtle'''<br />
| (1.00) || 1.00 <br />
| Extra Unlocks: All ships with teleportation - {{fleetTele}}<br />
| Planets are all very-to-incredibly heavily defended, but they do no waves against the players (Cross Planet Attacks and border aggression still happen). Specializes in teleporting ships, which are particularly powerful in defensive postures.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Thief'''<br />
: {{ReqLotS}}<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| Extra Ships: [[Etherjet]]s, [[Spire Tractor Platform]]s, [[Parasite]]s<br />
| Fairly aggressive AI that uses ships with tractor beams and leech capabilities. This can lead to a distinct disregard for player property rights.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Vicious Raider'''<br />
| 1.50 || 0.80<br />
| Extra Unlocks: [[Raider]]s<br />
| Sends substantially larger waves, and somewhat smaller defensive reinforcements.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Zenith Descendant'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| Extra Unlocks: Zenith ships - {{fleetZR}}.<br />
| Aggressive AI that uses only Zenith fleet ships.<br />
|}<br />
<br />
=== Harder ===<br />
{| {{AIWarTableHeader}}<br />
! scope="col" | AI Name<br />
! style="width: 15%" scope="col" colspan="2" | [[AI War:Why_Do_Enemy_Waves_Get_So_Large%3F|Wave & Reinforce]] Multipliers<br />
! style="width: 25%" scope="col" | Additional Spawns and Unlocks<br />
! style="width: 45%" scope="col" | Description<br />
|- <br />
|'''Alarmist'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00 <br />
| On most planets: [[AI War:Alarm Post|Alarm Post]]s or [[AI War:Special Forces Alarm Post|Special Forces Alarm Posts]]<br />
| Uses Alarm Posts on all of their planets that releases defenders when an adjacent AI [[Command Station]] is destroyed. Makes for massive cross-planet attacks unless players carefully kill these alarms.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Attritioner'''<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| On all planets: [[AI War:Attritioner|Attritioner]]<br />
| Planets are all moderately defended, except that each one has an Attritioner, which slowly drains the health of any human ships in the system. Does heavy attacks on the players.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Everything'''<br />
: {{ReqLotS}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| Extra Unlocks: All fleet-ships and core ships.<br />
| Has absolutely every fleet ship and core ship type unlocked from the start.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Extreme Raider'''<br />
: {{ReqLotS}}<br />
| 1.50 || 0.80<br />
| Extra Unlocks: [[Raider]], [[Spire Stealth Battleship]], [[Vorticular Cutlass]], [[Vampire Claw]], and [[Teleport Raider]]<br />
| Very nasty AI that uses raid-oriented fleet ships and really likes sending Raid Starships along with normal waves.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Fortress King'''<br />
: {{ReqAS}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| Extra Unlocks: [[Modular Fortress Command Station]]<br />
| Generally solid AI that has Modular Fortresses in place of most command stations. Expect grievous pain.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Golemite'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On many planets: AI-[[AI War:Golems|Golems]]<br />
| Has fully-functioning golems on a great many of its planets. <br />
: ''Note:'' It's not as bad as one might imagine - the AI's versions have 50% the health of player golems.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Mime'''<br />
: {{ReqDoW}}<br />
| ?? || ??<br />
| (none)<br />
| Normally when you lose units in AI territory the "salvage" is put towards a "reprisal" wave composed of normal AI units. The Mime will actually try to use the specific types of units you lost to create that salvage (even if that AI cannot normally put units of that type into a wave). If you use superweapons this can be... very painful.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Neinzul Nester'''<br />
: {{ReqCoN}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On most planets: [[Neinzul Nest]]s<br />
| Builds [[Neinzul Nest]]s on a huge number of its planets - similar in function to Raid Engines, but triggers when you control or destroy AI ships on adjacent planets.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Overreactive'''<br />
: {{ReqDoW}}<br />
| ?? || 1.00<br />
| (none)<br />
| Sends much larger Reprisal waves when it accumulates sufficient salvage from human ships dying on its planets.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Quadratic'''<br />
: {{ReqDoW}}<br />
| ?? || 1.00<br />
| (none)<br />
| With every normal wave it sends, it doubles the minimum strength of wave that it is willing to send. This tends to lead to waves that take much longer to "charge" (before being announced), but eventually leads to VERY large waves.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Radar Jammer'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On all planets: [[Radar Jammer]]s, mark-I or II.<br />
| Employs [[Radar Jammer]]s on all of its planets, which halves the attack range of all of your ships (and sometimes the AI ships as well, depending on its mark level).<br />
|-<br />
|'''Retaliatory'''<br />
: {{ReqLotS}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On most planets: [[Counterattack Guard Post]]s<br />
| Starts with [[Counterattack Guard Post]]s on most planets, and can actually have more than one on a planet (if that planet would have gotten one normally). This can lead to devastating counter attacks particularly when taking a mkIV planet.<br />
|-<br />
| '''Scorched Earth'''<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| (none)<br />
| Heavily defended planets. Whenever it loses control of a planet, it destroys that planet and all the resources there. Ships will survive. ''Note:'' This action counts as nuking the planet for a ''particular'' achievement.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Shadow Master'''<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On all planets: [[Planetary Cloak]]<br />
Extra Unlocks: all ships with cloaking - {{fleetCloak}}<br />
| Like the Stealth Master, except every planet is equipped with a powerful device that keeps all ships permanently cloaked, even when firing, even if they wouldn't normally have cloaking. The only sign of this enemy is the device itself, which can be difficult to reach what with all the invisible enemies firing at you from the nether.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Special Forces Captain'''<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| (special)<br />
| Can use [[AI War:Special Forces Guard Post|Special Forces Guard Post]]s instead of regular guard posts. This makes for a tremendous number of ships patrolling around the map at any given time.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Spire Hammer'''<br />
: {{ReqLotS}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| Extra Ships in wave: [[AI War:Spire Frigate|Spire Frigate]]s, [[AI War:Spire Destroyer|Spire Destroyer]]s and upwards.<br />
| Generally solid AI that adds capital ships from the Fallen Spire campaign to waves.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Starfleet Commander'''<br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| Extra Ships in wave: Four times the normal number of Starships<br />
| Aggressive AI that uses 4x as many starships in each offensive wave as normal. Sends somewhat larger waves, and somewhat smaller defensive reinforcements.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Starship Fanatic'''<br />
: {{ReqDoW}}<br />
| ?? || 1.00<br />
| Heavily uses Starships<br />
| Goes far beyond the Starfleet Commander, and instead of just getting more starships it uses them instead of fleet ships or guardians for most purposes (waves, reinforcements, etc).<br />
|-<br />
|'''Vanguard'''<br />
: {{ReqDoW}}<br />
| ?? || 1.00<br />
| Heavily uses Guardians<br />
| Uses Guardians instead of fleet ships or starships for most purposes (waves, reinforcements, etc). And Guardians are nasty.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Vengeful'''<br />
: {{ReqVotM}}<br />
| ?? || 1.00<br />
| (none) <br />
| This AI retaliates with (relatively) small exogalactic attacks every time you destroy one of its guard posts, warp gates, command stations, data centers... it's kind of attached to a lot of things, actually. Doesn't take criticism well.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Vorpal'''<br />
: {{ReqVotM}}<br />
| ?? || 0.90<br />
| Extra Units: ??<br />
| This AI focuses on force-field-immune units and strong Cross Planet Attacks as a counter to fortified human positions.<br />
|-<br />
|'''Warp Jumper'''<br />
: {{ReqCoN}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| Warp access: attack wave can launch anywhere, no [[Warp Gate]]s<br />
| On the bright side, this AI type does not build any warp gates on its planets, which saves 5 AI Progress per planet and avoids the need to gate raid their planets. On the downside, however, this AI type is able to launch waves at any non-warp-jammed planet on the map at any time thanks to their warp drives on their individual ships.<br />
|}<br />
<br />
=== Red/Technologist ===<br />
{| {{AIWarTableHeader}}<br />
! scope="col" | AI Name<br />
! style="width: 15%" scope="col" colspan="2" | [[AI War:Why_Do_Enemy_Waves_Get_So_Large%3F|Wave & Reinforce]] Multipliers<br />
! style="width: 25%" scope="col" | Additional Spawns and Unlocks<br />
! style="width: 45%" scope="col" | Description<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Brutal'''</font><br />
: {{ReqDoW}}<br />
| ?? || ??<br />
| "Brutal" core guard posts<br />
| Gets an extra "Brutal" core guard post on each homeworld, and gets another such post on each MkIV planet (that isn't too close to the human homeworlds). Those non-homeworld posts are not protected by the core shield network (if any) but do protect their local command station.<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Crafty Spire'''</font><br />
: {{ReqLotS}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On all planets: [[AI_War_Ships_and_Structures#Spirecraft|Spirecraft]].<br />
| Starts with various Spirecraft (which are generally bigger than starships and smaller than golems) on its planets.<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Heroic'''</font><br />
: {{ReqAS}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| [[Champion Ships]]<br />
| Generally solid AI that can also add powerful Champion ships to each wave. Also periodically spawns a Champion ship on one of its own planets that joins the general AI forces threatening you. At higher tech levels it uses bigger Champion ships. Note that the in-game description uses singular, in reality it is one or more Champion ships based on AIP, both for adding Champions to waves as well as spawning them on its own worlds.<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Raid Engine'''</font><br />
: {{ReqZR}}<br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On most planets: [[Raid Engine]]s<br />
| Uses [[Raid Engine]]s on a huge number of their planets. Makes for very frequent, short-term brutal waves in addition to the normal waves unless players carefully kill these engines.<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Technologist Homeworlder'''</font><br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| On most planets: [[Captive Human Settlement]]s<br />
| Like the Entrenched Homeworlder, except the enemy units are two Marks higher then they would be otherwise (these are quite a formidable foe).<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Technologist Parasite'''</font><br />
| 1.25 || 0.90<br />
| Extra Unlocks: all reclaimers - {{fleetReclaim}}<br />
| Like the Feeding Parasite, except the enemy units and planets are two Marks higher then they would be otherwise (these are quite a formidable foe).<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Technologist Raider'''</font><br />
| 1.5 || 0.80<br />
| Extra Unlocks: [[Raider]]s<br />
| Like the Vicious Raider, except the enemy units and planets are two Marks higher then they would be otherwise (these are quite a formidable foe).<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Technologist Sledge'''</font><br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| (none)<br />
| Like the Sledge Hammer, except the enemy units and planets are two Marks higher then they would be otherwise (these are quite a formidable foe).<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Technologist Turtle'''</font><br />
| (1.00) || 1.00 <br />
| Extra reinforcements<br />
| Like the Turtle, except the enemy units and planets are two Marks higher then they would be otherwise (these are quite a formidable foe).<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''The Core'''</font><br />
| 1.00 || 1.00<br />
| Replacements: all ships are mark-V.<br />
| Planets are all lightly defended in terms of the number of ships at each, but all ships of this AI are deadly Mark V/Core ships. (Note that system Marks are not boosted like Technologist AIs.)<br />
|-<br />
|<font color="red">'''Vicious Exotic'''</font><br />
| 2.0 || ??<br />
| (none)<br />
| This AI does not send normal waves, and instead sends LARGE "exogalactic attacks" (similar to those provoked by the Fallen Spire, Broken Golems - Hard, etc) with methods of composition and approach very different from normal waves. Note: this AI will send counter-attack waves the normal way.<br />
|}<br />
<br />
=== Randoms===<br />
Normally when you choose a random AI type you cannot see which type was actually chosen until the game ends. However, there is an AI Modifier in the lobby that allows you to make them visible from the start, but still chosen at random. You can also use the [[AI War:Disabled AI Types|disabledaitypes.txt]] file to exclude specific AI types from being chosen (if you've already played them, say, and are trying to work your way at random through the whole list -- or if you simply don't like a specific type of AI).<br />
<br />
; '''Random Easier'''<br />
: Chooses one of the easier AI types at random.<br />
; '''Random Moderate'''<br />
: Chooses one of the moderate AI types at random.<br />
; '''Random Moderate/Easier'''<br />
: Chooses one of the easier or moderate AI types at random.<br />
; '''Random Harder'''<br />
: Chooses one of the harder AI types at random (technologist AI types are all considered harder, so this includes them).<br />
; '''Random Harder Non-Technologist'''<br />
: Chooses one of the harder AI types at random, but specifically excluding any of the technologist types.<br />
; '''Random All'''<br />
: Chooses one of AI types at random.<br />
; '''Random All Non-Technologist'''<br />
: Chooses one of AI types at random, but specifically excluding all of the <font color="red">Red</font> AI Types.<br />
<br />
== Eye frequency ==<br />
Keith has said the following about the spawning of Eyes according to AI type:<br />
<br />
:''"AI types vary in how many eyes they get. Turtles, Teleporter Turtles, and Technologist Turtles all get a lot more than everyone else. Shield Ninnies, Grav Drillers, and Peacemakers get slightly less than the turtles (twice the normal).''<br />
<br />
:''On the other end, Mad Bombers, Neinzul Youngsters, Vicious Raiders, Extreme Raiders, Technologist Raiders, Scorched Earth, Attritioners, The Tanks, and The Cores all get half the normal amount.''<br />
<br />
:''From there, it's scaled by difficulty, so diff 10 gets 1.66~ as many as diff 6."''<br />
<br />
{{AIWarRefNav}}<br />
{{HOME}}<br />
{{C_4021}}{{C_AIWar}}{{C_ZR}}{{C_CoN}}{{C_LotS}}</div>Ovalcircle1https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Arrival_of_Fleets&diff=35543AI War 2:The Arrival of Fleets2019-05-15T00:01:19Z<p>Ovalcircle1: </p>
<hr />
<div><br />
== Known Issues ==<br />
* The lobby interface is currently temporary, and undergoing a complete overhaul.<br />
** It's suggested that you use the quick start option instead.<br />
<br />
* Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php<br />
<br />
* '''Multiplayer is temporarily disabled''' while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.<br />
<br />
* There are a variety of ships/units that don't have final graphics at the moment, though they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
* We're in progress with a major revamp of some systems based on cumulative feedback in order to push the game even more towards the feel of the original game... despite further divergence from it at a mechanical level.<br />
<br />
== What's this phase all about? ==<br />
<br />
After 3 months of Early Access and 2+ years of development, we've reached a point where we know what we want the 1.0 version of the game to look like. SO very much about this game already works well, but there are some major deficits coming into this phase when comparing this sequel to the original game. The aim of this phase is to close those gaps and make this clearly the superior product in terms of playability, fun factor, the amount of fun thinking-about-interesting-challenges you do during gameplay, and so on. <br />
<br />
There's also of course still more polish and bugfixing that we want to get done, and the lobby redo is still scheduled of course (but quick starts are an awesome alternative, and have helped us to defer a final design for the lobby as we formed up some other bits of the game first), but we're feeling really good about this final sprint toward 1.0. We still do need to also finish some graphics for the existing ships, but they all have their icons.<br />
<br />
There is some more content coming as part of this phase, kind of by definition -- fleets as a concept Change Everything in a good way -- but the focus is on taking what is a pretty awesome game with a lot of depth and pushing it to a level that we hope beats the pants off the original, finally. Stay tuned.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.859 ==<br />
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)<br />
<br />
* Mobile Support Flagships now show that they are building things in the tooltip<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the analysis of this problem<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Objectives (in the intel tab) for capturing battlestations and flagships now shows the supported units<br />
** This was annoying me<br />
<br />
* Allow the Dyson Sphere to free itself if it was reconquered. Otherwise you have to babysit the Dyson Sphere once you free it<br />
** Note this may cause the AI and Dyson Sphere to fight more often, since the AI is apt to try to recapture it repeatedly. May need further tweaks<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where Factories and Support Fleets were spending less metal than intended when producing more than one type of ship at once.<br />
<br />
* Fix a logic problem with neutral planet hacking which prevented you from being able to Watch-Hack a neutral planet<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add a "Ally player to AI" option in the game lobby.<br />
** This prevents you from playing the game normally, and is intended for people who want to play the game in Sandbox mode, watching the AI fight various minor factions, or an AI Civil War (or both)<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where hydra head ships (that spawn from hydras such as Stingray Hydra) weren't properly attritioning or being set to pursuit mode.<br />
** They will die faster thanks to the attrition working now, but hopefully be more useful as they'll chase enemies automatically.<br />
** For modders, this can be enabled for any ship by defining self_attritions_X_percent_per_second_if_parent_ship_not_on_planet="X" and adding the tag always_self_attritions="true" to your ship. Doing this for any ship except those spawned from another ship dying is kinda pointless though.<br />
<br />
* Don't allow drones to generate salvage<br />
** Suggested by Democracy<br />
<br />
* The AI will now wait until a wave is "strong enough" before sending it, rather than potentially sending very small or empty waves<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Allow the Nanocaust to kill Black Hole Machines, since they were otherwise an excessively effective counter to the Nanocaust<br />
** Thanks to a number of people for suggesting this, including Mosrael<br />
<br />
* Raid Engines function and are in use again.<br />
<br />
* Factories will now only produce strikecraft and frigates for fleet centerpieces that are fully claimed.<br />
<br />
* Player engineers are no longer able to repair friendly zombie ships.<br />
** A previous change to make zombies attrition every minute was effectively just a metal sink because they were still able to be repaired.<br />
<br />
* Like we have had description_appender_dll and description_appender_type for quite some time, we now also have per_second_custom_logic_dll and per_second_custom_logic_type.<br />
** The former calls void AddToDescriptionBuffer( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntityOrNull, GameEntityTypeData RelatedEntityTypeData, ArcenDoubleCharacterBuffer Buffer ) on a IGameEntityDescriptionAppender.<br />
** The new one calls void RunEntitySpecialPerSecondLogic( GameEntity_Squad RelatedEntity, ArcenSimContext Context ) on a IGameEntityPerSecondSpecialLogic.<br />
** This allows us to have all sorts of crazy AI watcher units, including AI Eyes or whatever else, that run some completely custom logic once per second. It's easy for modders to define, etc, etc.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Various fixes and changes to zombie fleets.<br />
** There is now a defined minimum and maximum amount of zombie ships that get randomly sent out when zombies decide to raid another planet. This is currently set at 30 and 50 respectively.<br />
** The group of ships that get sent out when deciding to raid a planet is now randomized. Previously the ships that got selected to raid were always the first ones created on the planet, now the group that gets selected is chosen randomly.<br />
** Zombies now correctly lose only 2% of their hp per minute. Previously, ships with high shields were losing much more hp per minute.<br />
<br />
=== Lobby Guts Revamp (Visually No Improvements Yet) ===<br />
<br />
* Completely redid the inner guts of how the lobby keeps track of changes that you're requesting, and how it then goes about updating and syncing the game and the UI, respectively.<br />
** It's a lot more responsive-feeling now, although we can get it even better than this. And it also provides a basis for us to be able to make this properly visually better soon.<br />
** This also fixes a number of problems that have existed where people in multiplayer making changes at the same time would have conflicts and lost data.<br />
** Essentially this is now doing differentials of changes rather than wholesale copies, and it keeps track of a separate "setup as per the lobby" that only the lobby can touch, and a "long term settings" that the game reads from later on.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a number of things with the map type sub-controls so that it is now fully modder-friendly, and multiplayer-safe.<br />
** You can now mod in you own map type sub controls without having to edit the central files (which of course would be overwritten next time there's a release).<br />
<br />
* Made the game way more robust when it comes to having a map set up that doesn't include any factions for whatever reason.<br />
** It's possible to make this happen in the lobby code if you mess up other things, and it's much easier to just have this be robust so that we can see the real errors.<br />
<br />
* Fixed up a variety of fonts that were too small, particularly for dropdowns, in the lobby in recent beta versions.<br />
<br />
* A variety of the map types now have much easier-to-digest names for their options, and all map types now have proper spacing between the words in their names and their options.<br />
<br />
* A new settings option has been added to the Debug section: "Write Lobby Setup Changes To Log"<br />
** If something strange is going on with the lobby, in multiplayer or otherwise, this is a way for the log to have a variety of data sent about what changes are being requested, and when.<br />
<br />
* New options for writing the full contents of a GameCommand have been added, to get all the details of what's in each list being sent, etc. This is now used a variety of places that can benefit from that extra clarity (all error-reporting-related or otherwise debug stuff).<br />
<br />
* GameCommands have been expanded to allow for a third RelatedString, which is needed by some of the new lobby stuff.<br />
<br />
* Automatically-created controls (such as in dynamic interfaces like the lobby) now can have a string control code sent to them along with the two integer control codes.<br />
** This again is needed for the lobby, and makes some of the new modder-friendly map stuff possible.<br />
<br />
* Some data during mapgen was previously stored in the Factions object, and others in ConfigurationForFaction in the WorldSetup object, and still others off in settings, etc.<br />
** The game now properly stores all that data inside the WorldSetup object, so that it can be copied around and separate versions can be read at various times (for display versus for mapgen asynchronously, etc), and so that it plays nice with multiplayer.<br />
<br />
* Mapgen logging now includes a new entry for ControlledByPlayerAccounts_DuringGame, which is now split between Factions (for ingame) and the WorldSetup (for the lobby), as noted in the above note.<br />
<br />
* Both of the modal popup types (the OK window and the Yes/No windows) now support scrolling text, aka way more info than before. Before if the text got too long, it would just cut off.<br />
** This is useful for all sorts of things, such as if we want to have things like header items that you can click (AIP display, for instance) that would give you a readout of a bunch of new details about the state of all the AIs (salvage amounts, reprisal status, whatever else we feel like).<br />
<br />
* A ton of debugging data about the state of the WorldSetup objects, and the basic faction data as well, can now be exported via either ToString() or WriteDetailsToStringBuilder().<br />
** This lets us actually look inside and see what is happening, which is kinda relevant!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the initial fleet not being serialized properly in the WorldSetup.<br />
<br />
* Added a new setting to the Debug section of the settings menu: "Show Debug Details Button In Lobby"<br />
** When enabled, a 'Debug Details' button appears in the lobby, which you can click to have it pop up all the relevant information about the current setup from a very low-level debugging style.<br />
<br />
* There is now a "tall" version of the modal "OK dialog" that is able to tell you info. This is particularly useful for info dumps versus just a quick notice regarding whatever it was going to tell you.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.858 Hotfix: The Lobby... Ate My Galaxy? ==<br />
(Released May 9th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Fixed the Vanguard Hydra Head benefiting from Heavy Tech instead of Light like their parent unit.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug in the prior version that threw invisible harmless errors while loading the game because it was trying to find the settings for the galaxy map before the settings had been properly loaded.<br />
<br />
* Guardians will now have a chance at spawning with waves. If maxGuardianTypes is larger than 0, a random value between 0 and maxGuardianTypes is chosen as the minGuardianTypes. Random bags of anyGuardians are chosen until the minimum is reached.<br />
** Right now guardians only get added if the strikecraft fail to completely fill numDifferentShipsToSpawn. This can be changed easily by removing the comparison ( chosenUnitTypes < numDifferentShipsToSpawn ) in both the if statement and the while loop.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug introduced in the prior build where if you changed anything in the lobby or even clicked to the factions tab of the lobby, then you'd get control of a ton of planets and be under fire on all of them and probably lose the game instantly as well. Very amusing in small doses, but that's quite enough, thanks, game. ;)<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, WeaponMaster, Gerard, Mosrael, and DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.857 The AI Strikes Back... Hard ==<br />
(Released May 8th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* The name of the currently playing music track is now shown in the Escape menu, for people like me who can never remember the titles<br />
** Prompted by music nostalgia from Puffin and Democracy in discord<br />
<br />
* There are now Achievements for winning in Civil War mode<br />
** Untested, like most of the other Achievements<br />
<br />
=== AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now be less afraid of distant enemies<br />
<br />
* Hunter Fleets will now consider enemy forces when choosing how to route to a target, so they don't accidentally suicide into a heavily defended planet on the way to somewhere else<br />
<br />
* The AI now has an "overconfidence ratio", where on lower difficulties Threat will overestimate its strength when choosing whether it's strong enough to attack. This makes it more aggressive, but also more likely to lose when it attacks<br />
** Finding ways to differentiate the AI difficulties is good<br />
<br />
==== AI Civil Wars ====<br />
<br />
* An AI will only give resource to to its own Hunter and Warden Fleet(s)<br />
<br />
* The AI Civil War now includes Warden and Hunter fleets. Each AI's warden/hunter is now hostile to other AIs and other Hunter/Warden Fleets.<br />
<br />
==== AI Homeworld Battle Changes ====<br />
<br />
* If an AI homeworld is attacked:<br />
** AI Threat ships on the homeworld will fight to the death<br />
** Ships Guarding planets near to the homeworld will become Threat. The higher the difficulty the more planets will be turned to Threat.<br />
** Threat ships will converge on the homeworld. Threat already waiting against a strong target will just join the Hunter fleet<br />
** That AI's Hunter and Warden Fleets will immediately converge on the homeworld<br />
<br />
* Thanks to a number of people for noticing the AI homeworld battles could be dull, including Nameless Terror from Steam. Thanks to StarKelp for a helpful save game to let me test this.<br />
<br />
==== Changes to AI Reinforcement ====<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft were being counted as turrets when loaded in a guard post, limiting the amount of turrets the AI could rebuild<br />
* Fixed a bug where the strikecraft currently on an AI planet were calculated incorrectly, allowing the AI to infinitely reinforce strikecraft if it never built guardians<br />
* Fixed a bug where strikecraft inside the AI Command Center were not being counted as guard strength for reinforcement<br />
** These bug fixes improve more defensive AI types like Turtle, as these two issues combined usually meant that the AI could never reinforce strikecraft or turrets<br />
<br />
* The AI can now reinforce an extra 25% strikecraft and Turrets per living guardpost on alerted planets<br />
** AI planets are alerted when there is a human command center adjacent to them<br />
** Destroying guardposts on planets next to human planets is now much more important, as they can reinforce to be much stronger than they started out as if left untouched<br />
<br />
* These are large changes that are mostly untested, let us know if this ends up making the game too hard or frustrating<br />
<br />
=== New Settings Options For Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new Galaxy Camera setting: Extra Background Hexagon Intensity<br />
** If you would like the background to be more stylized hexagons, then you can turn this up.<br />
** Nobody was really asking for this, but Chris had mixed feelings about his defaults and so figured why not.<br />
<br />
* The previous amount of bloom on the galaxy map was a bit on the high side, with an intensity of 2.06. That has been reduced to a new default of 1.4.<br />
** However, a new setting allows you to configure it between 0.4 and 4, which are two fairly extreme ends of it.<br />
** New galaxy camera setting: Bloom Intensity<br />
*** How glowy would you like the galaxy map to appear? More looks more computer-screeny, but can be distracting depending on your contrast settings on your monitor.<br />
** Thanks to Badger and danny for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== New Debug Commands ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to decrease AIP<br />
<br />
* Add a new Debug command to kill all AI units and structures on the currently viewed planet<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
==== When a flagship of yours gets crippled... ====<br />
<br />
* Having a Flagship crippled by the AI now gives the AI a nice burst of Salvage, enabling them to power up reprisal waves. This is intended as a penalty for losing Flagships.<br />
** Different flagship types generate different amount of salvage. Officer flagships generate more than Support or Transport, for example. The Regenerator Golem will generate much less salvage than other flagships<br />
** The AI will generate less salvage if it cripples a flagship on a neutral planet (but still some)<br />
*** All the tunables are in XML for this<br />
<br />
==== When you don't have enough energy... ====<br />
<br />
* Claimables that would cost you more energy than you have available now can't be claimed, and it shows that in their tooltip.<br />
** Previously it could just claim stuff and throw you into negative energy.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Similarly, if you don't have enough spare energy to create something out of a factory (strikecraft, frigates, whatever) then it will only build up to 100% and then will stop and not actually emerge.<br />
** Same with drone production; it won't produce the next drone, but just will stick at 100%.<br />
** In both cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** This is completely untested. Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Any units that are currently trying to self-construct, and you don't have enough energy for them (or negative energy in general) will completely stop constructing (unless they either don't consume energy or produce it).<br />
** In the relevant cases the interface will also show "ENERGY SHORTAGE" next to whatever the unit is.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for suggesting.<br />
<br />
==== AI Overlord Phase 2 ====<br />
<br />
* Now uses a Plasma Overdriver in place of the old Plasma Torpedo, affecting everything in a large radius.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Bolt damage 4,000 -> 6,000, shot count 40 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Fusion Bomb damage 30,000 -> 50,000, added 2x bonus multiplier vs targets of mass >= 5.<br />
<br />
==== Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Increased count of Guardians on AI planets.<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian Fusion Bomb Bypass 0.6 -> 0.9.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian damage 350 -> 450.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian damage 1,000 -> 300, shot count 1 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Temperamental Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tripled health of Fragmenting Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% for Tantruming Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Tantruming Guardian shot count 1 -> 5.<br />
<br />
* Fragmenting Guardian Shard health increased 50%, damage 800 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian damage 1,200 -> 1,500.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 220 -> 330.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Guardians now have a bonus multiplier vs albedo >= 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Guardian damage 3,500 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guardians ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guardians.<br />
<br />
* Increased health of Pike, Nucleophilic and Grenade Launcher Dire Guardians to match the others.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guardians, excluding Forcefield - still increased.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guardian shot count 5 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Plasma Guardian explosion size 300 -> 600.<br />
<br />
* Dire Pike Guardian damage 6,000 -> 4,000, shot count 3 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guardian shot count 3 -> 6.<br />
<br />
* Dire Grenade Launcher Guardian damage 1,300 -> 1,600.<br />
<br />
* AI Hunter / Killer shields 1,000,000 -> 2,000,000, Fusion Bomb shot count 25 -> 35.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for an AI Hunter / Killer to be chosen in place of a Dire Guardian.<br />
** This thing spawns as Mark 5 if it does, so be really careful.<br />
<br />
==== Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Increased bonus multipliers of Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Guard Posts excluding Forcefield.<br />
<br />
* Increased health by 25% of Forcefield Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10, reload time 4s -> 3s, range 8,000 -> 10,100.<br />
<br />
* Sabot Guard Posts increase their bonus multiplier with Mark.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guard Post shot count 5 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* MLRS Guard Post damage 480 -> 240, shot count 8 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 1600 -> 2,200.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Stealth Guard Post damage 600 -> 2,000.<br />
<br />
* Added a rare chance for non-Swarmer AI planets to have a Swarmer Guard Post.<br />
<br />
* Increased frequency a bit of Forcefield Guard Posts (as well as Forcefield Generators).<br />
<br />
==== Dire Guard Posts ====<br />
<br />
* Greatly increased bonus multipliers of Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Dire Guard Posts.<br />
<br />
* Dire Sabot Guard Post damage 3,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tesla Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Concussion Guard Post shot count 6 -> 12.<br />
<br />
* Dire Parasite Guard Post damage 6,000 -> 3,000, shot count 12 -> 30.<br />
<br />
* Dire Spider Guard Post damage 4,000 -> 2,000, shot count 12 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Nucleophilic Guard Post damage 8,000 -> 10,000, shot count 3 -> 6, range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Gravity Guard Post damage 12,500 -> 2,000, reload time 1s -> 2s, shot count 1 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Guard Post range 8,000 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
==== Drones ====<br />
<br />
* Dire Shredder Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, damage 4,000 -> 8,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida Drone health 5,000 -> 10,000, count 20 -> 40.<br />
<br />
==== Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Golems (Player and AI).<br />
<br />
* Increased health of all Arks.<br />
<br />
* Health increased 50% of all Spire Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Doubled health of all Combat Factories.<br />
<br />
* Increased shields by 25% of all Citadels.<br />
<br />
==== Strikecraft ====<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette shields 3,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Molotov explosion size 500 -> 650.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot base damage multiplier 3x -> 6x.<br />
<br />
==== Science, Tech and Hacking ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced Upgrade Costs of Battlestations and Citadels a bit.<br />
<br />
* Starting Science 20,000 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Science gained from Spire Archive Extraction 5,000 -> 8,000.<br />
<br />
* Increased secondary response strength of some AI hacks.<br />
<br />
==== General ====<br />
<br />
* Reduced the cap multipliers on Transport Flagships a bit.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fixed a tooltip typo that incorrectly identified the StrikeCraft version of the Intragalactic Coordinator as increasing the turret cap.<br />
<br />
* Only explore new planets when a Player kills an command station. Otherwise the Nanocaust and Civil War were giving tons of free vision<br />
<br />
* Economic Command Stations can now build multiple energy collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting, and puffin and ptarth for debugging assistance<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug causing fleet centerpieces to not cost any metal to claim.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the report.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the metal cost to claim capturables, this was causing most capturable things to cost less metal than intended. <br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Hunter Fleet was refusing to enter defended planets<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug in the internal drone construction logic that was previously present in the 0.850+ branch, but which was really only rearing its head on the new internal versions. Curious.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug with the seeding of SingularFreakySurprises where the chance for a golem to appear was being rolled once per galaxy instead of once per planet.<br />
** No more galaxies full of golems.<br />
<br />
==== Trying and Failing To Fix The Lobby ====<br />
<br />
* The way that the lobby regenerates the galaxy map is now slightly less direct. Rather than just directly updating things every time any dropdown value changed or similar, it now queues up those changes cumulatively and then applies them all 100ms after the last change.<br />
** This is because we can have situations where one dropdown changes, causing others to change, and that was causing repeat and often incomplete commands to be sent.<br />
** This was what we thought the disappearing-factions bug from the last few builds was, and we assumed it had to do with the dropdowns handling onValueChanged differently. That may be the case, but we can't really see how that's the case from a code review.<br />
** So this does seem to help with not missing things like some of the smaller secondary data for factions for instance, but it wasn't the complete solution we had hoped it would be.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, put in some defensive code to prevent certain errors when the game is trying to show a row for a faction that is out of bounds.<br />
** We get a lot more info about what went wrong when this is happening, at least. These errors are also no longer silent, but instead pop up a good error message with a useful stack trace.<br />
<br />
* Split the internal CodeDirectiveTag int on the ArcenUI_CreateElementDirective struct into CodeDirectiveTag1 int and CodeDirectiveTag2 int.<br />
** The purpose of this is so that we no longer have to do any crazy bitshifting to get the data out of a single integer for the faction index and field index in the lobby. This approach was mathematically clever, but had legibility issues at bare minimum.<br />
** Various parts of the lobby were incorrectly reading the data back as just faction index with no bitshifting going on, and maybe that was correct for those fields (??), but we're not really sure and that lack of sureness is not worth a tiny bit smaller struct.<br />
** This may or may not fix some bugs, but at least things are clearer.<br />
<br />
* Did NOT manage to fix the lobby with all these various changes.<br />
** But have managed to make ourselves wonder how it ever functioned at all.<br />
** Simply opening the MORE options next to a faction will change what is available in there, fun fact. That broke as heck, and probably isn't completely new.<br />
** Going through all this is, on the plus side, giving us a vastly better idea of how we want to rearchitect the lobby from a technical standpoint while keeping as much of what is there as possible. It looks like the "new lobby" is going to be a feature for 0.900-era AI War 2, simply because of all this.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.856 Clever Girl ==<br />
(Released May 4th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Ships that are in the process of loading into the fleet centerpiece no longer collide with other ships when near the centerpiece; faster loading with less micromanaging required.<br />
<br />
* Beam weapons now optionally support maximum_number_of_targets_hit_per_shot in the XML.<br />
** If the max is defined, ships hit past the maximum split the damage of the maximum equally between all ships.<br />
*** As an example, if you had a 10,000 damage beam with a max of 2 targets and it hit 4 targets, each target would take 5,000 damage only ( 2 max / 4 hit ).<br />
<br />
* Tweak the text for some hacks to fit the text in boxes.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators now cost AIP when the AI kills them<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror on steam for suggesting<br />
<br />
* The AI is now allowed to send waves against Unowned but defended planets in Civil War mode. The AI also gets buffs to its "anti-other-AI-planet" waves in civil war mode.<br />
** Thanks to Ovalcircle and Democracy<br />
<br />
* Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy now have an Objective to destroy them<br />
<br />
* Changed the way science hacking scales to be more intuitive<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for complaining about it.<br />
<br />
* When transferring units between factions, clear any previous orders and set the units to be in Attacker mode. This was causing issues when transferring units to the Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where having crippled flagships on a planet could sometimes cause hacks to fail<br />
** Someone complained about this but I don't remember who it was.<br />
<br />
==== Improved AI Attack Coordination ====<br />
* When the AI chooses targets for the Threat Fleet, it has a mild preference for attacking planets with critical player structures like Zenith Power/Metal Generators and Intra-Galactic Coordinators<br />
** The tunables for how strong that preference is (as opposed to going for more poorly defended targets) is an XML tunable per AI type<br />
<br />
* The AI now takes into account incoming wave strength when considering whether it is strong enough to attack a target when a wave is < 20 seconds out<br />
** This should allow Threat/Hunter ships to coordinate attacks with incoming waves when appropriate<br />
<br />
* When calculating whether a planet is a good target, the Hunter/Warden fleets now also include allied ships on their way to the target, as well as those currently at the target. <br />
** More coordination improvement code<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Gunboats should now actually decloak.<br />
** Thanks to Mac for finding this.<br />
<br />
* Gravity effects cannot reduce a units speed below 20%, up from 5%.<br />
** This is to stop being able to stack Gravity and effectively replicate Tractor Beams.<br />
<br />
* Target priority lowered for Tachyon Sentinels and Arrays.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY for reporting the bullet magnets these were.<br />
<br />
* Decreased the time for AI Threat to join the Hunter Fleet, from 15 minutes at all difficulties, to starting at 10 on Diff 1, lowering by 1 for each Diff higher, maxing out at 3 minutes on Diff 8, 9 and 10.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.855 Galactic Markings ==<br />
(Released April 30th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Improve the hovertext for waves. The hovertext now shows the Target planet name in the colour of the planet's owner, and the planet with the warp gate in the colour of the faction sending the wave.<br />
** Thanks to Ptarth for making sure I did this right<br />
<br />
=== Hacking Improvements And Science from Neutral Planets ===<br />
<br />
* Add a new hacking mechanism to allow extracting Science from neutral planets. It currently costs 5 AIP as well as a few hacking points. Performing this hack will cause the AI to launch a wave at you.<br />
** The AIP is part of the "AIP for taking a planet". So if you killed the command station there's actually no AIP cost (since you paid it when killing the command station). If another faction destroyed the command station then it will cost 5 AIP, but if you eventually capture the planet it will only cost 15 AIP when you capture instead of 20.<br />
** Note that this allows for you to collect Science much more quickly than normal by killing the command station and then doing this hack before capturing the planet, at the cost of some hacking points and the AI getting a bonus attack at you.<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon, DD the GerbilStrangler, Nameless Terror, themouthofsauron, x4000, Puffin and Apthorpe for useful discussion<br />
<br />
* If a Flagship becomes crippled mid-hack, the hack fails. Also Crippled Flagships are no longer allowed to start hacks.<br />
<br />
=== Galaxy Map Visuals ===<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map's bloom settings have been updated a huge amount, giving the entire scene a bit of a computer-screen glowy vibe.<br />
** The blue hexes in the background have been adjusted and the scanline effect is now less noticeable, as part of this, though. It was just a bit too much visual distraction.<br />
<br />
* All of the roman numerals for mark levels have been switched to a more thematic sci-fi type font.<br />
<br />
* All of the graphics for planets on the galaxy map are now more consistent in size, and generally smaller, as is the selection radius around the one you're viewing right now.<br />
<br />
* The positioning of all the font stuff on the galaxy map has been changed around a lot, to be tighter around the planets but no longer ever overlapping with the overlarge planet icons (that no longer are overlarge).<br />
** In general this keeps things more compact and hopefully also more legible.<br />
<br />
* The little icons for "important ships at planets" are also now a bit smaller and more compactly-placed under the planet on the galaxy map.<br />
** They should still be plenty legible, but no longer oversized compared to some of the planet stuff they are essentially orbiting.<br />
<br />
* As you zoom out on the galaxy map, the planets (and their text and icons) no longer stay quite as large as they previously did, instead shrinking down more.<br />
** On most screens this should remain legible, while at the same time keeping them from overlapping.<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.001" to galaxyplanet_scale_up_factor="0.0007" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalVisualConstants\CMP_VisualConstants.xml file.<br />
<br />
* The amount of time the icons and text now stay next to planets on the galaxy map have also been changed dramatically, so that they remain around until almost the last possible amount of zoom (and it's kinda useful having a super far zoom that gets rid of that clutter, at least at first thought).<br />
** This was simply changing galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="1500" to galaxyplanet_hide_side_text_starts_at_y="2000" and galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1300" to galaxyplanet_hide_special_entities_starts_at_y="1700" in the GameData\Configuration\ExternalConstants\KDL_VanillaConstants.xml file.<br />
** Particularly with how it's easier to see at a glance what the mark levels of planets are, and if you have current intel on them, this final-decluttered stage seems particularly useful. If you disagree, there are actually sliders in the options for changing it so that it declutters sooner or later.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Add a mechanic to allow anti-AI zombies to self-attrition over time. Currently set to 1% self-attrition per minute. This isn't very fast, and your engineers will repair them, but it's something?<br />
** Done after seeing some games where HeartHunter seems to have zombified the entire Hunter Fleet<br />
<br />
* Reduced the power of Mark 5, and greatly reduced the power of Mark 6 and 7.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels should have more Turrets.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Beam Cannons and Plasma Turrets in "Monochrome Turret" designs.<br />
<br />
* Lowered count of Frigates in "Frigates With Support" designs.<br />
<br />
* Doubled Mass Driver damage.<br />
<br />
* Botnet Golem shots per salvo 80 -> 50.<br />
<br />
* Player Botnet Golem damage 750 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Changed the scaling of most Tech Upgrade costs to somewhat match what they used to be before Fleets.<br />
** Some are cheaper, some are more expensive, and some just have the Marks evened out.<br />
** This is something that will probably always be a bit off somewhere, but hopefully this is an improvement.<br />
<br />
* Plasma Turret range 10,100 -> 15,000.<br />
<br />
* Beam Cannon and Heavy Beam Guardian range 15,000 -> 12,000, reload time 4s -> 6s.<br />
<br />
* Allow far more Anti-AI zombies to leave their current planet whenever that event occurs.<br />
<br />
* Mugger does a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Array range 2800 -> 4200.<br />
<br />
* Doubled count of Tractor Arrays in almost every player-available source.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator shields 250,000 -> 350,000.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Generator shields 150,000 -> 500,000.<br />
** Extreme, but these are apparently tiny roadbumps currently. They're rare, so this shouldn't be obnoxious.<br />
<br />
* Forcefield Generator size increased.<br />
<br />
* Shield Guard Post shields 90,000 -> 150,000.<br />
<br />
* Focused Gravity Generators and Gravity Guardians now only slow things below engine_gx 14, rather than 15.<br />
** There were a few units that should've been resistant to this but weren't due to a minor error.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestations will now always have Minefields as well as Engineers, instead of just Engineers.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix some issues with the science hovertext, where it was still listing planets even after you'd taken all their science.<br />
<br />
* Handle the case where a player might have Overspent building a unit. This can happen if a player was building a unit after spending X metal, saves the game, then changes the metal cost of the unit to < X via XML and reloads the game.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the bug report.<br />
<br />
* Updated the Steamworks integration library that we use (and the Steamworks dll/so/dylib files from Valve) to their latest versions.<br />
** More details are here: https://github.com/Facepunch/Facepunch.Steamworks<br />
** On windows, we can confirm that now it actually shows you as being logged in properly, and also lets you see the proper main menu visuals rather than a blank space background.<br />
** To check on your OS that this is working, please look in the bottom right hand corner of your screen on the main menu and it should say "Logged in as [your username]." If it says "Not logged into Steam" or similar, then achievements won't be working properly for you later on. And in general it's something we'd want to know about.<br />
** Mostly this is a compatibility thing with the newest version of Unity, so far as we can tell, but we also have some new capabilities that we might flex at some point in the future.<br />
<br />
* Intra-Galactic Coordinators for turrets and strikecraft should now work properly.<br />
** On any ship, there is now an is_strikecraft="true" flag, and an is_turret="true" flag that you can apply in order to have them be considered strikecraft or turrets for these (and later potentially other) purposes.<br />
** We didn't use the special_type field because it's possible that these things might be strikecraft or turrets and something else at the same time, and the case of being a strikecraft or being a turret isn't "special" enough to warrant the special_type field usage.<br />
** Note that it's also possible that some of these will be both is_strikecraft="true" and also have a special_type="Drone". In those cases, it won't give the ship cap bonus regardless of the is_strikecraft="true" being there. So drones don't have to un-set that, in other words.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Invert Mouse Zoom" setting in the All Cameras section.<br />
** Normally when you spin the mouse wheel forward, you zoom closer; backwards zooms you away. This lets you flip that functionality. OR, in the case that your hardware or OS is inverted for whatever reason, this lets you correct it to work like everyone else.<br />
** There is a bug in Unity 2019.1 on linux machines that causes mouse scrolling to be inverted, so this lets us work around that: https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/linux-input-dot-mousescrolldelta-returns-reversed-values-in-linux-player<br />
** Note that this won't help with inverted scrolling with dropdowns and other scrolling areas, unfortunately.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.854 Garbage... Collected! ==<br />
(Released April 26th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Known issue: in the bottom right corner of the main menu, it says you're not logged into Steam even though you are, and also if you are logged into Steam the backdrop for the main menu might be just stars instead of the usual colorful thing with ships flying by. We'll be upgrading our Steam integration dlls next build, which should fix that. Hopefully it causes no other issues.<br />
<br />
* Known issue: the intra-galactic coordinators for turrets and strikecraft do nothing right now. We wanted to get this build out asap, since it's beta anyway.<br />
<br />
=== Quality of Life and Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Player mobile defensive ships in planetary fleets now start in FRD mode<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for suggesting<br />
<br />
* Hovertext for incoming wave notifications now colours the target planet name for ease of reading<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* The hovertext for Science in the resource bar now shows the planets science is being extracted from and the amount of science remaining for each.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for the suggestion<br />
<br />
=== Ship AI Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to targeting logic from WeaponMaster, where the code was accidentally prioritizing the worst possible targets.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Add some new Zombifying targeting code, where ships with zombifying guns will prefer to attack things they can zombify<br />
** Thanks to Jonesmz for the suggestion and WeaponMaster for the code<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* If the top unit of a cloaking Stacked Squad dies, the next ship to spawn inherits its cloak state. So if you've decloaked it, killing the top unit doesn't allow the next unit to recloak.<br />
** Thanks to Nameless Terror for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix some typos in the Experimental: Civil War conduct text<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix typo on Encapsulated map type description<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where Intra-Galactic Coordinators were increasing the unit cap for Energy Collectors<br />
** Thanks to weapon master for reporting<br />
<br />
* Add some debugging code to catch a null reference exception in the Warden Fleet Long Range Planning code<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for making us aware of a problem in this area<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Flagships that are crippled can no longer pick up units for transport. Flagships that were transporting units and become crippled now unload all their units immediately. This fixes a few ways players could abuse the Crippled mechanic.<br />
** Thanks to Puffin for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Split Intra-Galactic Coordinators abilities. Instead of buffing all ship caps, there are now three, one for each of Turrets, Frigates and Strike Craft. Note that each Coordinator now gives a bigger buff.<br />
** Note that this doesn't work for strikecraft and turrets yet in the current build, we just didn't have time.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleet Centerpieces should now all Rebuild Remains.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting confusion in this area.<br />
<br />
* "Light" and "Heavy" Tech Upgrades cost more at higher levels.<br />
<br />
* "Disruptive" Tech Upgrade costs slightly more at all levels.<br />
<br />
* Battlestation, Citadel and Ark Tech Upgrade costs reduced.<br />
<br />
* "Spire Core" Tech Upgrade cost reduced a bit.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate reload time 9s -> 12s, damage 25,000 -> 20,000.<br />
<br />
* Tamed Macrophage metal cost increased to 2 million, energy consumption increased to 25,000.<br />
** Thanks to Apthorpe for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Scrubbed Abomination metal cost increased to 350k.<br />
<br />
* Muggers and Brawlers now cost their proper amount of metal - 300k - instead of 3 million...<br />
** Muggers sure lived up to their name.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting this! <br />
<br />
=== AI Threat Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Thanks to ptarth for a great save game that led to all these changes<br />
<br />
* The AI now has a per-AI Type tunable, RatioOfFearOfRemoteEnemies, which informs how seriously the AI takes into account your forces on planets near the planet it is attacking. This reduces the AI's tendency to be terrified of nearby large player/nanocaust forces.<br />
<br />
* The AI is now capable of having Threat that it uses only against minor factions. There was a longstanding bug preventing this from working correctly. This threat is "Dumber" then general purpose (aka "anti-player") threat.<br />
** Treat threat specifically against a player as "general purpose"<br />
<br />
* Improve the way the AI handles Threat adjacent to the player home planet.<br />
** If the Threat is Waiting against your home planet (since you have fortified it too heavily to attack) and there are much easier targets, it will prefer to take your other planets out first rather than just building up a giant fleetball.<br />
<br />
* Some improvements to units keeping track of the fact that they are Threat. Failing to do this was confusing the AI's Strength Counting, leading to the AI believing it was weaker than it should have been<br />
** When Threat gets an order to attack another planet, make sure to stay in Threat behaviour.<br />
** Fix a bug where Retreating AI ships would sometimes lose track of the fact that they should have Threat behaviour.<br />
** Copy Orders when splitting a stack (via the Split GameCommand or when the top unit in the stack dies) to preserve Threat behaviour.<br />
<br />
* Also improve debug hover tooltip for squad orders/Threat behaviour and improve some code commenting/readability<br />
<br />
=== Unity Engine Upgrade (To 2019.1 - Now With Incremental Garbage Collection!) ===<br />
<br />
* Upgraded the game to Unity 2019.1.0f2! The prior version was on 2018.2.0 or something along those lines, so this is a big jump.<br />
** The really big improvement is time-sliced garbage collection: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-incremental-garbage-collection/<br />
*** Or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhfzzLyG7_w<br />
** This also has numerous bugfixes, and lets us upgrade from a VERY old version of TextMeshPro to the newest version, which in turn fixes a variety of bugs relating to text, blurry text, textboxes, etc.<br />
*** That said, as part of this, we knew this was going to happen, but it breaks ALL the references to any sort of text-based thing inside of any of our unity projects.<br />
*** But we kind of needed to go ahead and have this done before we started in on a bunch more UI updates or else it was just going to be creating even more work for ourselves in the future.<br />
** There are also a variety of stability improvements to the unity engine in general, and a few performance improvements. I think that Linux machines will see the biggest boost.<br />
*** There are some new capabilities that we can in theory use in the future, too, and nested prefabs are an amazing thing for sure. But we're not really needing those bits in this specific project right at the moment.<br />
** Oh and this does upgrade us to the latest version of the post processing stack v2, as well, which means probably better performance and some edge bugfixes for some folks in that area, too.<br />
<br />
* Okay, so we've been using the mcs.exe compiler for the last two years, and it turns out that doesn't support the newer versions of C#. It would have been nice if that had been more clear.<br />
** Instead, when we were updating our TextMeshPro component or a few other things -- or trying to, anyway -- we would instead get mysterious "System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: "Void System.Array.Reverse(!!0[])" compilation errors. Good luck googling that, almost nobody has that.<br />
** The solution is to STOP USING MCS.EXE, and instead use csc.exe. That's the new Roslyn compiler that Micrsoft created and unity is using for the newer C# 6.0+ features.<br />
*** The !fun! part about that is that all the syntax is different, and also it requires references to... a whole bunch of dlls that are the "reference dlls" instead of the "runtime ones."<br />
*** If you ever find yourself referencing a dll called System.Private.CoreLib.dll, or anything like that, STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING and try a different dll.<br />
**** Even though the compiler just told you that what you need is in that dll, it's actually lying.<br />
**** Actually what you need is in... good luck figuring that out!... but probably it's in the REFERENCE version of System.Core.dll or similar. It has nothing to do with "netcoreapp" or "netstandard," unlike the few non-unity-related references to this on the internet would have you believe. That's unrelated to unity, and is just a fun thing on some web servers and various other software.<br />
**** What the heck is a "reference dll" in terms of what the compiler needs? Well, it's a fuller version than is used at runtime, I suppose. I haven't explicitly seen that said anywhere, but that seems to be the general feeling I'm getting. Why they needed this split I'm not sure, but I'm guessing different compiler flags or perhaps the ability to have different per-platform versions. Something like that.<br />
**** Where do you find those reference dlls?? Ha! Good luck with that. Some of them seem to be in the Roslyn compiler folder... except not really, some of them have way too small of sizes. Others are almost certainly in your [UnityInstallLocation]\Editor\Data\Managed\UnityEngine folder, but there again it's not perfect.<br />
***** Generally you're going to find yourself searching around inside the unity install folder, and you might even find yourself (if you're on windows) searching around inside C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.6.1\ or whatever your equivalent is. Nicely packaged for you? NO.<br />
** So that explains one of the big mysteries that Keith and I have been scratching our heads on for a couple of years now.<br />
*** But even with that "solved," I couldn't get all of the aspects of LINQ working, and some of our third-party networking code uses LINQ, so I moved that into an external dll that will get loaded at runtime. That's more efficient anyway, but annoyingly indirect.<br />
*** All of the network code has been open-sourced by the original authors anyhow, so that actually will work out extra well for us when we get to that point. But in the short term it's another pain in the rear we didn't need.<br />
<br />
* One bonus of all this upgrading of unity-stuff is that the editor is no longer complaining about our external dlls being something that will crash the editor and so something they refuse to load. That's... always a plus. And is related to the whole compiler saga.<br />
<br />
* Okay, nested prefabs from the latest versions of unity are actually indeed insanely useful and we're starting to use those more than we otherwise might have.<br />
<br />
==== Complete Overhaul Of All Fonts ====<br />
<br />
* ALL of the fonts in the game have been reworked (in terms of how they are imported into TextMeshPro and thus how they look in general).<br />
** And a bunch of new fonts have been added to the game as options for us to use in various contexts.<br />
** And we've completely redone what fonts we are using in almost all contexts as it is.<br />
** There was a lot of complaining about the fonts not feeling properly militaristic, or otherwise being non-thematic, and hopefully this helps.<br />
<br />
* The background story is again its own window and scrolls rather than is paginated, but this time is a lot more condensed, uses an improved version of the more-recent rewritten version, and uses strategic coloration to make it easier to read quickly.<br />
<br />
* The little notification icon/panels at the top of the screen now show up with a new font (as with most other parts of the game), but this is a particularly good font for condensed/confined places. It should let you read more things without them trailing off too ellipses, while it also not looking tacky in terms of how it's crammed in.<br />
** Also, the TextMeshPro upgrade itself seems to do a better job of choosing when to go to ellipsis instead of just drawing the raw text of whatever it is. So some of the planet names that were drawing ellipses very much too soon now won't.<br />
<br />
* As an aside, it's quite possible that the following issues are present somewhere in the game now, and we'd love to know about it:<br />
** Some sort of text not wrapping properly or being outright invisible, or cut off.<br />
** Some sort of text section making it impossible to click something near it, or picking up clicks from way further away than it should have.<br />
** Some sort of text section having the wrong font, or being misaligned in a subtle or not-subtle way.<br />
** We tried to correct all these that we could find, but bear in mind that this was a couple of dozen interfaces that we had to edit BY HAND for this version, so we probably missed something.<br />
** Honestly this was another reason we did this now, during the beta period, versus during a non-beta time. Thanks for being our guinea pigs to all the testers helping on this!<br />
<br />
* Given that we're changing so many of the fonts, and may choose to do so even more as feedback rolls in, we've now codified the in-code font-sizing a bit in a new FontSizes class.<br />
** Essentially size 12pt in font A might be waaaay larger or smaller than 12pt in font B. So we needed a way to normalize the offsets from the defaults of whatever we decide makes sense with a given font.<br />
<br />
==== Various Changes to our Post Processing Stack ====<br />
<br />
* Oh, I'm sorry, did we say we were going to be using the new unity Post Processing Stack V2? Blah, that really doesn't play nice with what we wanted to do.<br />
** Instead we're now using Beautify again, stripped down into performance mode but using it for vingnetting and tonemapping. We continue to use amplify bloom for the bloom effects, because messing with that again would be... insanely time consuming.<br />
** Overall this does mean there's a subtle shift to the look of the game yet again -- and, wait, no we're not using that now, either. Sigh. We'll figure out the tonemapping at some point, but frankly our general lighting is doing the heavy lifting on its own.<br />
<br />
==== Splitting Some Network Code Off Into Its Own Area ====<br />
<br />
* A bunch of the networking code has been offloaded into its own dll now, which we're able to more easily update as needed.<br />
** This actually makes our iteration time on that sort of code faster in the future.<br />
** In the process of getting this working, we managed to waste about two hours trying to figure out why the entire game was broken (and it was a one-liner typo). Fun!<br />
<br />
== Version 0.853 An Officer And A Bunch Of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 22nd, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Only the offensive (strike and officer) type of fleets are now auto-assigned numbered hotkeys.<br />
** If people want to manually assign hotkeys differently in the future, they can (when that interface is in place), but this really is the most likely use case most of the time.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* Command stations can once again die to remains.<br />
** This means that if you have a battlestation or a citadel on the planet, then they can rebuild the command station for you automatically just like remains rebuilders would have done once upon a time. Yay automation!<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes, Badger, and Nameless Terror for suggesting.<br />
<br />
=== Ability To Scout With Nanites Properly Works (And Related Visual Effects) ===<br />
<br />
* Unlike all the other versions since 0.850, you can now click over to planets that you have never explored.<br />
** This lets you actually use the Explore With Nanites hack, which is kiiiinda important, honestly. Or at least it's important to a lot of people, depending on playstyle.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and others for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* The visual effect for viewing a planet where you have stale intel (but have seen it before) was before a bit confusing and a bit much.<br />
** Much as Chris liked the matrix-y effect, that has been ditched and things are a lot more Factorio-like in terms of just being darkened and grainy.<br />
** The effect is subtle enough not to be irritating, but to be definitely noticeable. Given the sidebar notes Stale Intel, and things don't look super duper crazy in terms of the visual distortions, hopefully we don't need any bigger onscreen messages to explain what is happening to players.<br />
** Thanks to Badger, Nameless Terror, and RocketAssistedPuffin for suggesting.<br />
<br />
* There is a NEW visual effect for viewing a planet where you have never even explored before.<br />
** Through the distortion here you can barely even read the wormhole names, and all you can see are the planet graphics and wormhole graphics (not even metal spots, etc).<br />
** This one is heavily stylized, but is so TV-like and the sidebar is utterly empty and saying "you have never explored here" and similar that hopefully it's really clear what is going on.<br />
** This is needed simply because we're allowing players to click into planets that are unexplored so that they can do the nanites hack against them to explore them.<br />
<br />
=== New Background Story ===<br />
<br />
* A new and brief, paginated story has replaced the longwinded scrolling-based "background story" section of the main menu.<br />
** The old story was complicated and no longer really accurate to the game. This does mean all those character portraits that Chris created are now completely gone from the game, but such is life. The initial pre-game story is super simple and that's kind of how it always has been. We want the rest of the story, what there is, to be based on what happens during your gameplay.<br />
** The new story reads:<br />
*** After an 800-year civil war between humans fighting amongst the stars, they finally birthed a force that would end all human wars forever: Artificial Intelligence.<br />
*** Quickly eclipsing the humans in power and taking control of most of their automated forces, the AI nearly wiped the human race from the face of the galaxy. Only scattered pockets remain, hiding amidst the scattered wreckage from the civil war and the AI-led extermination that followed.<br />
*** You are in command of the last substantial remaining human military force. It is so small that the AI is either unaware of it, or just doesn't care.<br />
*** Potentially coincidentally, something outside the galaxy seems to have distracted the AI far more than humans ever did.<br />
*** You must grow your forces, capturing and reactivating fleets from the old wars... but you must be careful not to grow so strong that the eye of the AI turns back toward you.<br />
*** Gain just enough power, capture just enough fleets, take back just enough planets, that you can destroy the massive structures known as 'AI Overlords' and end this new war before the AI is even fully aware it has begun.<br />
*** If you are too greedy, if you make yourself too threatening, if you let the AI realize you might be a true threat... expect us all to lose everything.<br />
*** You must use discretion, avoid distraction and temptation, and wield your forces like a scalpel. Take risks, be bold, but don't try to be a conquerer.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* Removed the "build remains rebuilders" intel tab entry, since that is outdated.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The strength of waves that are incoming should now be correctly stated, whereas before it was not since we switched the AI costs and strengths to be two different things.<br />
** Some internal variables have also been renamed to be more clear.<br />
** This has not been tested, so it might still be wrong.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and BadgerBadger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new capturable_can_seed_at_all="false" flag, which is now applied to the Cloaked Ark One and the Agile Cursed Golem.<br />
** These two entities should no longer seed at all in the galaxy, since they were only ever supposed to be granted via the starting fleet choices anyhow. This won't fix existing savegames, but if you see them in new savegames as something you can capture, please do let us know.<br />
** Thanks to vinco and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Instigator bases should now seed at more appropriate distances from you.<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for finding and fixing, and reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where you could not select the starting fleet without it always just defaulting back to classic.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for the fix, and HeartHunter7 and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Put in some fixes so that if you have invalid/mismatched options (custom or otherwise) in the lobby, it will now complain about them properly and let you know that things are failing.<br />
** With this we found that the team colors for Instigators and the AntagonizedDysonSphere were not working properly, for instance.<br />
<br />
* Attack warnings in the top bar should now properly show stacked ship counts when you hover over them.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Some complicated code fixes from WeaponMaster have been put in place to hopefully solve the "multi-shot doesn't function when there's an enemy fortress or other super important item present" issue. Please let us know if this doesn't fix it, or any other strange cases wind up happening, but things seem okay from some limited testing so far.<br />
** Big thanks to WeaponMaster for the fix, and to KMan_Gladiator for the initial report!<br />
<br />
* Fixed some internal bugs with "last second we saw a planet" that was causing some oddities in the local tab's reporting of what you could see of enemy strength, etc.<br />
<br />
* The local tab summaries now include strength and ships that are inside other ships, aka drones and reinforcements not yet deployed, etc. It's way more accurate now.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips in the local tab were showing the strength values as being 1000x what we show them elsewhere in the UI. Oops, fixed.<br />
** This bug is old as the game itself, more or less. Wow.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting this right as we also discovered it!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where in the post-0.850 builds you could get too much intel about various other planets if you clicked to them in the first 2 seconds of gameplay. This wasn't as big a deal until we changed it so you can click to unexplored planets.<br />
<br />
* The little "battle at a planet" notification cards at the top of the screen now properly show all the ships that are inside other ships, making it so that their ship counts now match that of the sidebar (which is itself only newly correct in this version).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where the incoming wave notifications had strength values that were laughably tiny and wrong. It was only tallying the strength of the first ship of each type, which meant that if there were 1000 ships in a wave, it was 1/1000th the value it should have been.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Strike Fleets vs Officer Fleets ===<br />
<br />
* There was previously a general "mobile combat" (MobileCombatFleetFlagship) category for fleets. This has now been split in two:<br />
** MobileOfficerCombatFleetFlagship - this is the style that we had before, where the centerpieces are either an Ark or a Golem. These are big centerpiece fleets that have small and medium craft but also something big and scary at the center.<br />
** MobileStrikeCombatFleetFlagship - this is new, and is just basically a transport with a "super meh" fusion bomb weapon at the center. Basically this is meant to be the big groups of your ships that are moving around doing the most of the fighting, and the transports are there for... transport! And for ships to pop out of during construction.<br />
<br />
* There are now EVEN MORE fleets seeded around the galaxy for you to find, although many more of them are the "strike" kind of combat fleets instead of the "officer" sort.<br />
** This gets back to the main playstyle for most people from earlier version of this game and from the base game; having big centerpiece units is great, but let's not overdo it. And for those who don't prefer that kind of gameplay, they can entirely skip it.<br />
<br />
* The number of certain types of Arks and Golems that can be seeded has been drastically reduced from what they were before (those that are part of fleets, not lone ones).<br />
** You should still see almost as many of these types of fleets as before, but a greater diversity of them. And in general way fewer armored golems, for instance.<br />
** On really large maps, you will find that you're maybe not getting quite as many of these as you once were, though.<br />
** The ultimate goal is for these to feel more rare and powerful over time, and a lot of them are seeded a bit further away, now.<br />
<br />
* The "Drone" specialtype has been split into DroneGeneral and DroneFrigate.<br />
** This lets us better use the multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_drones and multiplied_nonfrigate_ship_cap_for_drones xml entries when relevant.<br />
** Most stuff is just DroneGeneral, though, as it is.<br />
<br />
* We now have two new entries, multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_mobile and multiplied_strikecraft_ship_cap_for_mobile.<br />
** These let us make fleets larger or smaller based on what the centerpiece is, separate from the fleet design itself. This is intended specifically for the officer and strike fleet types, to let us have them share the types of fleets but to let the non-officer fleets be larger in general.<br />
** Note that officer fleets and non-officer fleets are NOT intended to be balanced with one another (officer fleets are more powerful, naturally), but the officer fleets are more rare and more powerful as well as more expensive in general.<br />
<br />
* There are several variants of tranport flagships, which all look the same and have the same name, but which seed at different frequencies and have much larger frigate, strikecraft, or some mix of the two caps.<br />
** The idea is that if you want really huge fleets of smaller ships, then these are where they come from.<br />
** The balance of all this new stuff is very untested, but the seeding of them seems to work at the very least.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to Nameless Terror for inspiring these various changes.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Overloader Combat Factory speed boost increased from 20% to 40%.<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Citadels that roll the OtherDefenseFocus design (i.e Tractors, Tachyon, etc) now have Turrets as intended.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation shields increased from 350k to 500k.<br />
<br />
* Shifted Strength values around (mainly Guardians are lower).<br />
<br />
* Mobile Fleets should now always have at least two unit types.<br />
** Finding a Fleet with just one unit type was rather bad, and kind of doomed that Fleet to being relatively useless.<br />
** This was especially bad if it happened to the one adjacent to your Homeworld.<br />
<br />
* Most units for the AI now cost twice as much for it to purchase.<br />
** Guardians and Turrets cost 50% more, Frigates cost 33% more.<br />
** At the same time, the starting AI defenses are increased to make them roughly the same, as that seemed mostly okay, it was mainly the sheer wave sizes people were getting.<br />
<br />
* Shifted some of the Armored Golem hull into shields.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for the inspiration.<br />
<br />
* Economic and Military Command Stations store 300k metal instead of 100k, Home Command stores 2.5 million instead of 2 million.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for mentioning a problem here.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate durability upgraded a fair bit, the "Railcannon" variant has a 50% damage increase on the Railcannons, and the "Laser" variant loses the damage bonus in place of simply firing a lot more shots.<br />
** Thanks to trillioneyes and ptarth for bringing the issues up.<br />
<br />
* Citadels have some weapon boosts.<br />
<br />
==== Speedier Flagships! ====<br />
<br />
* Player Golem Arks speed doubled.<br />
<br />
* Ark speed increased to 1400.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate speed increased 50%.<br />
<br />
* Player Arks and Spire Frigates move 50% faster after entering a planet for 5 seconds.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Decloaking Capabilities For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Combat Factories now spawn with Combat Sentry Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== Way More Engineers For You! ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new category of ship_cap_group for fleet memberships, this one called Civilian.<br />
** Turns out that we just completely forgot to add in the ability to generate more engineers via battlestations and citadels, that that was most definitely supposed to be a thing.<br />
** This won't affect existing savegames, but you should be finding caches of engineers that you can construct along with your battlestations all over the place now in new games.<br />
** The idea isn't to increase the ship cap for engineers on a given planet by adjusting the planet itself (unless you want to change command station type), but rather by which types of stations you put there, and what engineering caps they have. That was always the plan with fleets, but was just a complete oversight.<br />
** The reason for the new Civilian category is so that we can have caps of engineers (and later maybe a mix of something else) that is separate from the OtherDefenses, turrets, and whatever else. Basically to let them not compete with other types of defenses while still being added new.<br />
** Thanks to Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
==== No More Mysterious Metal Increases As Marks Go Up ====<br />
<br />
* There is no longer any added metal cost to having higher-mark units.<br />
** Some may lament this, but this was the only downside to increasing the mark of units, which is otherwise an all-positive thing to do. It was such a sharp negative that you could actually tank your economy without warning.<br />
** The first game made good use of this because you could choose to build cheaper low-mark units at any time, and then more expensive high-mark units later, and the higher metal and energy costs, as well as lower ship cap, were all deterrents to the higher marks being overly relied-upon. That was an interesting system, but we moved away from that well over a year ago, if not more, when we combined all the ships of yours into being the highest mark of whatever their line is.<br />
** This new system is one that does stress your metal reserves less, probably, but you're gaining so many more ships over time (by capturing more fleets) that you're still going to need more metal later in the game than what you start with. It's just due to increased ship counts in this game, not due to your units suddenly and unexpectedly costing more.<br />
** Thanks to Karhax for reporting the root issue here.<br />
<br />
==== No More AIP Increases From "Too Many Fleets" In A System ====<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the "too many fleets at a planet" logic entirely, at least the current version.<br />
** It simply felt punitive and un-fun, and there was no version of that style which was likely to be fun. Nonetheless, we still just commented it out for now so someone can build something on that if desired in the future. We are also going to be working on some things to prevent players going absolutely nuts with how they stack things, but they won't be so opaque or so likely to unexpectedly bite you.<br />
** Thanks to basically everyone playing the betas for complaining about this. Honestly that didn't hugely surprise any of us, but the discussion it sparked was interesting. In particular thanks to Nameless Terror, Ecthelon, themouthofsauron, Karhax, and probably some folks we missed.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.852 Directness Is Better==<br />
(Released April 20th, 2019)<br />
<br />
* Rather than being markless, Sentry Frigates are now mark 1 but only get upgraded by the fleet itself upgrading (which isn't a working mechanic yet, it's coming!)<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for noticing this.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Tooltips setting option: "Show Weapon Activity Details"<br />
** If enabled, then each weapon in your tooltips shows you a bunch of info about how long until it reloads, why it didn't fire most recently, and other such info.<br />
** Previously this info was just always shown, but now it's off by default.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips -- for player ships or anything on the build sidebar -- now tell you if the ship is unable to be upgraded, or what techs upgrade it if any do, or if they are of the sort that only upgrade when their fleet itself upgrades.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for reminding us just how important this is, although we were already going to do it.<br />
<br />
* One crippled mobile fleet flagship among several functional ones could previously erroneously prevent you from building command stations. Fixed.<br />
** Additionally, now battlestations/citadels are able to build command stations, not just mobile fleet flagships.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== AI Reconquest Command Stations ===<br />
<br />
* There once was a specialtype of "NormalAICommandStation." This has been removed, and split into:<br />
** AICommandStationOriginal, which is used in the majority of cases.<br />
** AICommandStationReconquest, which is used for cases where the AI reconquered a planet.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "AI Reconquest Command Station," which is now what the AI will seed after taking back a planet during a reconquest wave.<br />
** This acts just like the original command stations of the AI, with the following exceptions:<br />
*** It has twice as much health and shielding.<br />
*** It doesn't have any confusing messages about AIP going up if you destroy it (that already wasn't the case, but the interface made it sound like it did).<br />
*** It can't be hacked for science extraction. Go build your own command station there if you want that science, sonny.<br />
*** It doesn't grant any scouting intel when destroyed, so you can't use any exploity type of behavior to let the AI take a planet back and then destroy the reconquest station in order to get more scouting intel AIP-free.<br />
** Note that in existing savegames, any existing command stations the AI put there because of reconquest will still be of the original sort. So you won't see this until the AI does a reconquest wave in this version or newer.<br />
** Fun fact, the humans-don't-autotarget-this rules are still the same here, for now at least, but this can be changed in xml if we really want to. We left this not because of an AIP cost (which is why the original has it), but because there might be a very valid reason you want to let the AI keep the planet (aka them wasting reinforcements on a planet that has been neutered). So having your ships go into auto-kill mode would probably break some valid advanced strategies.<br />
** Thanks to BadgerBadger, TechSY730, and Exlium for suggesting and reporting various issues that led to this.<br />
<br />
=== Ship Rallying Out, Direct Orders Inheritance And Position In ===<br />
<br />
* All concept of ships rallying to... anything... is now gone. It was annoying and full of edge cases that would cause players to have their fleets not behave how they wanted them to as refleeting was in progress.<br />
** Now all ships that are created for a fleet by a factory now pop straight out of the fleet centerpiece, with all the orders from the fleet centerpiece (including stance).<br />
** This gets around some of the most annoying logistical issues, and because the centerpieces of the fleets are so large it makes enough logical sense to not cause huge amounts of cognitive dissonance. Putting gameplay first, this is the only thing that really solves our age-old (literally like a decade old) problem.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 and others for reporting, although here again we were already leaning in this direction because of our own frustration.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.851 Drones And Economies==<br />
(Released April 19th, 2019)<br />
<br />
=== Player Command Station Rebalance ===<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the economic command station description:<br />
** Economic variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variant gives greatly improved metal and energy output, but lacks the ability to directly defend itself very well. It doesn't even have any means of decloaking enemies directly. Planets with these should either be protected by a powerful citadel or battlestation, or so far back from the front lines that they are safe.<br />
** Thanks to Vinco for inspiring this change.<br />
<br />
* The matter converters and energy collectors were higher on the logistical command stations, and now that has been swapped with the economic command stations.<br />
<br />
* Logistical command stations now come with 20 mines built in, and also two focused gravity generators. More stuff to help them be more tricky and dangerous directly.<br />
** They also now get 2 forcefields while the military variants only get 1 instead, swapping those two.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the logistical command station description:<br />
* Logistical variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at finding cloaked enemies, tractoring enemies, and even laying traps (mines!) for enemies. Beyond that it's kind of a halfway point between the military and economic drives of its peers. They also get two forcefields where their peers only get one, and way more engineers.<br />
<br />
* Military command stations now get 5 beam cannons and 15 ambush turrets, making them by far the most able to defend themselves without the help of a battlestation or citadel.<br />
<br />
* Re-wrote the military command station description:<br />
** Military variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet. This variation is by far the best at defending itself, and perfect for dangerous border planets. It also gets the most factories, making it probably the best way to resupply your fleets near the front lines.<br />
<br />
=== Bugfixes ===<br />
<br />
* The lost spire frigate faction has now been properly removed from the game.<br />
** We had already folded the functionality from that into the main game itself, so the faction was pointless and just broke things if you enabled it. If you enabled it in your savegames, then those savegames are probably now broken.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding issue where if we removed game settings from the game, then old settings files that were loaded in would complain about UnrequestedXMLAttributes.<br />
** Thanks to ptarth and Badger for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Ships that are owned by no faction (aka not claimed yet) should no longer have their cloaking devices function until they are claimed. Tested and works as expected.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY and RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* The seeding logic for NormalPlanetNastyPicks, SpireArchives, and CivilWarTriggers was... nonsensical? The code did some kind of strange things.<br />
** It should now work properly and not do things like putting spire archives on AI homeworlds.<br />
** It also now logs what it is doing to the mapgen logger if you have that turned on and want to see what it is doing.<br />
** We've not tested this at all.<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed an issue with beam cannons where they were being upgraded by the Melee tech instead of Splash.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a longstanding bug where it would register a double-click if you were clicking too rapidly between different parts of the screen. Mice are fast! Now if you've moved the mouse more than 10px, it doesn't consider it a double-click. Probably. We need to test that.<br />
** Fully fixed (and verified the fix) to the double-clicking stuff.<br />
** Thanks to Bobtree, Talkar, Kaleopan, and Exlium for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Fixed the "MISSING LOCALIZATION: AIPChangeReason_FleetConcentration" bug.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
* It is now possible to explicitly set up in the xml that units cannot be stacked. Use the tag cannot_be_stacked="true".<br />
** This also now automatically happens on all AI guardians (dire and regular), drones (that got exploity), lone golems, and NPC centerpieces.<br />
** All of the marauder raiders and similar can no longer be stacked because of the tag, to prevent issues with them.<br />
** Astro Trains also can no longer be stacked, since that's just odd.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where drones were never being set up properly on drone controllers at all (hive golem, etc).<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug where factories would help with drone production.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a bug that was preventing drones from ever being deployed even if they were internally created. Fun with boolean inversions!<br />
<br />
* Fixed a whole nest of bugs where drones that were a part of non-drone-specific fleet types could never be spawned by their spawner.<br />
** Aka this was breaking things like hive golems, but drone producer guard posts would have been fine (though that bit is untested).<br />
<br />
* Fixed some issues with the drone caps getting higher when the mark level of the drone controllers was higher. It should be the same ship cap for those drones regardless of cap, unlike with regular non-drone ships.<br />
<br />
* The data and tooltip info for AIs unlocking new ship types has been removed, as that mechanic actually isn't a thing anymore.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Irritation Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* AI guard posts that are no longer on AI-controlled planets now lose their cloaking. This also just seemed like a needed thing to avoid an annoying bit of cleanup you otherwise have to do. Typically they would be sitting around doing nothing, since all their defenders fled. Tested and works as expected.<br />
<br />
=== Interface Improvements ===<br />
<br />
* Double-clicking fleet leaders (centerpieces, flagships, command stations, whatever) now selects or deselects all the stuff in their fleet, rather than all the things of their same type.<br />
** For individual ship types, like fighters or whatever, it works like it always has.<br />
*** HOWEVER, when it comes to individual ship types, it no longer considers spinoff units (Daggers, etc) something to select along with the main unit type that you might have clicked. Sharing a common ancestor is no longer good enough for the selection stuff to work that way, particularly given the ludicrous number of variants we now have.<br />
** Thanks to wm46 for suggesting the change to double-clicking on centerpieces.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips now specify how many undeployed drones there are inside an entity.<br />
** Additionally, you can see the construction percentage on each drone that is getting created inside.<br />
<br />
* In preparation for some upcoming changes, the Ships tab has been renamed to the Local tab, and says "At Local Planet" instead of Ships up at the top.<br />
<br />
* On the fleets tab, it now has a new piece where it will show the hotkey assigned to that fleet, if there is one assigned.<br />
<br />
* You still can't manually assign hotkeys to fleets, but hotkeys are now automatically assigned to fleets as you acquire them early on in.<br />
** This is something we want to have happen so that the use of these hotkeys is encouraged by the large numbers of people (including some of us on staff) who never bothered to use them in the past.<br />
** But obviously prior to 0.900 we want it to be something you can control directly, too.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Dire Guard Posts no longer increase AIP on death.<br />
** Was intended to mimic the AIP Floor increase from Classic, but didn't play well with the random Post count and multiple AIs.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlords Tachyon system is a bit shorter range and decloaks at half the speed.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where this was a major roadblock - more than intended.<br />
<br />
* Dire Tethuida and Shredder Guard Posts fire every 3 seconds instead of 1.<br />
** Thanks to Quicunque for reporting a situation where a Tethuida was actually far scarier with the gun than intended - it's meant to use the drones, mainly.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation and Rorqual Hegira Ark have much larger forcefield radius now.<br />
** Things are bigger in general, so you weren't able to fit as much as you used to under these.<br />
<br />
* All Citadels except Interceptors now have a weapon range of 10,100.<br />
<br />
* AI requires higher AIP before increasing its tech level.<br />
** Used to be, starting from Mark 2: 150, 300, 450, 600, 800, 1200.<br />
** Now is, starting from Mark 2: 225, 450, 675, 900, 1125, 1350.<br />
*** The AI no longer pays more for higher Mark units, and so it was having very large power spikes relatively early on.<br />
*** Although, Mark 7 is actually triggered not much slower than what it used to, so really annoying the AI is still going to hurt a lot.<br />
<br />
* All Battlestations shield points increased to 350,000.<br />
<br />
== Version 0.850 The Arrival of Fleets ==<br />
(Released April 18th, 2019)<br />
<br />
''We are breaking '''all''' the savegames again, sorry about that. This series of updates leading up to 0.900 should collectively be the last time '''for real''' for real, although we've said that before. It's not our practice to do this sort of thing at all, typically, but this game has been going through a lot more pre-release evolution than most of our titles have. The old savegames won't even make sense in the new version, really.''<br />
<br />
* This got super long and we wanted to show what we were working on as we went, so we wound up also having this: [[AI War 2: 0.850 Raw Chris Changelog]]<br />
<br />
* And in general if you're not clear why we're doing all this, then here's a really long document that explains it: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/16dJvDOWckK4vfnW2Mwut7wv2OF_bCn17XuspBlPBymQ/edit#heading=h.wkf7np25ov5 AI War 2 - Unit Construction / Fleets Rework].<br />
** Although we went much further than the document laid out, moving into territory like making the AI planets more unique from one another, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Misc ===<br />
<br />
* Dyson Spheres will remain antagonized much longer after hacks.<br />
** More hacks against a Dyson Sphere will increase the antagonization time.<br />
<br />
* Allow the AI to spawn Dyson Antagonizers in the galaxy. Only Dyson factions with high enough intensity can spawn antagonizers.<br />
** Antagonizers affect all Dyson Factions, so if you've enabled 3 dyson factions, the AI will spawn antagonizers for each dyson faction, and you have to kill all the antagonizers before they will become friendly again.<br />
** Dyson Antagonizers follow similar spawning rules to Instigator Bases; they need to spawn close to the player at lower AIPs, and at high AIP can spawn anywhere.<br />
** To compensate for this, the Dyson's income has been slightly buffed.<br />
<br />
* Gives some units unused voice lines, and the Dyson ships the Zenith voice.<br />
** Engineers and other similar civilian ships now actually talk!<br />
<br />
* The galaxy map now has more of a "military screen" style look to it again, although this doesn't yet apply to the actual icons and lines and so on. But it has that same sort of scanline effect and whatnot as in the first game, though more involved now and fancier with some hexagons, etc.<br />
<br />
=== Quick Starts and Tutorials Gone for Now ===<br />
<br />
* The old quickstarts have all been moved to QuickStartsOld, since they no longer function with the new system in general.<br />
** Because of the way Steam updates work, the QuickStarts from now on will be loaded from QuickStarts2 instead, which is presently empty and needs to be for the next little while. But at least it won't be throwing errors when players try to start quickstarts in the new build.<br />
<br />
* The pre-existing tutorial has been completely disabled, since it is probably nonfunctional in general and tries to teach you a lot of things that are no longer relevant. We're going to be majorly redoing that in the future, but for now we don't want people accidentally going in there.<br />
<br />
=== Fleets Added ===<br />
<br />
* Fleets are a new concept in the game, which are basically collections of ships in one of a few different categories. The AIs and NPCs don't really use these, per se, although there's nothing stopping them from doing so. But on the player side, this basically is now the central grouping of units for your stuff, and you use these offensively and defensively. You can get waaay larger ship caps than before, but each group is... well, automated as well as being a distinct flavor unto itself.<br />
<br />
* The concepts of destruction points and Ark Upgrade Points are both gone, and replaced by Fleet EXP instead. This works similarly to both of those other things, in that if your fleet centerpiece is on a planet with an enemy ship that dies to your forces, then that fleet gains some EXP. More for big-ticket items.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of logic for how fleets are selected and moved around, which was previously related to control groups, is now in place.<br />
** The logic for how to assign fleets to keybind indices (fleet groups, essentially) for now is going to be clicking-the-interface-only, since that's really confusing in keybinds. We may wind up reintroducing keybinds for this at some point in the future, but more likely would be a better interface for organizing fleets into the keybinds directly, since this would avoid the confusion factor for players.<br />
** The big sticky spot for confusion is people thinking they're making a control group of ships, when really it is of fleets, in essence. Even this explanation is confusing. ;)<br />
<br />
* The various things that you can purchase from the Zenith Trader are all now planet-bound, even if they are normally mobile. They go into the fleet of that planet, and are on permanent station-keeping there.<br />
** In theory we could later have something that can let you purchase new ships for mobile fleets from the Zenith Trader or otherwise, but that would need a new UI and new general mechanics. That would be fun, but in terms of replicating the experience of the Zenith Trader thus far, here's how it needs to work for this part.<br />
<br />
* The various kinds of command stations now each come with their own hand-designed fleet styles, which are of the type that just use the max cap of each type they can have inside of their categories. That way they are always predictable per type, but you get more forcefields with a military command compared to economic, etc.<br />
** Things like minefields and the gravity generators don't go with any of these, but rather have to be gotten via Battlestations.<br />
** When it comes to factories, some of the command station types grant more factories per planet than others.<br />
<br />
* The Battlestations in general are set up, although most of them just seed randomized template-based fleets. The Ensnarer one has an example instead of a specific type of fleet that it uses in place of a template.<br />
** Bear in mind that there are several different ways to set up how a fleet leader (Battlestation or mobile) might have its fleet design created, and if none of them are set up then you'll have a lonely empty fleet. Right now the game doesn't warn the designers about that.<br />
** In general there is a looooot more that could be done here in terms of making new and unique things, but right now the procedural fleets themselves are enough that probably that's not a big priority.<br />
<br />
* The general strikecraft and frigates are all now set up so that they'll populate some interesting different procedural fleet designs in (currently) 9 different overall flavors. But even within those 9 flavors, there's a huge amount of variety likely to be found.<br />
<br />
* The game now actually seeds the Battlestations and fleet flagships, and makes sure that they have their fleet designs populated right from mapgen start.<br />
** First it tries to seed 1 item with tag "MobileCombatFleetArkOrGolem" on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed 1 more two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least eight more, but up to 1 per 25 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** It's possible that it won't have enough types or will run into blockages, and that's A-OK to happen.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 Battlestation (based on the SpecialEntityType directly) on a planet directly adjacent to a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least five more, but up to 1 per 50 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** In both cases, if it couldn't seed a thing closer in, then it will retry with it further out. This is mostly only relevant for snake maps and other things with very few direct and secondary connections from planets.<br />
** Next it repeats the process by trying to put 1 item with tag "MobileSupportFleetFlagship" on a planet two hops out from a player homeworld.<br />
** Then it tries to seed at least two more, but up to 1 per 150 planets, throughout the rest of the galaxy at least 3 hops from the player and 2 hops from the AI homeworlds.<br />
** The reason it uses the SpecialEntityType directly for Battlestations is because that's the most direct thing. For the other two categories, those both have a MobileFleetFlagship type, and so those tags help specify a bit more if they are regular (and thus more common), or are "support" (and thus less common and further out).<br />
<br />
* The Battlestation special entity type has been split into two: BattlestationBasic and BattlestationCitadel.<br />
<br />
* The MobileFleetFlagships special entity type has been split into three: MobileCombatFleetFlagship, MobileSupportFleetFlagship, and MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship.<br />
** The third in this category is for the things that don't have a fleet with them, namely right now the spire frigates.<br />
<br />
* The seeding for battlestations and mobile fleet flagships has been updated, as you might guess.<br />
** The existing logic for mobile fleet flagships now applies to MobileCombatFleetFlagships, and MobileSupportFleetFlagships still also work the same.<br />
** The existing logic for battlestations now applies to BattlestationBasic.<br />
** MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship is now seeded "kinda wherever" and is both rarer but also no longer counts against the normal combat fleet flagships.<br />
** BattlestationCitadel is following the general pattern of the basic battlestations, but with the following differences:<br />
*** It only ever seeds one on a planet, not two at a time.<br />
*** It seeds one within 2 hops of a player starting planet if possible.<br />
*** It then seeds a smaller number of citadels out in the galaxy, mixed between the middle-distance and far out. These are in addition to the basic battlestations, not in place of them.<br />
** With all this, there's a better sense of control of what exactly the player can look forward to out there, but also in general there are yet more capturables out there, and they can continue to be balanced in their niches: we can add more lone wolf stuff without swamping the main mobile flagships, and we can add more citadels or regular battlestations without affecting their relative mixes.<br />
<br />
* The various MobileSupportFleet flagships now are able to get upgraded from Mark1 to higher marks based on their fleets being upgraded. They have no techs that benefit them directly.<br />
** This fixes an issue with them referencing an Engineer tech that was nonexistent.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each faction as their "loose" fleet.<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just used for all their ships, more or less, and doesn't really get used for much. Drones don't go in there, but that's it. Actual useful fleets can be created as-desired in the future, but for anything not using something specific, it uses this.<br />
** For the players, there is a PlayerLoose fleet, which is basically "remainder units" that are not in a fleet. Odds are that this won't be used, but it's an overflow valve in case we have a truly odd case or potentially even a bug that we want to fail more gracefully.<br />
*** Oh! Actually, we are using this now for ships that are being captured via zombification. So there you go, a use for it already.<br />
<br />
* There are now fleets associated with each PlanetFaction as their "fleet of that planet."<br />
** For AIs and NPCs, this is just a reference to their parent loose fleet from the faction itself.<br />
** For the players, these are unique fleets that are what the command stations go into and put their stuff into.<br />
*** It's entirely possible for a command station of a player to die, but in those cases the fleet must live on.<br />
<br />
* When the game creates a new ship/structure, it now REQUIRES that the appropriate Fleet.Membership be passed into it.<br />
** This solves all sorts of bugs where fleet membership was never being set previously.<br />
** In the case of fleet leaders or ships that create drones, it ignores this membership, however, and creates and populates its own fleet.<br />
<br />
* Added a whole bunch of ways to calculate the strength and health percentages of fleets based on their type, which is more complicated than you might think.<br />
** For command station fleets, or the battlestation ones, it's based around the total power out of what you've DECIDED to build (and what has died to remains or is hurt or whatever).<br />
** For drones and mobile fleets, it's out of the total things that would be auto-built, since you get no decision-making in whether to fully stock those fleets or not (aside from keeping them away from docks).<br />
** This is surprisingly complex when it comes to things like the ships being transported in fleets, or undeployed drones, etc, etc.<br />
<br />
* A new destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command xml tag has been added.<br />
** This is used only in a really narrow set of circumstances: it was a planet that a human player controlled with one kind of command station, and they now have a different kind of command station there.<br />
** Basically, different types of command stations give you different numbers of engineers, basic turrets, energy collectors, etc. This prevents you from having too many left over after you switch from a military to an economic command station, for instance; there were all sorts of games you could play with that to exploit things.<br />
** What this does NOT do is destroy units after your command station has died on a planet; in those circumstances, whatever is there continues to live on until you build a new command station. Presuming you rebuild as the same type, nothing gets destroyed.<br />
** This flag is also explicitly NOT on certain units like the human home forcefields and the various things you get from the Zenith Trader. They will frequently be over-cap (since their command station type doesn't always include it but you might have bought it separately), and so these are always assumed to be valid.<br />
** Confusing? Basically this just shuts down an exploit and doesn't affect much else.<br />
<br />
==== Docks Sidebar Tab Gone, Fleets Tab Added ====<br />
<br />
* The docks tab is gone, and a new fleets tab has taken its place.<br />
** The fleets tab has a bunch of sections which show first your fleets at the current planet, and then all of your fleets in the entire galaxy, by category, after that.<br />
** The categories, in order, are:<br />
*** Current Planet<br />
**** A quick view of all your fleets at the current planet.<br />
*** Mobile Combat<br />
**** The most versatile of your fighting forces: generally intended for offense, but quite able to come and defend your own planets as need be.<br />
*** Mobile Support<br />
**** Unusual supporting fleets that are able to either act as a force multiplier for your offensive or defensive fleets, provide remote supply on deep strikes, or perform surprising other secondary duties.<br />
*** Lone<br />
**** Unusual single 'lone wolf' massive ships that forego having attending ships in exchange for a simply awe-inspiring amount of direct power. Use them offensively or defensively, as you see fit.<br />
*** Battlestations<br />
**** General battlestations that are useful for either defending your planets or for setting up offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Citadels<br />
**** Citadels that are much stronger versions of your general battlestations, packing a huge punch in their own right as well as providing access to defenses for your planets or for offensive beachheads on enemy planets.<br />
*** Planet Cmd Stations<br />
**** Each command station you have on a planet has a small force of mostly basic, utility, or economic nature. However, if you've made purchases from the Zenith Trader or found other unique capturables throughout the galaxy, you might have some fixed-position weapons of surprising power here, too.<br />
** For the time being, the tooltips over the actual fleets just shows the tooltip for their centerpiece. This won't always be the case; they'll later have their own unique tooltips that are more informative.<br />
** For the time being as well, clicking these does nothing but show you a message saying that the fleet management interface is coming soon.<br />
** The individual fleet entries show the name of the fleets, their health percentage, their total ships out of their EFFECTIVE ship cap (for the stationary things, that's out of what you've deployed), their planet name, and their total effective strength if they were fully powered at the level that is chosen for them.<br />
<br />
* Added a new specific tooltip for the fleets in the fleet sidebar.<br />
** This gives a lot of the same info you could already see on the centerpiece's tooltip, but in a slightly more focused and condensed format.<br />
** You can also now right-click to center your view on the centerpiece and select the entire fleet. The tooltip now tells you this. You can also hold shift to select multiple fleets quickly by doing this, as you would have with selecting control groups previously.<br />
<br />
* Given that the fleets in the fleet sidebar can be shown twice -- once for their current planet, and once for their other category -- we decided to add some color to the ones for the current planet to set them apart. This helps to keep it clearer visually what is happening.<br />
<br />
==== Hand-Designed Fleet Capabilities ====<br />
<br />
* Normally it's nice to only have... one way to do things when setting up the XML, right? I mean, that's the most clear thing, eh?<br />
** However, in a few cases it is sometimes nice to be able to have parents talk about their children, rather than children always being the ones talking about their parents.<br />
** This is most notable for hand-designed fleet templates, where we don't want auto-modded stuff to be added in a bunch.<br />
** Thankfully, we can do both things, with both coexisting and neither acting in exclusion of the other.<br />
*** Basically, NORMALLY, you should definitely still use the fleet_membership nodes on ships in order to get them into fleets. This is more modder friendly and more flexible in general.<br />
*** THAT said, now you can also define ship_membership nodes in the fleets themselves, which basically are just the inverse of a fleet_membership node. They say all the same things, but say "a specific ship is being added to my fleet," versus the other way around with a ship adding itself to a specific fleet.<br />
*** This is now in use in a new CMP_StartingFleetDesigns.xml file, which uses a new design_logic of InitialPlayerFleet.<br />
**** Basically: we want to have 5-7 starting player fleets that are hand-designed including what their centerpiece is as well as what their ship compositions are. This lets players start off the game with something they are excited about, and move forward with whatever they find procedurally generated after that.<br />
<br />
==== "Control Groups" Are Gone ====<br />
<br />
* Fleets basically handle the same thing. But better. Some of the interface for this won't be until an upcoming build, though.<br />
<br />
==== "Supply" From Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new IsConsideredOutOfSupplyOfParentFleetCenterpiece bool, which is calculated based on ships within a human mobile or defensive fleet not being on the planet of their centerpiece.<br />
** This is done separately because that way it can only be calculated once per second, which is a lot more efficient.<br />
** This then gets used by things that are checking to see if ship systems are disabled -- aka guns, engineers, etc. These ships can still move, but they're neutered on purpose.<br />
** If the centerpiece is itself kind of hobbling along half-dead, it's okay because the ships are still able to draw supply.<br />
** For the stuff that is either considered "loose" or part of a command station's fleet, these things don't have the concept of supply at all, because their fleet leaders can legitimately be destroyed permanently and they need to still function. Or the loose ones don't even have a fleet leader.<br />
** The goal of the fleet leaders thing is to keep the mobile fleets, and the Battlestation stuff, remotely in the same area as one another. You can't start segmenting your fleets and sending them off to fight WAY off, only raiding neighboring planets. This is for balance purposes more than anything else, and is similar in reasoning to the old Supply concept from AIWC. Funny how things like that come back around!<br />
<br />
==== Squads Removed ====<br />
<br />
* Intra-Squad Formations have been removed, as have the concept of squads, the counts of "visual things per subsquad," and so on.<br />
** The whole "squads" idea was mainly to have more ships without having more ships, and that just wasn't working out for a variety of reasons. Now it's just ships instead.<br />
* large_ship_scale_multiplier has been removed, so that all marks of a starship or whatever are now the same size. This lets us define them in ways that are best for being able to see them without them getting too stupidly huge.<br />
<br />
* Various parts of the game referred to "squads" and "ships" as separate things, and there were internal mechanics for repairing lost ships in a squad, etc.<br />
** That's all gone now, but there are some code remnants (to say the least) that still refer to squads. If you run into anything in the front-end (aka actually in the game) that mentions squads, we'd appreciate a heads up so that we can correct that.<br />
** There ARE still visual groups of many of the smaller ships (V-Wings, etc), which is because those are just a single "3d model" made out of several smaller 3d models at this point. We can go back and correct that later, or we can leave it; we're kind of on the fence.<br />
<br />
==== Rallying Ships From Factories to Fleet Centerpieces ====<br />
<br />
* IF a mobile fleet of yours is on a planet with a factory, or on an adjacent planet, then the factory now produces ships for it as fast as it can.<br />
** In the interest of fairness, a given factory divides up its resources evenly between every possible ship that it can build for every fleet in range, and works on them all at once. So there are no queues, there is no order to set, there's just whether or not you accelerate the factories with engineers or not.<br />
<br />
* The various types of "ships rally to X location after construction" are now gone, with instead all the ships from docks rallying to their fleet centerpiece, whereever that may be.<br />
** This is highly automated and much more the default thing we want to have happen.<br />
<br />
* Fixed a variety of bugs with ships rallying to their fleet centerpiece (which is the only type of rally that now exists).<br />
** They should rally to where the centerpiece either is or is heading, and they'll stop rallying once they get very close to where the centerpiece is.<br />
** They stay in rally mode, continually updating their destination, until they reach the target. Initially the target can only be on the planet they are on or an adjacent planet, but it's possible that the target will move even further away while they are chasing it, and they should adjust to follow. That has been tested except when moving more than one planet away while they chase.<br />
** Note that you can't set the rallying directly at all, unlike prior versions of the games. Factories just make whatever is needed in order to bring a local fleet up to full fighting force, and those things automatically rally to their respective fleets. "Local" means on this or an adjacent planet.<br />
** On arrival, the rallying ships should take up the disposition of the ships that are at the other end, but that remains to be seen if that works as the interface for that bit isn't there yet. If you see problems with us, please do let us know.<br />
<br />
==== Procedural Fleet Names ====<br />
<br />
* The fleets for most fleets now have default names that are pulled from folders [FleetNames_Mobile_P1]+[FleetNames_Mobile_P2]. If anyone reading wants to add to these after this build is out, that's certainly welcome.<br />
** This wasn't a high priority item, but Chris needed a small mental break when starting the morning. ;)<br />
** These can be renamed later by players.<br />
<br />
==== AIP Penalties for Fleet Clustering ====<br />
<br />
* If you put too many ships from too many fleets on one planet, basically the AI notices, gets scared and angry, and the AIP starts increasing over time. It warns you about this.<br />
** You're allowed to have WAY more units in this version of the game compared to any prior one, but if you go putting them all one one or two planets the AI is going to kick back... hard. That whole "guerrilla warfare" bit goes out the window if you advertise your presence like that.<br />
<br />
* The fleet concentration AIP penalties will now only kick in at 3 fleets on an AI planet, and 5 on a player planet, rather than 2 and 4 respectively.<br />
<br />
* The way that the "too many fleets on a planet" code works has been reworked a fair bit, but not tested:<br />
** It now looks at all the human ships that are part of a mobile (flagship) fleet or a battlestation/citadel fleet. Before it was just looking at the fleet centerpieces, meaning you could have your centerpiece hide on an adjacent planet and send its ships in and the AI wouldn't notice.<br />
** It also now only looks at the ships that are actually on the planet, and not the total strength of the fleet. The strength must be at least 2 in order for it to care at all about it for these purposes. If you send in 10 fleets of strength 1 -- or a slice of them that is strength 1 -- then it won't care.<br />
*** This latter thing will probably encourage all sorts of bad behavior, but we'll figure that out in the future. For now it should feel more natural in general, but it will likely need further iterating.<br />
<br />
=== AI Behaviour Changes ===<br />
<br />
* The AI will now be less worried about distant mobile enemy forces.<br />
* The AI will no longer mistakenly count Guard units as Threat in some code paths<br />
* Make some improvements to hunter/warden fleet routing logic<br />
** Thanks to zeusalmighty for the Hunter/Warden save game<br />
<br />
* Each AI faction now has its own Hunter/Warden fleets. The units of each Hunter/Warden will just show as "Hunter Fleet" or "Warden Fleet", but there will now be multiple fleets acting independently. The goal of this is to make those fleets much more flexible in how they deal with enemies.<br />
** Only one Hunter and one Warden are visible in the game lobby. The other hunter/wardens will copy the colours but not the settings of the visible Hunter/Warden.<br />
<br />
* Add a new gameplay mechanic, "AI Civil War". At the beginning of the game, Communication Nodes are seeded near all the AI homeworlds. Destroying all of them will trigger the AI Civil War by making the AIs unable to communicate with eachother. This will make all of the AI factions hostile to eachother; they will send waves at eachother, use Threat on eachother, etc, just like they do against the player.<br />
** This will significantly strengthen all the AIs.<br />
** The Warden and Hunter Fleets will remain friendly with all the AIs. They are unaffected by the Communication breakdown and are quite confused. <br />
** If there is only one AI in the game then the Communication Node will not be in the game.<br />
** "AI Civil War" mode is also available as an option to the Game Lobby, which will start the game with AI's in Civil War mode. This is for testing and sandbox purposes.<br />
<br />
* The targeting code now treats XML-based importances as more important than 'amount of damage I can do'; this makes it less likely for units to ignore Command Stations and other high-value targets in favour of fleetships<br />
<br />
* Change how overkill is calculated; only count units that are actually in range of the target<br />
** This makes ships less likely to dance between multiple targets, unable to pick which one to attack.<br />
<br />
* Don't throw away Distance to Target information when choosing a target<br />
** This also makes ships much less likely to do the "can't decide on a target" dance<br />
<br />
* AIs no longer have any concept of "unlock points," and they don't unlock new ship types over the course of the game.<br />
** This was a neat concept in AI War Classic, kinda-sorta, but in a long campaign it just meant more chaos, honestly.<br />
** The original intent was to make it so that there was a feeling of progression and the AI doing new things with new tools as you go through the game, and that is now handled far better via the ship groups instead, and the planets being more unique, etc.<br />
<br />
* When the budget for a wave is over 3k, the AI no longer randomly gets guardians added in as a thing they can buy for the wave. Instead things are more hand-designed than that.<br />
<br />
=== Map Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Several map types have been improved by Draco.<br />
** Thanks Draco!<br />
<br />
* Make the Simple and Realistic map types more interesting by fixing a dumb bug in them.<br />
<br />
* The Max/Min number of planets in the galaxy is now defined on a per-map type basis rather than a global (since some maps scale up to larger galaxies better than others)<br />
** Some map types go up as high as 500 planets, others are capped at an AIWC-like 120 planets<br />
<br />
* The previous methods for some of the map seeding of AI things are also being... phased out in some ways, and made a lot more centralized and thus flexible.<br />
** This in turn lets us make the various AI planets a lot more unique, and lets modders add to things without replacing them.<br />
<br />
* The warden special forces hideouts were previously always seeding 4, but now it's sometimes more based on the size of the galaxy being larger.<br />
<br />
* The game is now able to seed multiple entities on certain planets if we so desire, during mapgen.<br />
** As the sole use of this so far, we're now seeding two battlestations/citadels on any planets that have those, to make those a lot more attractive as targets and also thus provide more firepower for defensive purposes for players without them having to capture QUITE so many planets for each of these that they get.<br />
<br />
* Did a fair bit of rework on some of the mapgen logic where it is trying to seed things close to the player homeworlds.<br />
** A while back we had some problems where things were frequently seeding too close, so we put in code to counter that. That was in turn preventing us from intentionally putting stuff there more recently.<br />
** Now there's a healthy balance between us being able to do that while still avoiding the old bug, and in general things seem to be working well.<br />
<br />
* There was some other funkiness with it being really unlikely to seed certain things very near to you.<br />
** That has been fixed, to start with, but then beyond that it also now tries to seed half the flagships and battlestations kind of in the middle-distance for you on the map.<br />
** In general this now gives you way more options for middle-game goals for making yourself stronger.<br />
<br />
==== Limited Ship Types For Each AI Planet ====<br />
<br />
* Essentially it's super boring when there are too many types of ships all over the place on every planet for the AI. So now it does this really interesting thing where it chooses a subset/theme for each planet, and some themes are harder than others, rarer than others, etc. Now you can actually see what is there, formulate a strategy of which of your fleets is best to send, and... well, send them.<br />
<br />
* Planets now remember what specific ShipGroup out of a ShipGroupCategory they are using for a given faction. This is where the theming comes in for these planets.<br />
** For the wormhole sentinels, it's actually only seeded at the start of the game, and each wormhole is unique rather than being homogeneous per planet. So those don't get remembered.<br />
<br />
* The entire way that AIs choose their "draw bags" for how to populate a planet's guard posts, strikecraft, turrets, or whatever, has been redone; but also the same is redone for waves and CPAs and the like. It's all using the new AIShipGroups and AIShipGroupCategories.<br />
<br />
* In the tooltips, you can now see how many ships and what strength is contained inside a guard post, as you used to be pre-fleets. HOWEVER, you can also now see exactly how many of each type of ship is inside there, to see what mix the AI is using at that planet without having to go aggro a guard post.<br />
<br />
* Basic definitions for ai ship groups and ai ship categories have been implemented. These are based around the excellent document that Puffin set up on the subject, but with some changes and additions here and there.<br />
** Note that this is ai_ship_groups_i_am_part_of, and it refers exclusively to how the AI uses ships. This isn't meaningful at all to fleet design stuff for players, which is a separate topic.<br />
** This also doesn't affect minor factions, although there's nothing stopping minor factions from adopting this new pattern in the future.<br />
** At the moment this also only describes strikecraft and frigates, and not turrets or other things of that nature. Those are coming soon. Puffin, if you want to set up the other categories and groups based on this starting template, probably ignoring the "singular freaky surprises" stuff, then please feel free as it would save me some time.<br />
** The overall rule with this usage of ships in groups is that anything that is a variant of something else shouldn't be in the same group with it. This is just a design thought, not a technical restriction. Warden and Hunter fleets will wind up having all sorts of strange mixing and matching, but by keeping to this rule we will ensure that planets and waves otherwise don't have that sort of strange mixing.<br />
** You'll also notice that for the ship group categories that are specific to certain AI types, like Turtle or Cloaking-Heavy or whatever, those also include some sub-groups that are unrelated to their type, but which will provide some... well, variety. Aka sometimes instead of being a cloaking-heavy wave, it will by an anti-structures wave. Sneaky! There's nothing worse than a predictable AI type, so having some variety in what they do, even if they are thematically heavy, is good.<br />
** It's also worth noting how the "draw bags" work, in this context. Essentially the number after the things that are included say "how many raffle tickets do I put into the draw bag?" And depending on how many other total raffle tickets have been put in, that's how likely it is to come out.<br />
*** In order to allow for granularity in definitions, our default number of tickets to add is 100. That way we can say "only do this 1% as often as most stuff" by putting in 1 ticket instead of 100.<br />
*** But even there, the odds of it coming out are not 1%, because it depends on what else is put into the bag. And by very definition, what is put into the bag is something that is meant to be unknowable at design time, since it can be modded, and expanded in the future. So we simply use something like "100" to mean "regular frequency, whatever that is," and then the other numbers like "25" to mean "about a quarter as often as usual, whatever that is."<br />
*** It is worth noting that not putting too many types inside a single draw bag is probably good in MOST cases, because it means that players will be facing a planet or a wave that has some sort of coherency to it that they can plan around. I'd say that 3 types is a sweet spot for waves, but sometimes having many more or fewer types is okay. Variety being the spice of life, it's okay that many of the things drift off the "normal" design parameters.<br />
*** Overall we'll find some situations where people go "wow there's way too many xyz unit in this circumstance," and we'll deal with that as need be. But most of these groups are intended for things that are not strictly numbers-bound (aka more than a handful of forcefields on a planet is terrible, so using them in these groups would be a Very Bad Idea since it would lead to occasional bouts of player dismay).<br />
**** Most of the time, we are likely to wind up with something like "holy cow that one planet is a nest of sniper like I've never seen in my life," and we just kind of sit back and go "yep! That will happen, in extremely rare cases. Either deal with it or go around, but that's the fun of this." The prior system was leading to a feeling of samey-ness on all the various planets, and so this is meant to break things up more into various thematic niches, some of which are more rare than others due to being either annoying or scary or hard or whatever. But we still want those rare outliers to happen, because those are either the places where good stories happen during AARs, or where the player's eyebrows can shoot up as they go "I'm glad I don't have to go THERE." Or sometimes it's just going to be the Wave From Hell that surprises players before going away again.<br />
** This whole thing is going to take a lot more defining and redefining over time, but it's really well set up for having lots of ship variants and strange outliers. In a lot of ways, this is intentionally pushing planets and waves a bit more in the direction of a RogueLite, where you never quite know what you're going to find. Chris was really missing some of the sense of exploration, and this is his way of trying to capture that again.<br />
*** And note that this is completely parallel to the player fleet waves and such, so the nice thing is that the AI, other factions, and players can all be thought of using completely separate structures and in completely different terms. As it should be.<br />
<br />
* Each planet belonging to an AI now seeds a single entity from SingularFreakySurprisesAIShipGroup on each of their planets at the start.<br />
** Note that this includes a fair bit of blank space, and that if it chooses blank space that is considered A-OK. So it won't really be every planet, and the frequency is actually determined in the xml rather than the code.<br />
** This lets things like the Golemite be set up a lot more directly, and without using tags.<br />
** The ONE downside of this is that the frequency can no longer be based around things like what the AI difficulty level is. But frankly, that's something that makes the AIs feel less unique and not just easier; if the game is meant to be easier, the player should still be facing the unique foes of that AI nonetheless.<br />
*** As part of this, the explicit seeding code for the Golemite to seed its golems has been removed, and it now uses the new central xml-based function.<br />
*** Note that, if we want to, there's nothing stopping us from using both the old method and the new one at the same time. The new one is mainly a convenience that makes for some powerful new xml-only modding capabilities that don't need to touch C# to add cool stuff to an AI.<br />
<br />
* Guardians now have their own AI ship groups, like Strikecraft, and are similar to them. Did the same for Royal, and it uses those for the wave and reinforcement ones as well, so interestingly it can vary what Guardians it has, or roll the same thing in Reinforcements and Guardians separately and really focus on one thing, or even have almost every kind, with an emphasis on this set, etc.<br />
** Just didn't like how planets were always a mess of Guardians. Sometimes they still will be, but that's a rare "Oh dear" thing.<br />
<br />
===== How The AI Guards Wormholes Is Way Cooler =====<br />
<br />
* The Stealth Wormhole Sentinels have been set up as something that only show up rarely, now that scouting is going to be working differently. This is useful for making planets feel a lot more varied, and not all planets so hard to sneak your stealth ships into.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Basic Minefield Wormhole Sentinels, possibly against our better judgement, to let a tiny minority of wormholes actually have mines around them that players can stumble into.<br />
** Since these should only really show up once, with the AI not rebuilding them, this should be an interesting thing for the player to run into well under 1% of the time. Thanks to Puffin for suggesting this; this should provide for some interesting traps without being too frustratingly common.<br />
<br />
* Actually jacked up the default NobodyHereWormholeSentinels draw bag count to 1000, and the StealthWormholeSentinels to 50, so that the 1 of BasicMinefieldWormholeSentinels is EVEN MORE RARE. Hopefully players run into one or zero minefields during a given campaign, thus making it more exciting.<br />
** Of course, if someone wants to make a minefield-heavy AI type, that is straightforward to do, now.<br />
<br />
* Additionally, there are now 5 different kinds of wormhole sentinel setups that are based around using tractor arrays and turrets, tesla turrets, gravity weapons and pike turrets, and whatever else.<br />
** These are also in the minority in terms of how frequently they will seed, but are way more common than the minefields and should make it so that some of the wormholes are a lot more interesting to face, now.<br />
** This gets back a bit more back to the original design of the original game, which is only possible now because of how some of the scouting changes will interact with the game here. We had had to move away from this because of tedium of automated scouting in other circumstnaces.<br />
** There are still quite a few wormholes that won't be directly defended at all, and it's possible for us to set up way more wormhole defensive types as desired in the future; these are mostly a proof of concept.<br />
** Note that with the sentinels at wormholes, the idea is that these will exist from the start of the game and never get upgraded or reinforced, unlike what happens at guard posts.<br />
<br />
==== Revamped AI Types Based On New Seeding Styles ====<br />
<br />
* Set up new "singular freaky surprises" that includes how golems are seeded for the Golemite now, and actually gives a very rare chance that some regular planets will sometimes have an AI golem.<br />
<br />
* The Vanilla AI type has been renamed to "Full Ensemble," referening the fact how it is basically the most well-rounded AI type that presently exists. It has the most varied surprises up its sleeves.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Simple Ensemble AI variant: Like the full ensemble in most respects, but minus some of the more esoteric ship variants. There's plenty going on here, but not quite so much craziness to discover as you explore.<br />
<br />
* The Starfleet Commander AI type has been removed, as now all the AIs kind of do what it was doing before. It no longer stands out as unique.<br />
<br />
* The Everything AI type has been removed, as it was kind of redundant now, and wouldn't have made for coherent gameplay anyhow.<br />
<br />
* Added in a completely untested new Thief AI type that was kinda-sorta defined previously but seemed to be missing, nonetheless.<br />
<br />
* Also added a completely untested new Zombifier AI type that uses a bunch of zombifying ships and other nasty things. It was kinda-sorta previously defined but again still seemed to be missing.<br />
<br />
* In general there were very few AI types removed, and instead they are all just a whole heck of a lot more vibrant, and we actually added a few.<br />
<br />
=== Hacking changes ===<br />
<br />
* Science Extraction hacking will now show the total cost for the remaining science on the planet in the tooltip<br />
** Requested by Ecthelon on Steam<br />
* Hacking has been feeling a bit too easy these days, so include AIP when calculating how strong the hacking response should be for hacks against the AI.<br />
** The formula is now NewHackingResponse = oldHacking Response + (oldHackingResponse * AIPMultiplier * CurrentAIP)<br />
<br />
* Add the Sabotage hack<br />
** This will kill a random NormalPlanetNastyPick structure on a planet. Many people have asked for this. <br />
<br />
* Allow hacks to be done against planets, not just structures<br />
* Allow hacks to be done without a local hacker on the planet<br />
* Allow the AI to launch an attack against the player after hacking is completed<br />
** These can be set on any hack with an XML tag. So all the previous hacking mechanics can continue to function as usual, but new options are now available.<br />
<br />
* Mercenary Beacons can be done without a local hacker on the planet. They are also nearly instant to complete.<br />
<br />
* Hacking the dyson sphere in order to download a ship design SHOULD now actually work, although it works differently from before.<br />
** Rather than unlocking a new ship line in general (type Dyson Defender), it now adds a permanent cap of 2 more dyson defenders to whatever the hacking fleet is that just did the hack. So it's a way to buff up the particular fleet doing the hack with some sweet new dyson tech that you get to keep forever.<br />
** In general this can now serve as a model for other types of the same thing that we can do, although there's a question mark of course as to whether this actually works since we've not tested it. But it's neat and should be useful in general for the future.<br />
<br />
* The hacking for the dark spire wraiths now works like the dyson hacking.<br />
<br />
=== Bug Fixes ===<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug in the entity hovering ui where it was incorrectly identifying energy overdrive as an attack penalty<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where the Zenith Trader (Traitor!) was allowing the AI to buy way too many goodies<br />
** Thanks to lots of people for reporting this, including Jannik2099 and Ovalcircle<br />
<br />
* Fix a null reference exception when handling GameCommands<br />
** Thanks to jannik for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Fix a problem where v-wings were having damage multipliers based on buildings lack of engines<br />
** Thanks to weaponmaster for the bug report<br />
<br />
* Correctly flag the "Download Dyson Sphere Ship" hack as unavailable after that hack has been completed<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on steam<br />
<br />
* Fix a bug where vengeance generators were warping in already vulnerable to damage<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster and zeusalmighty for the reports<br />
<br />
* Add an Objective for hacking the Spire Archive<br />
** Thanks to settemio for the reminder<br />
<br />
* Only seed one spire archive per AI<br />
** Thanks to WeaponMaster for the report<br />
<br />
* Spire Archive isn't invulnerable to all damage, meaning it properly dies after being hacked.<br />
** Thanks to Democracy for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Spire Archives now show on the galaxy map.<br />
<br />
* The Superterminal now explodes after the hack finishes, instead of using a kludgy and bug prone mechanism to prevent it from being hacked multiple times<br />
** Thanks to Lifestrider and zeusalmighty for bug reports<br />
<br />
* Fix a typo in the settings menu for multiple AI types<br />
** Thanks to coldrage101 for reporting<br />
<br />
* Fixed a minor bug where the HRF Raiders were never spawning because of a typo in their tag.<br />
<br />
* Fixed that issue with the fullscreen resolution not being settable in recent internal builds.<br />
** Note that there is still some issue that may make you need to alt-f4 the program after changing between fullscreen resolutions or fullscreen to not-fullscreen, but it then shows up properly after that. I expect an upgrade to the unity engine, due in the next month or so, will probably fix that one part. And that one part probably isn't new. But the new part that was broken is now fixed.<br />
<br />
* The game now properly unpauses itself after you close the escape menu, if it paused itself going into there.<br />
<br />
* Units that are stacked, or units that are in transports, now cost energy the same as they do when they are outside of their hosts.<br />
** Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin for reporting.<br />
<br />
=== Renaming And Visual Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Cleaned up all entity names, from in the past when they changed function (i.e LaserTurret to NucleophilicTurret).<br />
* Also cleaned up and standardised all the entity system names, and cleaned out a few that were redundant.<br />
** This should make it a bit cleaner to work with in future, as there's no weird cases of there being a WidowGuardian, which is really the Paralysis Guardian, but it shows up as the Widow in all the internal files!<br />
<br />
* The Widow Mine is now the Paralysis Mine, and the Grenade Launcher fleetship is now Grenade Launcher Corvette - seeing as it has the Corvette icon and all.<br />
<br />
* Sentinel Frigates are now Sentinel Gunboats.<br />
** Anything in future, like Lightning Torpedo Frigate will use the term Gunboat instead.<br />
<br />
* Fleetships are now called Strikecraft, and Starships are now called Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Space Docks are now simply called Factories, Mobile Space Dock is Mobile Factory, and the Starship Constructor doesn't exist at all now.<br />
** Both Strikecraft and Frigates come out of the same building.<br />
<br />
* Not a rename, but a recolour. Human Resistance Fighters and Marauders have a primary green that shows up better in game, and matches what it is in the lobby.<br />
** Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.<br />
<br />
* Advanced Factory is now the Intra-Galactic Coordinator.<br />
** It's just a thing that increases your ship caps, essentially.<br />
** The ship_cap_multiplier actually works now in the new system. It won't increase the caps for anything with a cap of 1, though, just FYI. It also can't be used to reduce the cap.<br />
<br />
* Mentions of Shields such as the Shield Frigate, Shield Generator etc are all Forcefield now.<br />
** Apparently we were using both in kind of random places?<br />
<br />
* As Squads are removed, all the Strikecraft models are much bigger, with a single one taking up the same space the full squad used to!<br />
** In addition, things like Frigates, Command Stations, Turrets, etc are all bigger. Almost everything, really.<br />
<br />
* All icons in the game are displayed a bit higher above their entity. This gets them out of the way a bit, hopefully not too far that it's difficult to know what they're for.<br />
** With this and the above change, you can actually see the models a bit!<br />
<br />
=== Ship Variants ===<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Harasser" variant of the MLRS Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Porcupine" variant of the Pike Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ablative Troll" variant of the Ablative Gatling.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Dagger" variant of the Raider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Gunbot" variant of the Autocannon Minipod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Velociraptor" variant of the Raptor.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Stalker" variant of the Eyebot.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Tripper" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Railpod" variant of the Sniper.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Pulsar Punk" variant of the Pulsar Tank.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Aggressor" variant of the Agravic Pod.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Mirage" variant of the Space Plane.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Hydra" variant of the Vanguard.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Zapper" variant of the Inhibiting Tesla Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Terrier" variant of the Spider.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Molotov" variant of the Grenade Launcher Corvette.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ranger" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Medic Gunboat" variant of the Sentinel Gunboat.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Absorber" variant of the Vampire Claw.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Thief" variant of the Etherjet.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Paralyser" variant of the Stingray.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Cluster" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Nanoswarm" variant of the Auto Bomb.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Persuader" variant of the Parasite.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Ripper" variant of the Warbird Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Brawler" variant of the Assault Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Devastator" variant of the Siege Frigate.<br />
<br />
* Adds the "Siphoner" variant of the Shield Frigate.<br />
<br />
* The Hydra is now the Vanguard Hydra, and there's a new Stringray Hydra type to keep it company.<br />
** The Stingray version is markedly more strong in the sense that it subdivides but doesn't have worse stats. It's a quick bit of variance for planets or waves that are replicant-heavy.<br />
<br />
* Also added a Parasite Hydra to round it out even more, although made them thankfully lexss frequent.<br />
<br />
* Added Ghost Grenade Launcher Corvette and Ghost Concussion Corvettes, to round out the ghost strikecraft category a bit.<br />
<br />
* A new Station-Keeping Assault Frigate has been added to the loadout of military and home command stations (2x each), and logistical command stations (1x each).<br />
** As with the pike turrets that all the command stations now have, this gives you some more defensive options without having a fleet or a battlestation around.<br />
** Unlike the turrets, these don't require any placement planning, since they are mobile and able to roam around and hit enemies. Seemed like this would get around a variety of frustrating situations that even having turrets would not solve.<br />
<br />
==== New Variants For Starting Fleets ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new Cloaked Ark One variant, and this one is ONLY available via a new "Cloaked Fleet" (CloakedStartingFleet) that players can get in the lobby at the start of the game.<br />
** This offensive fleet is one of the first that players can choose from, and it's powerful and invisible and likely to make them feel quite powerful.<br />
** Led by the Cloaked Ark One, this has Raptors, Agravic Pods, Gunbots, and then Warbird Frigates.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Mugger variant of the Assault Frigate that gets parasitism (this needs to be tested).<br />
** This is ONLY available via the new "Parasitic Fleet" that players can choose at the start of the game.<br />
** The parasitic fleet in general is weak and small by comparison to others when it comes to direct firepower... but of course they create a bunch of zombies to work for them. Uh, and yeah there's a Botnet Golem at the center. So weaker might not be accurate after all.<br />
** Led by the Botnet Golem, these have 60 Parasites and 2 Muggers. This is by far the smallest ship cap fleet you can start with... until you start creating zombies.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Classic Fleet that players can start with.<br />
** This classic mix isn't good at any one particular thing, but is well-rounded against any foe. The forcefields just make things even better.<br />
** It's V-Wings, Fusion Bombers, Concussion Corvettes, and then a Forcefield Frigate, with the centerpiece being an Armored Golem.<br />
** This is a nod both to the first game as well as the classic starting loadout of ships in this game itself, which is now absent.<br />
<br />
* Added a new Raid Fleet for the starting player options, which also has a new "Agile Cursed Golem Ark" that is the Cursed Golem but with way faster engines.<br />
** The whole purpose of this fleet is being able to rapidly move around faster than any other purely offensive fleet in the game.<br />
** It also includes a new "Turbo Stingray" ship that is a faster version of regular Stringrays, and then Velociraptors and Daggers, which are normally already super fast.<br />
** All of these things share the same base (very high) speed except for the last and obligatory part of the fleet, Raid Frigates. These are able to move EVEN FASTER, and so can go off on their own away from the main body if you so desire.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Doorkicker Fleet" as another starting fleet option.<br />
** Mostly focused on crowd control, but with siege frigates along to punch giant holes in large targets when required.<br />
** Basically this is the taking the idea of the Attritioner archetype, but giving one bit of counterbalance to it. Led by a black widow golem, this has MLRS Corvettes, Grenade Launcher Corvettes, Inhibiting Tesla Corvettes, and then Siege Frigates.<br />
<br />
==== New Battlestation Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Revealer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tachyon Array.<br />
<br />
* Gravitic Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Gravity Generator.<br />
<br />
* Shieldwall Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has greatly improved shields that extend out around itself.<br />
<br />
* Engineering Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has very powerful engineering capabilities.<br />
<br />
* Ensnarer Battlestation<br />
** Can construct various structures on a planet, even if you don't own it. Also rebuilds structures from their remains. This Battlestation has a very powerful Tractor Array.<br />
<br />
==== New Citadel Variants ====<br />
<br />
* Metabolic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing many weak shots that turn targets into resources on death.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of high power Agravic Bombs.<br />
<br />
* Inhibitor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires bursts of shots that reduce enemy weapon output.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, fires multiple paralysis shots.<br />
<br />
* Parasite Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, firing small bursts of bolts that zombify victims.<br />
<br />
* Interceptor Citadel<br />
** Strong defensive structure, packing multiple railcannons that shred fast moving targets.<br />
<br />
=== Balance Tweaks ===<br />
<br />
* Tesla-class structures (Guardians, turrets, etc) now reduce incoming damage from far away by 99% instead of 100%. This allows the targeting code to identify Tesla units as potential targets (instead of ignoring them as if they were Invulnerable). Units in FRD (and minor factions) should now be able to actually attack Tesla turrets.<br />
** Many people have complained about this, including TechSY730 and Democracy.<br />
<br />
* Ark Energy Overdrive is removed for now. Find another place for it (likely in a changed form).<br />
<br />
* Sniper damage bonus requirement reduced from speed 1200 to 1000.<br />
<br />
* Sniper: Starting bonus multiplier 5x -> 8x.<br />
<br />
* Space Plane gets the damage resistance to anything beyond range 4600 instead of 5600 now.<br />
** Basically you have to be closer to it to do full damage. Also means that when using Pursuit, they try to stay beyond that.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units have half the shots per salvo, but reload in half the time.<br />
** Helps them retarget more often.<br />
<br />
* MLRS units get their damage bonus at 30% enemy hull remaining, instead of only 20%.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard, Pulsar Tank, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette, Grenade Launcher Corvette: Mass 0.21x -> 0.3x.<br />
<br />
* Vanguard: EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Raptors, Autocannon Minipods, Space Planes, Agravic Pods, Vampire Claw, Raid Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Eyebot, Stealth Guardian: Albedeo increased to 0.7.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette, Sentinel Gunboats, Snipers, Siege Frigate, Tritium Frigate, Warbird Frigate, Tritium Guardian, Concussion Guardian, Plasma Guardian: Armour reduced to 40.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Corvette: Shields 2,800 -> 1,800, EngineGx 8 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Claw: Armour 40 -> 70, Life Leech reduced from 1.5x to 1x.<br />
<br />
* Raptor: EngineGx 7 -> 10.<br />
<br />
* Raptor Hull: 2900 -> 1900.<br />
<br />
* Stingray, Etherjet, Metabolizing Gangsaw: EngineGx 7 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette only applies reload penalty to armour below 60.<br />
<br />
* Siege Frigate: Damage 2500 -> 25,000, spreads it among targets instead of hitting 10 for full damage, range 10,100 -> 12,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard, Pulsar Tank (main gun only): Range changed to 4200.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Vanguard: Speed reduced to 400.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette: Hull 1,000 -> 1,400, shields 1,000 -> 1,600, EngineGx 8 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Corvette, Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Armour increased to 110.<br />
<br />
* Inhibiting Tesla Corvette: Shields 2,000 -> 3,000.<br />
<br />
* Etherjet: Damage 30 -> 20.<br />
<br />
* Fortified Tesla Turrets have a similar damage bonus to Ablative Gatlings now.<br />
** Makes them a bit more interesting, and also some room for other changes.<br />
<br />
* V-Wing: Hull/Shields changed from 500/3500 to 2000/2000.<br />
<br />
* Pike Corvette: Armour 50 -> 70, range 8,000 -> 6,000, shields 200 -> 800, speed 700 -> 500.<br />
<br />
* Eyebot: Hull/Shields 1,000/1,000 -> 800/800, armour 50 -> 60.<br />
<br />
* Agravic Pod: Armour 50 -> 70.<br />
<br />
* Dark Spire get a bit less energy if they're the ones that killed something.<br />
<br />
* Nucleophilic Guardian: Armour 90 -> 50, albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Concussion Guardian: Hull/Shields changed from 20,000/20,000 to 10,000/30,000, EngineGx 12 -> 14.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian, Paralysis Guardian: Speed 1,400 -> 400.<br />
<br />
* Spider Guardian: Range 15,000 -> 8,000, Armour 90 -> 40.<br />
<br />
* Paralysis Guardian: EngineGx 13 -> 7, Armour 90 -> 110, range 8,000 -> 5,000.<br />
<br />
* Grenade Launcher Guardian: Albedo 0.4 -> 0.3, EngineGx 14 -> 7.<br />
<br />
* Pike Guardian: Armour 50 -> 70, EngineGx 14 -> 7, range 8,000 -> 6,000.<br />
<br />
* Tractor Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.3.<br />
<br />
* Gravity Guardian: Albedo 0.7 -> 0.4.<br />
<br />
* Vampire Guardians now have Cloaking, but attack half as fast.<br />
** Stealth Guardian now has a friend that it shares a group with.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Plasma Turret.<br />
** Closer to Heavy Beams than the rest.<br />
<br />
* All Turrets except Beam and Plasma have 10% lower health, but 15% greater damage in exchange.<br />
** Turrets felt like they slap the enemy to death slowly while outlasting everything. This is minor, but speeds it up a tad.<br />
<br />
* Slow the increase in cost for Science hacking multiple planets<br />
** Thanks to Ecthelon on Steam for the suggestion<br />
<br />
* Minefields are now all one use. Damage increased for normal and Area mines to compensate, Paralysis mines have a longer effect as well.<br />
** This fixes numerous problems with them, including somehow surviving and the AI being confused, being repaired mid-combat, overkill or Military Command Station boosts having weird effects, etc.<br />
** Also lets us put damage bonuses on more cleanly without worsening any of those previous problems.<br />
<br />
* Marauders have a per-outpost cap on the Raiders they can produce. Unfortunately, stacking causes raiders to lose information about their spawning outpost. As a backup, also introduce a global cap on the number of raiders that the marauders can have.<br />
** This should dramatically tamp down the power of high intensity Marauders late game, especially in sandbox games.<br />
<br />
* Reintroduce the Hunter/Killer.<br />
<br />
* AI Co-Processors reduce AIP by 20 more when all destroyed.<br />
<br />
* Player Golems are much weaker now, but can be upgraded alongside Arks. AI Golems have minor upgrades.<br />
** With enough upgrades, the player ones will match then surpass their previous forms.<br />
** Initial testing of Golems as Flagships was...amusing.<br />
<br />
* Thanatos starts with the zombifying weapon already usable.<br />
<br />
* Arks are a bit faster, have a bit less health and a bit more damage.<br />
<br />
* Spire Frigate can be upgraded as well, has some weapon and health changes and has three versions of itself now.<br />
<br />
* AI Forcefield Guard Posts and Forcefield Generators are now actually in use again, as rather rare finds.<br />
** Connected to this, AI Turrets are in a tighter spread around whatever they defend, so they actually sit in the forcefield instead of uselessly outside.<br />
<br />
* AI Overlord Phase 2 should actually come after you on that planet now.<br />
<br />
* Mercenaries spawn at Mark 1 now, and level up with the players tech level.<br />
** They're also a bit weaker to compensate for that.<br />
<br />
* Carrier Frigates are, unfortunately, gone. For the player, Drone producers must be a Fleet Leader, instead of a random Frigate or whatever in it, to avoid having nested fleets.<br />
** Potentially it can return in a fashion as a Fleet Leader in future.<br />
<br />
==== Crippled Status ====<br />
<br />
* Battlestations and Mobile Fleet Flagships are now automatically something that cannot ever die, per se -- instead they become "crippled" when their health is less than 10% of its maximum value.<br />
** This solves a whole heck of a lot of problems that we otherwise have, such as where ships should rally to, and it also avoids the "corpse run" problem. <br />
*** If there are lone golems that players are capturing that die to remains, or other similar things that are not fleet leaders in that way, then those can still be a source of corpse runs, so it's not like that mechanic went away. It's simply not being a major focus for these types of ships.<br />
*** For a while, we were having things like Arks (which fall into this new category) automatically warp back away to some sort of safe space, but that's no longer a thing, which is good.<br />
** Their weapons and other systems all go offline when they have less than 10% health now, which is actually a pretty new limiter on them since it gives them only 90% of their health in which to work, although there's no longer the risk of them dying if you're not paying attention. But for balance purposes it's worth noting that we may wind up needing to beef these out slightly.<br />
** Enemy ships will consider them an uninteresting target if they are already crippled. It's possible that actually shots won't do any more damage when hitting them and they are crippled, which if so is a bug I need to fix later. But them not bothering to target the enemy seemed to be the most important thing for now. If you have a savegame with shots not damaging these ships, then please let us know.<br />
** It's also possible that there will be some edge cases where these things actually DO die rather than being crippled, in which cases repro saves will be very welcome.<br />
** Mobile fleets with a crippled centerpiece now have an effective remaining cap of 0 for all the ships that factories might be sending to them.<br />
*** This makes it so that factories won't supply new things for them anymore until there is an un-crippling of the centerpiece. Otherwise there's no reason to bring said centerpiece home for repairs, it's just this strange invincible vessel to which lots of ships rally.<br />
*** The metal spent on partial construction of ships is not refunded, but rather is stored at the fleet and as soon as the centerpiece is un-crippled things will come back online and resume wherever they were.<br />
** Note that if any ships are set to reverts_to_neutral_on_death="true" in xml while being of one of these two types, that really won't matter because they should never die. So those should probably be removed.<br />
<br />
==== Costs of Repair vs Construction ====<br />
<br />
* We recently (in this giant build group) redid how the repair costs were working for ships, and it's unclear how that changed things cost-wise compared to what the costs used to be (the costs as they used to be were super unclear).<br />
** What IS clear is that we changed it to just be the equivalent to rebuilding the unit, aka repairing it 50% is the same as building half a new unit. This was by design and we didn't think much about it, but it is definitely something that was eating through metal prodigiously.<br />
** What's also clear is that we were charging this FULL amount for repairing shields, health, and engine health -- ouch. So really if you were at half engine health, half shield health, and half hull health, you'd spend 150% of what it would cost to just build a new unit. Not good! We'd much rather encourage repair in general.<br />
** We now have a variety of dials in the xml external constants to affect the percentage of the full metal cost that it will cost for various repair types:<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_hull_points: 50% cost for repairing hulls.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_personal_shields: 20% cost for repairing personal shields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_bubble_forcefields: 75% cost for repairing bubble forcefields.<br />
*** balance_repair_cost_multiplier_for_engines: 10% cost for repairing engine damage.<br />
** This should make things quite a bit less constrained on the player income-wise (it was feeling pretty tight at certain points in the early game because of your much larger forces), and also encourages reuse rather than just refleeting.<br />
<br />
==== Costs For AIs Purchasing Things ====<br />
<br />
<br />
* There is a new field, cost_for_ai_to_purchase, which is an integer that replaces the old_strength values.<br />
** This is now what AIs use to purchase units, and it is separate from how strong the unit is seen as.<br />
** This is problably way out of balance for now, but it at least is something we can tune directly from now on.<br />
** "Strength" in the game is now properly only used for evaluating, well, how strong something is. Aka how the AI acts, or as information for the player.<br />
** This is NOT something that goes up by mark level anymore, unlike before, and that's by design as well. The AI should be able to afford equal numbers of ship type X on a mark 1 or a mark 4 planet. That's how things were in AIWC, but it was oddly not at all like that here.<br />
<br />
* There are a bunch of other related changes to making the game use the CostForAIToPurchase field instead of the Strength field -- and remember that this is on the TypeData rather than the ForMark data, and that this is by design.<br />
** This is probably buggy as eff. There's a ton of code in this area, written by a bunch of people over a long period of time. So AIs will probably wind up making some pretty strange purchases for a little while, until we find and fix whatever bugs there are, aside from the inherent data issues.<br />
** Nonetheless, now was the time to go ahead and make this change, because it was a fundamental deterrent to us being able to balance what the AI builds separately from how strong the AIs and players view a unit as being. And that was one primary driver behind all things being a very similar cost-to-benefit ratio, at least on paper... and ongoing headache for Puffin, with that. The headaches won't end because of this change alone, but they will shift to a new sort: balancing each of those two things independently of one another ("does the strength stated for that unit seem to match how scary the AI and players should think it is?" and "does that cost an appropriate amount for the AI in most contexts, or is it too cheap or too expensive for them?").<br />
** But in the short term, this will be extra complicated by the fact that the math probably has some bugs in it because probably some things that should be using the new AI budget stuff are still using the strength data. I would be shocked if that's not the case, despite looking at it very carefully until I was cross-eyed.<br />
** And then the other question of "how much should this cost" is now out of date compared to what the strength values were, so even if the math is all perfect we're going to have bonkers data for a bit. That part I do leave to Puffin for the most part, sorry about that. ;)<br />
** As a general design note, both the players and the AIs have been having fewer ships than I would prefer, thus far. For players it was because of the way the ship caps were -- pre-fleets. For the AIs, it was because of the way they were being "charged more" for higher-mark stuff when looking at their own budgets. At the start of the game, a mark 3 planet and a mark 4 planet should have the same relative amount of budget spent, but one gets better stuff from it. Previously, unlike AIWC, the mark 4 planet was getting charged a premium and so felt anemic by comparison to the mark 3 planet.<br />
*** This may in turn wind up with the AI having waaaay too many ships for a while, but if we pack those into the guard posts as contents that are not deployed yet, that should have zero performance impact. And it will be good for the humans who suddenly have a lot more firepower at their disposal. Overall the goal coming up is for everyone to have a whole heck of a lot more shooty things, but having them more spread out so that the mega-battles aren't individually any larger than they are now. It will take us a little while to get that part perfect, so please bear with us.<br />
<br />
* TryToSpendBudget_CPA has had some updates to how it deploys ships from itself, since the way it stores ships is different from the start. This may or may not cause demonic fumes to erupt, so let us know.<br />
<br />
* UnlockShipLineForAI() has been removed, as AIs don't work that way anymore, either.<br />
<br />
=== Achievements ===<br />
<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with each AI type enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with some of the Minor factions enabled<br />
* Add Achievements for winning a game with various galaxy sizes<br />
* Add Achievements for controlling a given number of planets in a game<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have > X Metal/Energy/Hacking points"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Kill > X units", "Lose > X units" and "Kill > X && Lose > Y units"<br />
* Add Achievements of the form "Have a campaign X hours long"<br />
** Note that the above types of Achievements can be added to the game with only XML changes<br />
** TODO: Add a UI to show the player which Achievements have been earned<br />
<br />
=== Science/Tech Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete rework of how techs function. They are no longer tied to individual ships like before, but rather there are actual technologies that are named and that benefit a variety of ships.<br />
<br />
* Ark Upgrade Points and Destruction Points are both confusing and have been removed from the game as a concept.<br />
** But never fear, something very similar with a clearer name and purpose is being added back: Fleet Experience Points.<br />
<br />
* The initial techs have been added, and applied to ships and turrets and whatnot.<br />
** This is, at best, a first pass for now. However, there are are present 14 distinct techs that you can upgrade that are more ship-abilities-focused, and which are generally shared between strikecraft, frigates, and turrets. This is the general intended design, even if exact matchings aren't correct or ideal right now.<br />
** The costs here are also potentially bonkers for real-world use. Additionally, there is a maximum number of times a given tech can be researched, and that is usually set at 4 right now, kind of arbitrarily. That does NOT mean that the max tech level of a ship is 4, however.<br />
*** Ship tech levels are a combination of all the techs that benefit them (some have more than one), as well as any upgrades to the tech level of their specific fleet. So some are much easier to get to a VERY high mark now, whereas others are almost impossible to do.<br />
** There is now a new UpgradeMeFromFleetOnly tech that isn't shown on the menu, but which we use in cases where we want to denote that this IS something we can upgrade, but only at the fleet level rather than the ship level.<br />
*** This is used for things like command stations, engineers, economic production units, and forcefields. That makes these things a lot more location-dependent in terms of how high quality your ships of those sorts are. This should be pretty interesting, actually, and it takes them out of contention for the main science upgrade costs more.<br />
** Overall the goal here is fewer science upgrades happening, but each one having a much larger impact. We may have gone too far in that direction with this first setup of the data, but at this point it's all an xml-based issue.<br />
** Note that all of these techs are based around upgrading all the ships that you have that subscribe to this tech via tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and that crosses fleets.<br />
*** This should benefit mercenaries, although that hasn't been tested.<br />
*** We did base this loosely around Puffin's classes/roles document, but this is meant to be... slightly both more and less granular than that document, and to be multi-categorized in many cases. So your document is still relevant (mainly for fleet design), but it's just semi-related to this specific use.<br />
** It's also worth noting here that some ships/turrets/whatever have multiple tech_upgrades_that_benefit_me, and those are going to go up in tech quality FAST by comparison to their peers. Assuming that players unlock techs synergistically. So some of the ones like the Light, Heavy, etc, might need to be a lot more expensive than they are right now.<br />
*** As noted already, the balance here is a bananas basic proof of concept right now, and I'm sure broken in a thousand ways. The only purpose of me throwing this together at the moment was to give a proof of concept unified design philosophy to look at, even if details are really wrong. This gives Puffin and others a chance to actually make it make a lot more sense while I move on to work on other things.<br />
** Note that the EXP concept doesn't come into play at ALL with these sorts of techs. These are purely science costs. The EXP is fleet-based stuff instead, and may not cost any science at all (fleets that auto-upgrade would be nice). But also spending some science on a specific fleet's upgrading would be nice, so that's something that will likely be possible. How that works at the planet level is still TBD, I have two different possible models for that and haven't been able to choose between them yet.<br />
** Also please note that for an individual ship/turret/whatever type, there's no risk of it going above its max mark level, which is either 7 or is explicitly defined as something lower, or is markless. If it subscribes to 2 techs that each have 1 upgrade, it would naturally be mark 3, unless it's capped at mark 2 in which case it will sit at mark 2. And if its fleet is also upgraded 3x, then it would be mark 6, unless it was capped lower.<br />
** A general note: This overall tech system has way fewer decision points than the old one, which is good because that makes them actually something that you can contemplate. However, as a byproduct of that, you'll often get some secondary stuff upgraded that you cared less about, and that actually provides opportunities for you to make new use of them in interesting ways if you so choose. Also also, you're a lot more likely to have really wide mark level disparities between parts of your empire (different planets and fleets), which is more in keeping with the first game albeit from a completely new angle. This is exciting.<br />
** Another general note: the overall ship caps per fleet will only be whatever they are, but the idea is to have larger effective ship caps for players by the late game because of a proliferation of fleets. In some cases in the late game you'll also have some fleets that are incredibly technologically superior to the AI, and other fleets that are incredibly behind the times. How this exactly plays out will be interesting to see from players, but in a theoretical sense there's nothing wrong with that; we may just have to adjust some balance dials over time to keep things from being TOO extra weak or strong, and/or to make the AI really reactive to overly-advanced forces if those exist. Here again this is an opportunity for more gameplay, rather than a real challenge in a negative sense.<br />
<br />
* The tooltip for science has been improved to be more accurate and also more descriptive:<br />
** Spend Science to unlock higher-level units and structures. It is gained primarily by claiming new planets and holding them for a while.<br />
** There is a limited amount that scientists can learn from what they find in each system, so you'll need to keep finding new research targets for them.<br />
** A single ship type can be upgraded by multiple tech upgrades as well as from its parent fleet gaining experience, so be sure to consider your options carefully.<br />
** More techs will appear in the tech sidebar as you capture fleets with ships that can benefit from them.<br />
<br />
* The tech sidebar is once again functional, and allows for you to unlock techs that benefits various ships that you have.<br />
** It looks and works a lot more like the hacking sidebar instead of the build sidebar, now, since the type of data it needs to show is very different. This makes it a lot more text-heavy and showing related costs and the mark levels of ships in a really clear and concise fashion. Yay! It does mean no real icons on here, though.<br />
** The tooltips for techs that you can upgrade are also now completely redone, and it shows you which ships will benefit as well as how many of them you have. It doesn't show you the mark level of the ships, because you might have several different mark levels of each ship type since they may be upgraded by fleet upgrades.<br />
** This was certainly needed in order to make the game all that playable in 0.850, but in terms of why we did it right now versus after the build menu, it's mainly because this was simpler and was therefore a nice dry run for the more complicated menus.<br />
<br />
* Ok! So we've already learned quite a bit about techs and how people will wind up using them. Clearly the new system works well, but is going to need refinement; chief among that is just how many upgrades a given line can grant.<br />
** One of the other things that was immediately most clear was that "Ark" as a technology was really not cutting it. This was way too broadly useful, and "Battlestation" was almost as bad.<br />
** First of all, these need to be more pricey, but some Arks should cost more than others, and some Arks should share techs, but not ALL Arks.<br />
** With that in mind, there's a new schema in place for various Arks and Battlestations broken out as follows:<br />
*** Ark Spirit (most basic stuff), Ark Heart (happy helpful stuff, less dangerous), Ark Armor (beefcakes you need to really pay for), Ark Fist (holy smokes these things are powerful, and thus expensive, and only have 3 marks rather than 4).<br />
*** Battlestation Shelter (protection-oriented), Battlestation Hand (grabbing or slowing enemies), Battlestation Architect (engineering or construction).<br />
** And it's worth noting that Battlestations are really oriented into those as well as the previously-were-fortresses Citadels that are way more combat-oriented, so splitting those also matters:<br />
*** Citadel Executioner (kill a lot of things), Citadel Protector (yeah, hurt them, but protect other stuff as the primary), Citadel Consumer (eat or steal the enemies).<br />
** And then there's the Spire Frigates, which really don't need to be lumped in with Arks or Battlestations or Citadels. I'm sure these will expand in the future, but for now we just have the new "Spire Core" (for all three types of Spire Frigate), and they're super expensive but can be upgraded 4 times.<br />
** The overall lesson here is that we CAN have more techs than we maybe were once thinking, particularly since they only show up conditionally. This also makes the Arks and Golems and so on a lot more unique in terms of how well they are upgraded (or not).<br />
*** This will get more crowded in the tech tab with time, unfortunately, as you unlock a lot of ships. For that reason they are now down at the end of the list below all the actual main ship lines.<br />
*** This may also hint that we want more tech lines in general for the other ships, and/or that they need some changes to their science costs, but we'll cross those bridges when we come to them.<br />
<br />
* The science intel message is now more brief in the sidebar, and more informative in the tooltip. Now everything fits.<br />
<br />
* On factions, there is now a InheritsTechUpgradesFromPlayerFactions serialized bool that should be set to true for any factions that the designer wishes to recieve all of the upgrades for the player techs.<br />
** Aka, if two players each have upgrades to Tech A, then the faction will get the largest of the two, not the combined value of them.<br />
<br />
* Got rid of the (very elegant, sadly) "tech view" version of tooltips that showed all the ways a ship would be upgraded by gaining a mark level.<br />
** That was overwhelming as an amount of information, but also there's just no place where we'd actually be asking you to see that anymore. Now you upgrade techs that hit a bunch of ships at once, and so this per-ship-type comparison stuff just has no place in there anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Vision Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Complete vision rework. Planets are all now either<br />
** Unexplored: You have no vision of what is on this planet. You also cannot send ships to or through Unexplored planets.<br />
** Explored: You can't see exactly what's on the planet, but you can see who owns it and the sidebar works. Chris has a TODO to figure out how to show stale data/interesting visuals when you try to look at an Explored planet.<br />
** Watched: This state means "Explored and you have ships there". You can see what's on the planet, but when you no longer have ships there the planet will go back to Explored.<br />
** Permanently Watched: you always have vision here<br />
<br />
* At the beginning of the game, all Player Homeworlds and adjacent planets are Permanently Watched, and all planets 2 hops from a player homeworld are Explored.<br />
<br />
* Capturing a planet or killing an AI command station automatically Explores all adjacent planets<br />
<br />
* You can also Explore a planet by hacking an unexplored planet, as long as you have an adjacent Explored or Watched planet (otherwise you could just explore random planets around the map which seems less interesting to me)<br />
<br />
* You can Permanently Watch a previously Explored planet by hacking (but the AI will launch a small counterattack at you when you do so).<br />
<br />
* The game now tracks the specific gamesecond that entities were created, and when they entered planets, versus "how long ago."<br />
** There are helper methods for getting the familiar "how long ago" data, however.<br />
<br />
* Now that we know the last gamesecond we had vision of a planet, and the gamesecond that ships entered planets, on planets where we do not have current intel we are instead showing the effective last-known data on the sidebar, as well as actually showing the ships visually (through the distortion), even moving around if they are. <br />
** This won't show any ships that have been more newly added to that planet, though, and the sidebar notes that. So there might be a huge hunter fleet moving through there and you'd have no idea, for instance.<br />
<br />
* For planets that are completely unexplored, you cannot directly send ships there anymore, nor can you select it on the galaxy map or send your view there.<br />
** It IS still possible for your ships to path through completely-unexplored planets, for the time being, however.<br />
<br />
* Trying to make it so that player ships are completely unable to pathfind through unexplored planets is rather more than a bit of a nightmare. With that in mind, they are now simply disabled if they wind up going into unexplored space for whatever reason.<br />
** We can make this more sophisticated in the future, but for now that should handle anything exploity.<br />
** Players can use various tricks on the sidebar to click to the fleet leader heading through unexplored space to see such a planet, but they'll wind up seeing nothing there, so they gain very little. And meanwhile, the ships of the player are unable to shoot but still able to move, and enemies are able to shoot and are completely invisible to them, so that's... quite a bit of "fun."<br />
** Main thing we probably want to do at some point is get player ships to try to prefer not going into unexplored territory if at all possible.<br />
** Edit: nevermind, player ships should not be able to path through them at all. So yay! But if they do, they'll be disabled.<br />
<br />
* The "explored" status for planets has been split into "explored by natural means" and "explored by distant hacking."<br />
** This mostly doesn't matter and isn't something we're making a big deal about in most places. But using spy nanites basically is no longer a way you can expand how much your empire gains in vision every time you capture a planet.<br />
** The "explore next to explored" logic basically ignores stuff that was spy nanites. Maybe there should be a conduct later that makes it not ignore that, since that ALSO would provide some interesting strategic options, but frankly for now that seems like overkill. We shall see.<br />
<br />
* When you don't have vision of a planet, there is now a fancy distortion effect that is part grainy-tv and part slow-matrixy-refraction.<br />
** There's not a way to disable this effect, because it shouldn't be fast enough to make anyone nauseous, and there's no real point in looking at planets that you can't see anything at, anyway. This just makes it clear why you can't see those planets (the sidebar says no vision, but why did all the ships just disappear?)<br />
<br />
==== "Hard Mode" For Scouting ====<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Scout Adjacent Only" conduct, with the following description:<br />
** TLDR: This is harder and will make you take a lot of planets. For advanced players only.<br />
** Details: Normally when you capture a planet, all planets adjacent to ANY explored planets become explored. Unless the map is very narrow, this causes you to get exponentially more planets you can see as the game goes on. Even further than that, there is a minimum number of planets it will explore for you when you take a planet, depending on the number of planets in your galaxy, so that snake maps and other really narrow maps aren't unplayably hard.<br />
** With 'Scout Adjacent Only' enabled, it tosses all that out the window. Instead it just explores any planets adjacent to the planet you just captured. This will make snake maps almost impossible to play (so that's a bad combo), but on maps with more cross-connections it can lead to... a certain added strategic challenge. This still seems masochistic even in the best case, but have fun with that if you want.<br />
<br />
=== Removed/Revamped Ships ===<br />
<br />
* Science Labs, Hackers and Scouts are removed. Scout functions of the Sentinel Frigate and Sentry Starship are removed.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Starships are now per-planet cap, cannot use wormholes, are built directly (like turrets) and die to remains.<br />
** They're effectively Decloakers from Classic, but far more convenient.<br />
<br />
* Engineers are per-planet cap, cap reduced significantly and can't use Wormholes.<br />
** The new Combat Engineers are able to use Wormholes and are a type of Strikecraft instead.<br />
<br />
* Mobile Space Dock and Mobile Builder are not unlockable or buildable, and are instead capturables.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Builder is now the Basic Battlestation, and is capturable.<br />
** And now there are actually like 5 variants of this, thanks to Puffin.<br />
<br />
* The Mobile Factory is now the CombatFactory, and is capturable.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Fortress is now a form of Battlestation called Citadels.<br />
** And there are several variants of this, too.<br />
<br />
* The Remains Rebuilder has been removed, and the RebuildingRemains metal_flow has now been granted to all of the player command stations and the player mobile builders. It's no longer something that is assist-line-distance-based, nor is it something that requires a dedicated unit to run around doing things with.<br />
** This is one of those streamlining bits that people have requested for a while, but Chris in particular was noting that engineers and rebuilders need to be two separate functions (and they do). But making this instead essentially work like claimables and "just happen" solves the issue that people were complaining about without getting into territory of making the AI for the engineers likely to be bonkers.<br />
** Later we will need for all of our Battlestation types to have this, most likely, or things will get funky at times. This last is a note for Puffin.<br />
<br />
* Colony ships have been removed from the game, since that was a level of indirection that was not needed.<br />
** Similarly, hackers are gone, as are mobile builders in the classic sense.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers in the codebase are now gone. The concept of warheads, in the codebase, is now gone.<br />
<br />
* Starships are now called Frigates, including in the codebase itself. Docks are now called Factories in the codebase.<br />
<br />
* Golems as a standalone thing (for players) are now gone, as are Arks. They are now combined into being the Mobile Fleet Flagships. They are still called golems and Arks, but they're the centerpieces of your fleets at any rate.<br />
<br />
* Really key new limitation for drones, for the sake of sanity and not having nested fleets. This really only applies to player ships, in the main:<br />
** The drone producer must also be the fleet leader. So if we're talking about a player ship, it needs to be the Battlestation or Flagship of a fleet, and not something like a random Frigate as part of it.<br />
** On the AI and NPC sides, they don't really use fleets the same way normally, so anything that is a drone generator just becomes in charge of a new Drone fleet type.<br />
** This is probably going to be the source of some "fun" bugs. It will start spewing errors like crazy when this happens (once per second per ship that has this issue during gameplay), if it happens. It's possible to set this up with bad xml, basically.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for automatically building remains rebuilders and setting them to auto-FRD are both now gone, since so are remains rebuilders.<br />
<br />
* The gameplay settings for "brave scouts" is also now gone, since scouts are also being removed and rejiggered.<br />
<br />
* Design Template Servers have been removed. They were not exactly exciting, and they don't make sense in the new method of AIs working with unlocked ships.<br />
<br />
* Schematic Servers (formerly ARSes) have been removed. Those also no longer make sense in the brave new world that is the new setup for fleets, etc.<br />
<br />
* The idea of CorruptedAIDesigns has been removed, as that was something that people weren't really using and it doesn't fit well with the new approach to AIs and fleets.<br />
<br />
* A bunch of stuff relating to Golems the way they used to be, including the entire Broken Golems faction, has been removed.<br />
** Golems are now another form of Ark, basically, and are capturable in that fashion.<br />
<br />
* Metal harvesters are now markless, rather than being upgradeable. This solves an issue with them being funky upgrade levels on enemy planets, and in general the ability to upgrade them is something that I was iffy about in the current system anyway. It was likely to be too powerful.<br />
<br />
* The home forcefield generator, which has existed since the first game as a last-ditch tool that you have until you lose it, is now something that you can rebuild.<br />
** It's also now markless and has its stats more directly set, so that you definitely never get more than one. It was kinda funky having it be mark 2 in this game from the start, and it also led you to having a cap of 2 instead of 1.<br />
** The whole purpose of this is so that you can rebuild it if it dies, since you don't otherwise inherently have access to any forcefield generators on your home planet at all, now. You have to put a battlestation or a citadel there in order to get a forcefield beyond the first, and depending on your playstyle you might choose not to do that.<br />
<br />
=== Capturing Planets ===<br />
<br />
* So long as you have a mobile fleet leader on a planet with no command station (enemy or otherwise), you can now capture it like you would have previously done with a colony ship.<br />
** Aka, just take any of your golems or Arks over to the enemy planet and destroy their command station and you're immediately ready to set up your own. Boom, simpler.<br />
<br />
=== UI Changes ===<br />
<br />
* Player profile stuff relating to choosing a default Ark type is now removed under the hood. It hasn't been on the front-end for quite some time now.<br />
** Note that a lot of the stuff with Arks having a story and a portrait image are thus now gone, although again this isn't new on the front-end. Arks simply have a new role now.<br />
<br />
* You are no longer asked to pick a Chief Adviser at the start of the game for your profile. That was a lot of confusion an un-needed choice on something rather trivial, and got in the way of getting you to the actual game.<br />
** Now it just has a screen for profiles that asks for a name and your default colors and that's it.<br />
<br />
* In the lobby, you can no longer select a starting bonus ship type OR a starting Ark for your faction as a player. Neither of those make any sense anymore. Now there's something new:<br />
** The game now lets you choose from special starting fleets, of which at the moment there are 5 handcrafted ones. The player can choose which one they want in the game lobby, just like they could with Arks.<br />
<br />
* "Conducts" are now able to, and in fact required to have, a description.<br />
** They also now have tooltips in the lobby, which show these descriptions, thus explaining what the heck they do.<br />
<br />
* The conduct for "start with planets explored" has been removed, as that's really cutting out a core part of the game now.<br />
** The scouting being so much more automated now kind of makes it a bit different from other games where you can turn off fog of war. Despite the first game having the option to turn off fog of war, that really takes out the entire flow of the game when it comes to this game.<br />
** Scouting isn't some hassle thing "that you have to do but might want to skip" anymore, but now is part of the reward structure for capturing planets, and so turning that off just would have... a lot of balance issues, among other things.<br />
<br />
* Added the following description to the Experimental: AI Civil War conduct, which is the only pre-existing conduct currently remaining. This may or may not be fully accurate:<br />
** If there are multiple AI factions, they all hate each other and will fight each other. They still hate YOU, too, but all this chaos and infighting is assumedly to your beneit. Then again, you might just find yourself in the crossfire of AIs who are getting more powerful more rapidly due to aggroing each other... so it's anyones's guess as to how long you'll last.<br />
<br />
* Working on making the tooltips for ships substantially more brief while still conveying the important information. Some of them are getting ridiculous for sure.<br />
<br />
* Added a new type of control for our settings menu, which is an integer slider. This is preferable to the textbox or dropdown for some cases.<br />
** We're now using that for the auto-build engineers, which also defaults to 2 now instead of 0.<br />
** We're also now using that for the various volume controls, which were inexplicably textboxes before.<br />
** We're also now using this for the minimum autosaves to keep, and the autosaves interval.<br />
<br />
* When planets are explored via you having just capturing a planet or whatever, it now shows a message log entry saying what planets were discovered and how many of them there were. This way it's clear that scouting is even happening!<br />
<br />
* display_name_for_sidebar has been added for entities, as it lets us give a more brief name to appear on the sidebar while still having a fuller name in tooltips.<br />
** This is optional and will just use the full name if it needs to. But if the sidebar is having bad wrapping of some text, then this should be filled with something shorter. Case in point is the home forcefield generator.<br />
<br />
* There used to be some logic about automatically opening certain windows when you selected certain kinds of ships (build menu when selecting command station, science menu when selecting science lab, etc), but since so much of that is all centralized or otherwise non-ship-related now, or all related to centerpieces, this just led to the UI kind of oddly seeming to do its own thing at times now. This has been removed.<br />
<br />
* The tooltips for factories now show which fleets they are supporting, and what the status is of all the individual line items they are building for that fleet. This is super satisfying to just watch, turns out.<br />
<br />
==== Intel Tab ====<br />
<br />
* Something I talked about on the podcast is an new form of objectives, which is an idea that I've been refining since then (and had already been prior to then).<br />
** However, the "objectives" on the sidebar as they stand right now are not something I want to get rid of at all (most of them), given that they are kind of a "todo list of things you might want to do," and that's a pretty important tool to have.<br />
** With that in mind, the Objectives sidebar has instead been renamed to Intel, and over time we'll probably take out some things like the beginner tips and the primary objectives and so on. For the primary objectives we'll likely just recontextualize the same thing, but the beginner tips we'll probably fold into the new objectives (actual objectives system, separate from this intel system).<br />
** All of the really time-consuming-to-add and detailed "objectives" stuff about where we found things to capture and hack and kill, and where we should be scouting, etc, is all going to stay. It's just under the name "intel" instead, now. Really, that's what it is: information that lets you make decisions yourself, be that diverging from your main objectives or defying them or whatever else.<br />
<br />
==== Build Tab ====<br />
<br />
* The "Direct Build" sidebar has been completely reworked from scratch.<br />
** It's no longer based on icons and tiny buttons, but instead has much larger buttons in categories. This may lead to more scrolling in some cases, but it also should be way more legible AND in general the player should have fewer things that they can build at any given planet unless they've stacked a lot of battlestations and citadels there.<br />
** Each line item not only shows what type it is, but also has to include what fleet it goes with -- so if that's the planet fleet, or one of the battlestations or citadels, that is relevant.<br />
*** Why is this relevant? Well, those things can be upgraded independently, for one. And for another note, it's possible that you might choose to move a battlestation or citadel to a new planet, thus making all of their units on this planet stop functioning. So it does play into the strategy if you plan on moving around your battlestations and/or citadels (as you likely will).<br />
** These also now show the cap directly in a 0/3 fashion or similar, with it showing how many have been built out of how many are possible. It's possible that you might have more built than are possible to build, which it will show properly, but with a red warning.<br />
** It also more directly shows the cost for construction -- super useful -- and grays out the text of any entities that you have already built to the full cap so that they are not so noticeable.<br />
** This whole setup is really geared around having many fewer TYPES of things that you can directly build at a given planet, and that's the intention for the long term. We don't really want dozens of options here, but rather a smaller and more interesting selection that you can build from contextually depending on the planet.<br />
** At this point you can actually construct new direct-placement units!<br />
<br />
* A whole bunch of changes have been made to the way the tooltips look in build mode for entities, and also to how things are hovered-over in the build menu and galaxy in terms of what highlights, when.<br />
** It's stuff we'll refine further with time, but if something seems off, please let us know.<br />
<br />
* When a Zenith Trader is visiting, you'll see a bunch of stuff on the sidebar under various categories, noted in pink as being from the Zenith Trader.<br />
** This is different from past versions of the game where there was a specific category for all the Zenith Trader stuff regardless of what its function was. This actually makes it a lot easier to find things by function, particularly if the amount of wares on offer goes up a lot in the future.<br />
** For things like the Station-Keepers (Chained Dark Spire Eidolon), there is now a per-planet cap higher than 1 for these. That's pretty nifty, and it works!<br />
** Note that even if you don't have the metal for these projects NOW, while the trader is visiting, you can start the projects and pay for them over time. This is as before and is by design. The UI might be a bit confusing on this, not sure.<br />
<br />
* In the build sidebar, turrets and "other defenses" have now been properly split out. Before they were all kind of mixed together in "defenses," which got confusing.<br />
<br />
* Sentry Frigates are now part of the Station Keepers sidebar instead of Other Defenses.<br />
** This is meant to be the case for anything that is mobile, essentially.<br />
<br />
==== Hotkeys ====<br />
<br />
* The hotkey for opening the tech tab now only opens that, versus opening that or the hacking tab contextually.<br />
** Given that the docks tab is gone, the build hotkey now only opens the build sidebar directly as well, kind of implicitly.<br />
<br />
* There are now separate hotkeys for opening the hacking (H) and fleet (R) tabs.<br />
<br />
* The "split selection" keybind that was previously L in this game and the original is now semicolon.<br />
<br />
* The "Unload Transports" (U) hotkey has had its description reworked as follows:<br />
** Any mobile fleet flagships that you have selected will immediately unload any ships they are presently transporting.<br />
<br />
* Added a new hotkey (L): Load Transports<br />
** Any ships that you have selected which are part of a mobile fleet will immediately get inside their flagship for transport if their flagship is on the same planet.<br />
** Note that the need for this to be separate for unload is that it will be common to have partially-loaded transports and you don't want to get into funky toggle situations with ships getting in and out when you really meant "keep getting in" or "keep getting out."<br />
<br />
* The keybind for "select all scouts" has been removed, since scouts are removed.<br />
<br />
* SelectNextUnitType and SelectPreviousUnitType have both been removed, as they were buggy like crazy in general, and also don't really make all that much sense in the new workflow of things.<br />
<br />
* Trigger Current Master Menu Action 1-12 are now gone as hotkeys, as they only worked in the escape menu (since the rest of the master menu was gone as of over a year ago) and it was using up a lot of hotkeys for something not all that useful anymore. Once upon a time this was brilliant, it just doesn't fit anymore.<br />
<br />
=== Savegame Format Revamp ===<br />
<br />
* The default serialization style for things the game saves is now Byte arrays rather than the char arrays. This will make savegames vastly smaller than before, although not as legible (as if they were before) to edit by hand.<br />
** This is great for a variety of practical reasons, but among them it causes fewer transient garbage collector allocations. And it also makes it so that large integer numbers are no longer something that make the savegame larger. Rather than one char's worth of bytes per digit in the number (1-6 bits, per UTF-8 specs), it now just has a fixed 4 bytes for the number regardless of how many digits it has.<br />
** This breaks all the previous savegames, but they were already broken anyway.<br />
** Player profiles and settings are still using char arrays so that they can be edited by hand as desired.<br />
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* There was previously a "too smart for our own good" method for "compacting" integers down that were used as primary keys. This could cause all sorts of bugs when used incorrectly, and aside from known bugs that this fixes, we happened to see a few other bugs in passing as we were removing it.<br />
** Note that this was needed almost exclusively because of the char arrays serialization that we were using. Now that we're using byte arrays, this compacting is not just bug-prone it's actually not any more efficient in the first place. So it's really good to have that out of there in general.<br />
** Thanks to DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY for reporting a particular bug caused by this.<br />
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* Items that are truly deprecated, but that we still want some record of for whatever reason, are presently moved into a new GameData/Pre900Deprecated folder.<br />
** This way we still have the xml, but the game never looks at it. Normally the purpose of deprecating something is to make sure that savegames that are older can still be read in. With 0.900 we're breaking the savegames anyway, so clearing out the deprecated stuff is only natural.<br />
<br />
* As part of this release, we had switched to writing our savegames in a binary format. However, this wasn't really working fully properly because it was trying to transcode that into unicode, which in turn would sometimes complain with the "Unable to translate Unicode character XXX at index YYY" error.<br />
** This was also notably less efficient in terms of GC usage. Now we're just directly writing the binary file.<br />
** In fact, now we're writing a BuzzsawBinaryByteArray, which is 449kb where even the binary array was 3.2mb, and the char buffer was even larger.<br />
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* The way that the "external data" (aka modder-type data or data that was being saved into the external projects) is saved used to be based on using a sub-serializer that then itself got written as a string back into the main serialization stream.<br />
** This was probably done as a way to isolate freaky bugs introduced into savegames by modders, but with our new serialization logging that's really no longer a worry. As it stands, the sub-serialization may have instead been preventing us from properly saving sub-data and getting it back reliably. Also it was vastly less efficient in the new context.<br />
** Anyway, given that the new context is such that doing the data saving of external data just fully inline without any wrappering is more efficient, that's now what we're doing. Based on the serialization logs, this seems to work great.<br />
<br />
=== Debugging Additions ===<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Savegame Serialization Logs" setting into the debug section of the game settings.<br />
** When saving a game, write WorldSerialization.txt, and when loading it write WorldDeserialization.txt -- both in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if a savegame won't load for some reason; this lets us do a diff of the two files and figure out where they are diverging.<br />
** Note that this won't help with an existing broken savegame. This will only help if you have it turned on prior to creating a savegame you expect to be broken. This is basically a way for us to test the savegame creation and load process, which otherwise can be incredibly opaque and take a lot of time to hunt down.<br />
** It's hard to understate just how big a deal this tool is. This is an area that could have us searching for hours or days for a problem, and now we can find it in minutes, potentially.<br />
*** The specific genesis of the feature was in fact Chris spending hours searching for something and not finding a solution, and finally thinking there had to be a better way. We should have thought of this 10 years ago, honestly.<br />
<br />
* Added a new "Write Mapgen Log" field in the debug part of the settings.<br />
** When generating a new map in the lobby, write MapGen.txt in the PlayerData folder. The only real reason to turn this on is if mapgen isn't really doing what you expect for some reason, or you just want some detailed insight into what is happening and in what order.<br />
** To hook into this as a modder for your own purposes, you simply write to MapgenLogger.Log(). If you're doing anything CPU-expensive or that involves string concatenation or similar, then you can wrap that inside an "if ( MapgenLogger.IsActive )" statement. This simply avoids slowing down mapgen at all when logging is not active.<br />
** There is some serious funkiness going on with some data being null when it should not be, and this is how we're going about figuring out when and why that is happening. But this also lets us see the results of maps that are generated without having to scan with our eyeballs all over a big map so much. Given how much has just changed in mapgen and elsewhere, this is handy, even if we didn't have an immediate bug issue.<br />
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* The fleet centerpiece "repairs" no longer get dumped to the log unless a new debug setting is enabled. This was essentially just spamming the log for no good reason at the moment, but it's useful to be able to see it in some limited cases, hence the new option.<br />
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* Put in a buuuunch of debugging code for figuring out where excess notifications that hang out at the top of your screen are coming from.<br />
** The tooltips for the excess notifications should now explain what the problem is.<br />
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== Prior Release Notes ==<br />
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[[AI War 2: Early Access Starts!]]</div>Ovalcircle1