AI War:Current Post-4.000 Beta

Prerelease 4.035

• The wave sizes of the aggressive AI types have been toned down quite a bit, from being 2x or 3x larger than normal, to being 1.25x or 1.5x larger in general, or 2x for the mad bomber (which was previously the sole 3x-larger one).

• For clarity, the rarity descriptions of asteroids have been changed from "Low, "Medium," and "High" to "Common", "Rare", and "Very Rare."
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for suggesting.

• Fighters and bulletproof fighters have been rebalanced a fair bit.
  • Their attack power and health, etc, scales up more linearly by mark level, making the higher-level ships much more powerful than before.
  • Their attack power in general has increased 10x, while their hull attack multipliers have been dropped 10x. Any hull multipliers that were less than 10 have simply been removed.
  • This is essentially a preview of something we hope to do next week for all the fleet ship types.

• Fallen-Spire Stuff
  • Added episode 7.
  • The in-hostile-space surveys now takes 2 minutes instead of 5.
  • The event-attack counter now won't count up at all until the first city hub is constructed. Any saves from before the first city hub construction will have their event-attack counter zero'd out on load.
  • All event-attack-counter incrementing now comes from the city hubs, to avoid players feeling like they're being penalized for building the structures and ships that come from the hubs. This also avoids problems where multi-homeworld games using the expanded caps for the Spire capital ships was resulting in the event attack counter increasing faster AND causing bigger attacks, when it should have been maintaining the same frequency as a single-homeworld game while using bigger attacks.
  • Fixed a bug where saves made after construction of the subspace receiver or refugee outpost in versions where those were the last implemented stage of the progression were failing to progress when loaded in recent versions.
    • Thanks to themachineissentient, Lancefighter, and Dazio for reporting this from their mp game.
  • City Hub IncrementsEventWaveCounterByThisPerMinute from 1500 => 1300 (the 1500 is from the aforementioned combination of other factors into the hub, the decrease is to compensate in part for the build-up time from hub construction to full deployment if its structures and capital ships).
  • Event attacks will now use roughly 1/3rd as many fleet ships, if it is unable to spend the points they will be shuffled up to buy more escorts.
  • When loading games from 4.034 or earlier, the game will compute the event-attack-counter contribution from the existing city hubs and set NextRawEventWaveSize and AccumulatedEventWaveCounter to what it would have been with the new numbers. It is also very forgiving of city hubs that have been in existence for over 3 hours, though in general having several hubs for several hours is going to tremendously dangerous event attacks.

(Note: this prerelease is not publicly available yet, we're still working on it)

Prerelease 4.034

• Sniper, Tractor, Tachyon, Artillery, and Laser guardian shots-per-salvo significantly reduced, damage-per-shot increased to maintain same raw dps. Should shred fleet ships somewhat less. Flak, Lightning, and Raider guardians a bit more distinctively-against-large-groups now.

• Fallen-Spire stuff:
  • Added episode 6.
  • The 2-hour time limits on the survey missions have been removed. The main point of them was to encourage the player to be planning to move forward in the near future, rather than waiting until significantly later in the game (when it might no longer be possible due to sheer AIP, buildup, etc), but the psychological impact was more of "feeling rushed", which was not intended. The limits may be re-introduced later in another form if this is found desirable.
  • Spire frigate, destroyer, and cruiser main weapons changed from Heavy Beam Cannons to a new beam mechanic (currently called "Photon Bombardment Cannon", though not all tooltips may indicate this).
    • These look pretty similar to a single-beam HBC, but instead of applying all their damage in one frame they apply it over about 2 game seconds, doing damage every frame, but the beam endpoint cannot change during firing. This makes it much easier to apply full damage at a longer range than the fan-of-beams based HBCs, but it is also possible for the target to move out of the beam during those 2 seconds. It behaves similar to an HBC in that it hits whatever is along the actual line of fire, and closest to the firing ship, and continues through any targets destroyed by the damage.
    • Note that the heavy beam cannon modules mounted by Spire ships are still HBCs, only the main guns are now PBCs. There may be some PBC modules for the higher capital ships later on.
  • Along with the mechanic change, the Spire capital ship main-guns now have a firing cycle time of about 10 seconds instead of 5 seconds, and do about 4x as much damage as they used to (2x to compensate for the reload time change, 2x to compensate for the mechanic change that makes it very much more anti-big-target).
  • The AI's Event-attack composition logic now uses a somewhat different system for assigning point-values to eligible ship types, so there may be some differences in sizes and when certain ships start showing up in these.
  • Core Starships are no longer immune to missiles (this is a base game unit, but in practice is only encountered via cheats or the Fallen Spire progression).
  • Survey Ships can now fit in a transport, though they will not be able to scan from inside them.
  • Spire capital ships will no longer add more to the event-attack counter when on an AI planet, removing the penalty from using them offensively.
    • Thanks to orzelek for reporting the unseemly difficulty of having 1 Spire City on Diff 7, due to offensive use of the Spire fleet.
  • Added "Enable Advanced Logging" toggle to the advanced tab of the settings window. The only thing this does right now is add entries to a new "EventAttackCompositionInfoLog.txt" log file in the RuntimeData directory, each time a Fallen-Spire event attack is launched, with details on the composition that is useful for balance and debugging. The option is off by default since disk i/o is related to some of the recent instability issues on OSX, etc, but really it should be safe since these attacks are not triggered frequently.
    • If you are playing a Fallen-Spire game, we would appreciate your turning this option on in case you run into some oddness or just sheer brutality from the event attacks, it makes it much easier for us to get the necessary details to make informed decisions.
  • For 4.033 the IncrementsEventWaveCounterByThisPerMinute values for each of the relevant Spire unit types were about 35% of what they were in 4.032. For 4.034 they will be roughly 25% of the 4.032 values.

• Transport unload radius changed from 50,000 to 60,000.

• Put in a fix that prevents a semi-rare exception from killing the AI thread.
  • Thanks to Kejal and Ymihere for reporting.

• The method for randomizing lists has been made generic rather than object-based, so that lots of boxing and casting no longer occurs with it, saving a bit of CPU and more transient memory usage.

• Previously, there was an extra wave per wave event for difficulty 8, two extra waves for difficulty 9, and three extra waves for difficulty 10. This made the game WAY harder for solo play on those difficulties, but much easier the more players you have (since this didn't scale per the number of players).
  • Now it has been changed so that there are no extra waves per wave event on difficulties 8 and 9 (as the more recent changes to wave sizing make this unneeded, anyway), and the number of waves per wave event is simply doubled on difficulty 10 (so that way it scales appropriately with the number of players). Normally there is one wave per home planet of the players per wave event.
  • Thanks to Dazio for reporting.

• Warp Jammer Command Stations now block counterattack waves.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for suggesting.

• Counterattack waves are now 4x larger than normal, but take a full 14 minutes to arrive. This makes them more of an event than they used to be, even, but also makes them much easier to prepare for and deal with.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 and others for inspiring this change.

• Previously, SuperTerminals and AI Eyes were not limited in what they spawned based on the types that the controlling AI had unlocked. Fixed.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for reporting.

• When a target ship gets into a transport or goes through a wormhole, shots that are incoming to that ship will now hit the the ship immediately. This prevents players or the AI from being able to use wormholes or transports to fire pot-shots and then disappear.

• Shot damage is now recalculated right when a ship is hit, so that if targets were changed (was the forcefield, now the ship, or vice-versa) the appropriate damage is now done rather than an inflated or reduced amount.

• Multi-shot ships no longer are able to get any "freebie" shots if their target dies while their shots are incoming against it. This nerfs the mutli-shot ships to a minor degree, but more significantly it is a CPU-cheap way of solving a huge bug that was recently leading to multi-shot ships sometimes getting loads and loads of freebie shots that they weren't supposed to -- leading to things like the "rapid fire artillery guardian," for instance.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz for reporting.

• Yet more changes have been made to sound (and, actually, this time also music) playback to hopefully further reduce the psched issue on OSX. Additionally, this should fix the nonresponsiveness and cutting-off-too-early issues with sound effects on windows in the last version.

• Raid Starships are no longer immune to missiles.

• FF Bearers are no longer immune to or absorb EMPs (to make it possible to disable their ff coverage via emp).
  • Thanks to lanstro for the suggestion.

• The health of all the scout starships have been doubled.

• The health and other stats of the scouts have been improved a bit.

• Fleet, Bomber, Siege, Raid, Leech, and Riot Starships all now cost 2x more metal and crystal than before, and thus also take 2x longer to build. This should hopefully bring their cost-to-benefit ratios more inline with the fleet ships.

• Dyson Gatling Health increased by factor of 10. Also, they now take 1000 seconds to auto-decay instead of 200 seconds (it had been 1000 before the removal of a standard 5x health multiplier). Also can now hit UltraHeavy and Structural hulltypes again, but should still be unable to hit all guard posts to avoid freeing stuff.
• Marauder Buzz Bomb and Marauder Dagger Frigate health and attack power increased by factor of 10.
• Resistance FighterBomber and Frigate health and attack power increased by factor of 3.
• Player-Ally and Enemy-To-All Neinzul Roaming Enclaves health increased by factor of 10; AI-ally ones left as-is since those are painful enough.
• Neinzul Preservation Wardens health and move speed increased up to same as AI-Ally Roaming Enclaves.

(Released November 15th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.033

• A completely new formula for wave sizes has now been put in place, and it puts a much more linear weight on AI Progress and difficulty when determining wave size. This attempts to go back to some of the earlier 2.0-and-before feel of the AI Progress increases while staying away from extreme early game difficulty with the first waves.

• Impulse Reaction Emitter damage is now multiplied by (sqrt(targetEnergyUse)/10) instead of (targetEnergyUse/100) (the root is computed when the energy use is set, not each time it is needed, of course), much like the zenith polarizer now multiplies by the square root of armor rating instead of armor rating. Also using the lower divisor to make it more granular. Base damage is half what it used to be (except the core version which had a much higher base, down to like 1/4 of what it was).

• AI Carriers engine health from 100 => infinity.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• AI-only Black Widow golems 1/2 health modifier (it used to have less than a core starship, and not much more than an old spire starship).
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for pointing out the oddity.

• Fallen-Spire stuff:
  • Added "episode 5".
  • Spire Heavy Beam Frigate now fires 1 250,000 damage beam instead of 5 50,000 damage beams.
  • Spire Destroyer's main gun now fires 1 375,000 damage beam instead of 5 75,000 damage beams.
  • Spire Cruiser's main gun now fires 1 750,000 damage beam instead of 3 250,000 damage beams.
  • Spire Heavy Beams now have no bonuses against anything (they had a few bonuses against small-ish stuff, which is not their intent; the existing heavy beam cannon turrets and modules are unchanged).
  • Coordinator ships now release their minions if the coordinator's engines are shot out.
    • Thanks to Lancefighter for admitting to the use of this tactic.
  • The rolling special attacks that start midway through episode 4 have been cranked down to happen about 35% as often as before. The actual attack sizes will be about the same. This will be retroactively applied to 4.032 saves so that future attacks won't be as large. Any attacks already spawned will not be affected, however.
    • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting this in mantis.
• Hybrids will now launch an attack if at least 7/8ths of the hybrids that are coming are ready, and will not intentionally wait for the last 1/8th.

• Modules firing will now apply the same "cannot be cloaked for x seconds" logic to their parent ships as to themselves.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was causing special forces ships and astro trains to not patrol properly.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• Fixed index out of bounds exception in reference tab.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• Fixed a sizing issue that was causing an error message and for the special forces guardian to not appear in far zoom.
  • Thanks to orzelek and themachineissentient for reporting.

• System.IO.File.AppendAllText is no longer used, in favor of a wrappered System.IO.StreamWriter. It is apparently possibly the case that the AppendAllText does not close properly, or uses a secondary thread, in Mono on OSX. That's not 100% certain, but as a matter of safety at this stage we're trying to eliminate extra held handles that might exist.

• A wildly different sort of sound playback system has been put in place. It's now using PlayOneShot off a single audiosource, for those keeping score. The hope is, once again, to fix the OSX psched issue with either this change or the File.AppendAllText change.

(Released November 13th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.032

• Several things with HullType.UltraHeavy changed to HullType.Heavy, since they just didn't have the hp to play in that league.
• Most bonuses vs HullType.Heavy reduced to 20-25% of what they were, since they were much more in line with bonuses vs. HullType.UltraHeavy, leading to alarmingly rapid destruction.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for pointing out some of the more egregious cases.

• All Fabricators from base health of 60,000 to 1,000,000, since they are lost forever if destroyed and previously a player could lose one before they even realized there were hostiles near it.

• Fixed swapping of text between two keybinds on the controls window.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for the report.

• Added context menu item for when you have a single ship selected that is modular, for opening the ship design window with that ship's modules prepopulated into the slots so that you can save the design. You can also change the modules manually or select another defined custom design and apply it to the ship you used to get to the window.

• Spire Starship given 16000 armor piercing, because it strangely had none despite both the Zenith and the Core starship having it.

• Core Starship rebalance:
  • Armor from 5000 => 2500.
  • Health from 65,000,000 => 25,350,000 (twice the Spire Starship's).
  • Attack Power from 40,000 => 60,000.

• Fallen-spire stuff:
  • Art added for actual zoomed-in graphics and buy icons of fallen-spire-related stuff; buy icons and far-zoom-icons still what they were.
  • Added "episode 4".
  • Added an Achievement for completing "episode 1" of the fallen spire progression on difficulty 10 with 8 human homeworlds (it takes the number of human homeworlds or the number of human players, whichever is greater). If this causes you grievous harm, blame the guys on irc.
  • Fixed a bug where the AI would scrap some of the starships spawned an event attack.
  • The "from homeworld" scans now only take 5 minutes instead of 45.
  • Spire Heavy Beam Frigates:
    • Actually have an engine health now.
    • Shots-per-salvo from 7 to 5.
    • Now properly immune to insta-kill, tractors, reclamation, emps, and paralysis (some of these had been missing).
  • Non-chase event attacks now try to be a bit more coherent.

• The way that the AI thread keeps track of Astro Train Stations and Special Forces Rally Points (of all sorts) is now significantly more efficient and effective, resulting in somewhat lower RAM and CPU use on the AI thread in general.

• The EMP on death ability now shows how many seconds the EMP is for.

• The way that expansion enabled status is checked and set in code is now more efficient on RAM and CPU use.

• 35 new guardians have been added to LotS (5 marks each of 7 new guardian types): Carrier, EMP, Self Destruction, Special Forces Rally, Vampire, Warp Gate, and Zombie.
  • EMP guardians only appear on difficulty 7 and up.
  • Self-destruction guardians only appear on difficulty 8 and up.
  • Warp gate guardians only appear on difficulty 7 and up.
  • The rest of the guardians have a more normal difficulty spread, and thus appear at all difficulty levels.

• Thanks to HitmanN for providing module-scale versions of the Heavy Beam Cannon graphics (the turret versions of which he also provided).

• 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 (not available yet in the beta) around this asteroid to consume it and use its advanced materials to create advanced ships not accessible any other way.
  • Note these are utterly useless at the moment, but won't be for long. ;)

• The way that the text wrapping is handled on the intel summary is now better, appropriate to its new taller-but-narrower appearance.

• Transports can now not unload further than 50,000 range units from planet-center (for reference, the maximum distance anything can be built at is 60,000), to avoid some of the more exploitative usages.

• In yet another attempt to find that sound-related resource issue on OSX, the sound system has been hugely restructured to be more bulletproof and to hopefully remove any possibility that Arcen's code is dropping any clip references that were keeping files open.

• A new version of the Unity Engine, 3.1, is now in use (updating from prior version 3.0).

(Released November 12th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.031

• Fallen-Spire stuff:
  • Added 3rd "episode" of the progression.
  • Dangerous fallen-spire events (like when you discover an artifact and the AI starts spawning ships to go after it) now automatically pause the game and display the corresponding journal entry so that you don't miss the fact that you're about to be torn to ribbons (or not, if you're on your toes).
    • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.
    • Added "Disable Dangerous Event Auto-Pause" toggle to a new "Advanced" tab of the settings window to disable this behavior. Note that in a multiplayer game if anyone hasn't disabled the auto-pause, it will still happen, though those with it disabled will not have the journal entry pop up automatically.
  • Added LotS-only cheat "i do not have time for this" that toggles the fallen-spire UseTestTimingValues flag on and off (it defaults to off). When the flag is on, all time-to-perform-survey (not time-before-signal-disappears) times are divided by 60. Note that this is indeed a cheat and will massively mess with the overall balance, but is provided as a courtesy to those players who are so helpfully assisting in the testing of these features. It can be toggled back and forth, though the behavior may not work quite as expected in all cases. One suggestion for balance testing is to use it to shorten the "remote" (from your homeworld) surveys and turn it off before beginning the "local" (on the AI planet) surveys.
    • Thanks to themachineissentient for suggesting a way to short-circuit the waits for testing.
• Increased Avenger hull hp to be somewhat greater than a superfortress, again in line with recent hp changes to fortresses.

• Added a new tab to the Controls screen called "Ship Design", for defining custom templates for modular ships (i.e. the three marks of Riot Control Starship).

• Updated Zenith Polarizer tooltip to no longer specify the exact relationship between attack power and target-armor, since it's more complex now and there isn't space to explain it all.
  • Thanks to liq3 for pointing out the inaccuracy.

• Re-implemented the small window that used to draw when placing a ship, that tells you why the icon is red if the proposed location is not valid.

• Fixed bug where the minor-faction-shots-never-anger-AI logic was causing it to not even apply the repair-cooldown from the damage. Changed to handle LastDamaged separately from LastAngered.

• GZip compression is now used instead of Zip compression for savegames. This has the advantages of: 1) resulting in significantly smaller save files, especially for large savegames -- as much as 30% savings at the upper end; 2) resulting in the correspondingly smaller full sync network requirements for multiplayer; 3) hopefully solving the "pthread_getschedparam" issue on OSX, which seems to quite likely have been related to unintentionally-multithreaded zip processing in the autosave process.
  • Huge thanks to dumpsterKEEPER, resistor, and Vampyre for helping to track this one down.

• A message is now shown when a savegame is saved, to provide visual feedback that the save actually did occur. It's only been since SlimDX that this message was missing, incidentally, but it's fixed now.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for suggesting.

• Raid Starships now have only 1/2 the health reduction that was previously made a few releases back (it's about 5x more health than in the last version, or thereabouts).
  • Thanks to Toll, orzelek, Winter Born, and Moonshine Fox for suggesting.

(Released November 9th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.030

• Fixed a null-exception bug in hybrid-hive logic that was killing the ai thread when it was unable to pathfind to certain objects.
  • Thanks to KToff for reporting.

• Fallen Spire stuff:
  • Unset a testing flag that was making the survey times in seconds instead of minutes.
  • Survey-marker time-to-disappear no longer counts down while the marker is being actively surveyed (this is important in cases where you have 2 hours before it disappears and it takes 45 minutes to go from start-to-finish; this way you have 2 hours to start, rather than just 1 hour and 15 minutes).
  • Made event-attack composition logic significantly more robust (more interesting compositions, at least in the developer's opinion, now properly scales with unit caps for scaled units, point-cost and tier-associations now kept with the rest of the unit data, etc).
  • Chase ships will now no longer wait at wormholes for an accumulation of force (which is the normal behavior).
  • Shard is now immune to engine damage.
  • Shard will now be consumed by construction of receiver.
  • Receiver construction notice now happens at time of completion, not beginning.
    • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.
  • Added next "episode".

• Special difficulty factor (currently only used for hybrids and fallen-spire stuff) now scales more granular-ly with difficulty. For example, it used to be that 7, 7.3, and 7.6 all multiplied the factor by 1 (i.e. no change), and 8 multiplied it by 1.5. now 7 = 1, 7.3 = 1.15, 7.6 = 1.3, and 8 = 1.5. And so on with the other partial difficulties.

• In recent versions the MkIV heavy beam cannon's metal+crystal cost was lower than intended, increased to 2x of what it was, to be in the general neighborhood of 4x what the mkIIIs cost.

• FF Bearers (Shield Bearers):
  • Health increased from 88000*Mk to 100000*Mk.
  • Armor decreased from 4000 to 200.
  • FF coverage radius increased by 50%.

• Armor ship:
  • Reload Time from 4 seconds to 3 seconds.
  • Armor from 15,000 to 3,000/3,200/3,400/3,600/4,000 for I/II/III/IV/V.

• Superfortress health from 90,000,000 to 150,00,000 to be more in line with the recent AI fort hp bonuses.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting the new inconsistency.

• Fixed a bug that's probably been around since unit scaling and armor where the game was frequently using the normal-cap base-attack-value instead of low, when playing on low. With this fixed, it is likely that stuff will die faster on low now.

• Laser Guardian
  • Bonus against polycrystal 45x => 5x.
  • Bonus against light 45x => 5x.
  • Bonus against refractive 15x => 5x.
  • Bonus against turrets 3x => 1x.
  • Base attack power 1800*Mk => 4800*Mk.

• Raider Guardian
  • Bonus against heavy 18x => 5x.
  • Bonus against artillery 12x => 3x.
  • Bonus against turrets 3x => 2x.
  • Bonus against swarmer 4x => 3x.
  • Base attack power 1200*Mk => 1800*Mk.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version with the AIs only using basic ships.
  • Unfortunately, this will only work for new savegames -- campaigns started in the last prerelease will still be too easy, because this was part of the initial seeding of those savegames.
  • Thanks to DakaSha for reporting.

• When a "pthread_getschedparam" error is logged, the game now also logs information about the total number of texture, music, web service, update, and sound WWWs (and errors) that have been started. Hopefully this would provide some clues as to the nature of the pthread_getschedparam error.

• The ship cap for colony ships has been dropped from 60 to 5, to prevent people from just storing up so many extra colony ships now that there is no energy cost per colony ship.
• Command stations must now be built within 2000 pixels of a colony ship.
  • Thanks to Malibu Stacey, Moonshine Fox, orzelek, and KToff for various suggestions relating to this.

• A new graphic for the Shard is now in place.

• In prior versions, the AI was actually still creating barracks instead of carriers (d'oh). Fixed.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• The images for the AI Carrier, Raider Guardian, and Laser Guardian have once again been included in this beta release since the 4.021 update on Steam for some reason still didn't include them.

(Released November 8th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.029

• Added a new "Fallen Spire" Minor Faction for LotS. Details secret for now :) The special stuff starts right at the beginning of a game with them, though, so self-discovery is possible. Only about 10% of what's intended is actually done.

• Fixed some inconsistencies in AI "can I give another order to this unit yet?" logic.

• Fixed some bugs skewing the overall "special difficulty" modifier (based on homeworld/player count and AI difficulty); it was only used for hybrids, so the problems may not have been apparent.

• Fixed some rare null-exception bugs in the lobby when coming in with a messed up settings.dat.

• Turret rebalance:
  • Basic, MLRS, Flak, Laser health to 5/3x of what it was.
  • Lightning Turrets health to 5x what it was.
  • Missile Turrets health to 1/3x of what it was.
  • Laser Turret base range from 6000 to 9000.

• Various major-electric ships now have the corresponding extreme-armor-piercing (core electric guard post, tazer, all warheads, electric shuttle,

• Following guardians now have 1.4x as much health as before: Tractor, Lightning, Flak, Beam, Laser.

• Bomber starship rebalance:
  • Attack power 1/3x what it was.
  • Reload time 1/9x what it was.
  • Attack range from 5000 => 2500.
  • Health to 2x what it was.

• Fixed bug where if you had the game in non-trial mode and your last-started-game's available ships setting was something other than "Simple", and then switched to trial mode (by adding an expansion without a key), and then tried to start a new game it would fail.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was causing there to be no higher-mark AI planets in Conquest mode except for the homeworlds and the worlds next to them.
  • Thanks to DakaSha for reporting.

• Achievements for victories against AI types, minor factions, AI plots, on various planet counts, for controlling various planet counts, winning and losing in general or against certain difficulties, and so forth are all now Conquest-only. Other achievements, based on things such as points, time, resources, kills/losses, and reclaimining/scrap are still able to be won in Defender mode.
  • Thanks to nachomahn for suggesting.

• Fixed a couple of bugs with how bonus ships were assigned on game start in the last version.

• Previously, the "Attack Recharge" was also being used as an "Ability recharge" for a growing number of ships (raid engines, cleanup drones, rebuilders, etc). That led to a number of bugs so subtle that no-one has ever reported them (mostly with the raid engine), but now we've split these apart and the various bugs are thus resolved.

• The logic for when raid engines trigger is now a lot tougher (it happens when there are ANY human military ships, whereas in the past it took a military fleet of size 100 to trigger them (which was basically a free pass to starships -- no longer).

• Four new AI Core Guard Posts have been added for LotS: Booster, Cross Planet Attack, Heavy Beam, and Raid Engine.
  • All four of these basically add variety to the end-of-game scenarios (most specifically the CPA guard post is wildly different), which has been a long-term goal for the game for a while now. Because of the comparative rarity of AI Core Guard Posts (they only show up on the AI homeworlds), we won't be adding too many of these in this expansion, though -- more focus will be going into the regular Guard Posts (mark I-V) that show up on all the AI planets randomly, as variety is even more critical there (in one sense).

(Released November 5th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.028

• Fixed a bug that caused any non-Defender-mode campaigns to result in an instant loss in the prior version. Whoops!
  • Thanks to Varone and ghoti221 for reporting.

(Released November 4th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.027

• Auto-created manufactories are always now disabled at the start of the game.

• The first set of waves now comes sooner from the AIs, more like it used to in the 2.0 era of the game. It's been a longstanding bug since 3.0 or thereabouts where the first set of waves always fizzled.

• The remaining trial time is now shown as a countdown timer in the alerts box in the upper left of the screen while playing. This should make it a lot more obvious when players accidentally start a trial game, as well as making it more clear how much time remains for players who did intend to start a trial game.

• The first release of Light of the Spire's beta is in this one. Defender mode, as well as the Vanilla and Everything AI types make their debut. As a warning, Defender mode is extremely preliminary, so will probably need a lot of tweaking to be in balance. But it's pretty fun already, if you like getting beat up. ;)
  • Also bear in mind that we do still need to teach the AI a few new tricks for this mode. It's not used to working on a timer, it's used to thoroughly crushing you. When it's on the clock, it needs to do a better job of prioritizing your quick defeat, rather than obliterating every last trace of you.
  • In short, if you play with too few planets the AI will crush you; too many, on too short a time schedule, and it won't have time to crush you so you'll likely win despite the thousands of high-level ships slowly scouring you from the galaxy. We'll be working on that in future releases, but for now we suggest you use maybe 4-5 planets as perhaps a sweet spot. Or, feedback on what seems to work best (and what doesn't) is also welcome. Part of the point of the beta, after all!

(Released November 4th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.025

• Fixed mark I scouts to not have guns, unlike the prior release.
  • Thanks to Epsilon Plus for reporting.

• Raid Starships now have 100x more armor than before, and now have 100k armor piercing. They also now have 10x lower health. In general, this transforms them into a ship specializing in killing highly-armored targets, including fleet ships such as armor ships, which is a unique role for them amongst starships. The extra armor that they have, in turn, makes them better suited than ever for doing long-range raids except when they run up against raw-damage-dealing ships such as siege starships and so forth.

• Neinzul Cockroaches no longer fire translocation shots, as this was overpowered and made offense a lot tougher with them around.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Fixed what may have been a small memory leak in the GZip compression. More likely, an extra handle declared and never released. Related to the crash on OSX?

(Released November 3rd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.024

• Colony ships no longer have any energy cost.

• Cutlasses now have a heavy penalty against command grade hulls, and their attack power (and health) have also been significantly reduced.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for reporting the imbalance.

• All of the fleet ships, starships, and turrets (and a few other types of ships) now have a completely revamped cost structure. In the case of their mark I variants, the costs have been tweaked somewhat, often reduced slightly or even significantly in cases of ships that were exceedingly expensive before. In the case of their mark II, III, IV, and V variants, they are now based on multipliers from the mark I version.
  • Those multipliers are x2, x4, x8, and x16, respectively. This makes the mark V variants enormously more expensive than the mark I variants, which accomplishes two things: first it once again increases the utility of those lower-level ships, and secondly it makes it so that the economy becomes more strained the further into the game players go. This makes the early game simpler (as it has been lately), while not making the late-game too easy in terms of the decisions regarding territory, economic unlocks, and so forth.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for inspiring this change.

• The health of all the AI force fields has been increased by 5x, in light of all the new ultra-damaging starships and such that the humans have.

• Home planet command stations for the human players now have 2 million health instead of 300k.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• The AI now has a separate fortress line with 10x more health and without the ability to be repaired. Player fortresses can now be directly repaired, but those fortresses now take 10x longer to build and repair.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• At long last, due to popular demand, there are now Mark V Fighters in the game. What's more, there are also now Mark V Bulletproof Fighters and MicroFighters.
  • There are also now core fabricators for all three of these ship types.

• Spire Starships are now considered Mark IV, instead of Mark III.

(Released November 2nd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.023

• Removed AI Progress cost for killing any Neinzul cluster (Neinzul Nests still cost 10 AIP to kill).

• Previously the save window, load window, and stats window would not functionally fit on a 1024x600 screen (1024x768 is the lowest resolution supported, but we try to make 1024x600 work at least minimally functional), fixed the sizing of controls so this works now.
  • Thanks to datom for reporting.

• Also fixed the settings window to fit (albeit barely) on 1024x600.

• Also fixed the lobby window for 1024x600, though this one is a bit more intrusive: when the lobby window first initializes, if the height of the current resolution is less than 768, it omits the logo at the top of the right window, so there's room for the start game button at the bottom. This looks a bit weird but it's at least functional.

• Added explicit logic for preventing most non-ai-ally minor faction ships from being able to hit anything that can cause freeing of ai ships (namely command stations and guard posts); this had been handled properly before but after the switch to hull-type-based bonuses some gaps opened up, and may be responsible for some of the inexplicable early-game attacks people have been seeing.

• Fixed an (apparently) rare crash bug in the tutorial that happens right after capturing the ARS. If the underlying bug happens it may cause problems, but at least shouldn't crash.

• Fixed bug in last version where it would fail to write to an error log due to path confusion.

• Added 2 new planet-specific controls:
  • Alert When # Enemy Units Present
  • Alert When # Aggressive Units Present
  • If set to something higher than zero, the alert window will note when the planet has >= the specified number of enemy or threat (respectively) units. This only works if you have scout intel on the planet (command station or scout drone provide that, among others).

• Augmented the tooltip of the "Threat" section of the resource bar to display a list of all planets with known threat units, and the count thereof. Only displays planets you have scout intel on.

• Lightning Guardians now have 100000 armor-piercing (like lightning turrets), 4x previous attack power, and 1/2x previous base range (actual range differs from base range due to some post-processing on stats).

• Since the introduction of armor, the different unit scales have provided pretty radically different balance between scaled-types (like a bomber) and non-scaled-types (like a flak guardian). This is due to the fact that 2x as many bombers each with 1/2 as much armor (high caps) are going to die way more than 2x faster against a flak guardian. Similarly, 1/2x as many bombers each with 2x as much armor (low caps) are going to have a much easier time surviving against the same unscaled flak guardian (even leaving aside the aoe aspect of that). We've now put in a fix that will make scaled ships always have the same effective armor against non-scaled ships, while maintaining their scaled armor ratings versus each other (since if we just stopped scaling armor at all then scaled ships would take a _lot_ longer to kill each other on some settings).
  • PLEASE NOTE: this is going to put the effective armor roughly between where it was on High and where it was on Normal. Low will probably be a step harder in this respect, but it was never intended to be easier than Normal or High. We'll be listening closely to player feedback and will continue to make adjustments as necessary. Your patience is appreciated :)

• Fixed bug preventing the mercenary space dock from building a ship whose base type was prohibited by the Available Ships lobby setting (so if you had it on "simple" you couldn't build ether jets or beam frigates from the mercenary space dock, but now you'll be able to).
  • Thanks to several users for reporting and providing saves.

• Fixed bug occasionally causing a null exception in GameButton.SelfRender early in the game. This was being caught, logged, and ignored so it probably wasn't hurting anything, but definitely good to have it fixed.

• Fixed a bug preventing player from buying ships from a human rebel colony.
  • Thanks to Collic for reporting.

• Heavy Beam Cannon health increased by 5x, to make them not insta-die so readily.

• Further balancing of the guardians, specifically:
  • Most of the offensive types had their number of shots multiplied by their mark level; since their attack power was already being multiplied by their mark level each level was a much larger increase in dps than might be expected. For now, all those types now have the same number of shots that the mkIII versions used to have.
  • Those types with bonuses against turrets have had those bonuses reduced; Flak guardians in particular will do much less damage against turrets as they're supposed to be the bane of mobile lightly-armored stuff, not everything that has the audacity to exist. Guardians are still very effective vs turrets (particularly mkI turrets) and are intended to be so.
  • The artillery guardian's base range reduced from 25000 + 4000*mk to 30000 + 1000*mk.
  • Laser guardian reload time from 2sec => 4sec, shots-per-salvo from 19 = > 11, attack power from 400*mk => 1600*mk. This makes them even more effective against armored targets (already having 500*mk armor-piercing).

• Fortress balancing to deal with ineffectiveness vs. armored targets and stuff with high bonuses vs UltraHeavy:
  • Reload time from 3sec => 6sec.
  • Shots-per-salvo from 60/80/100 => 30/40/50.
  • Attack power from 2000/3500/5000 => 8000/14000/20000.
  • Health from 2,800,000/4,800,000/8,800,000 => 4,000,000/8,000,000/12,000,000.

• Fixed a bug preventing the galaxy-map helper-window from switching out of displaying the last find-mode target. Also changed the find-mode text to reflect that left clicking empty space ends it, rather than right-clicking empty space.

• Decreased the difficulty of the player-adjacent Mark IV planet in the intermediate tutorial.

• Fixed a bug where Youngling Commando MkIIIs were not scaling with the unit cap.
  • Thanks to cpunch for the report.

• The license keys, logo, and general programming hooks for the upcoming expansion pack AI War: Light of the Spire are now in place.

• Various AI types are now disabled based on the current options in the lobby.
  • If an AI belongs to a specific expansion, it is now disabled if that expansion is disabled in the LOBBY, not just in the overall License Keys / Expansions setting for the game itself.
  • If Mines are disabled, so is the Mine Enthusist.
  • If Starships are disabled, so is the Starfleet Commander.
  • If Heavy Defense is disabled, so is the Fortress Baron.
  • If Teleporting is disabled, so is the Teleporter Turtle.
  • If Parasites are disabled, so are the Technologist Parasite and Feeding Parasite.
  • If Cloaking is disabled, so are the Camoflager, the Counter Spy, the Shadow Master, and the Stealth Master.
  • If the Astro Trains AI Plot is disabled for either player, then those players cannot be a Train Master.
  • Thanks to Folket for suggesting.

• When the AI Type that would be selected is unavailable (due to options being changed as above, for instance), it now defaults to Random Moderate/Easier instead.

• When the player or AI colors would be set to nothing in the lobby based on their old values not being available, it now sets them to the first entry in the list instead.

• Two new expansion-3-only AI types have been added: Vanilla and Everything.
  • Vanilla is just a basic AI with no special abilities or extra ship unlocks, whil Everything has ALL of the fleet ships unlocked.
  • There are also the attendant six achievements associated with these, also.
  • Note that as preorders haven't quite yet started for the third expansion, these are currently inaccessible in the game.

• Fixed a rare bug that could cause the lobby to draw without the planets actually showing, while throwing a lot of exceptions, upon the second or third run of the program (but not always!). This seems to only have happened if the players were viewing the galaxy map when they exited out of the game, and possibly only if they were hovering over a plant at the time.
  • Thanks to unclean, vonkolberg, and Spikey00 for reporting.

• Hopefully fixed a rare AI Assertions bug that could be caused by a "race condition" of sorts when starting a new game or restarting the AI thread.
  • Thanks to NickAragua for reporting the last batch of them.

• If the dreaded pthread_getschedparam error is encountered on OSX, normally this means a crash is imminent within 30 seconds or so if the player does not disable their sound first.
  • We've been attempting many things to solve this problem, and still will be hunting for it, but as a temporary salve we've now made it so that when this error is encountered it will AUTOMATICALLY disable the sound for the player and shows them a message advising them to save their game and restart the program asap.
  • It also now logs some extra information about the state of their program to hopefully aid in actually fixing the root cause of this.
  • It also stops further images, music, and similar from being loaded, as they could also trigger the same crash and the player really needs to restart, anyway.

• Since the 4.0 switch, the "Automatically Check for Updates" settings option was doing nothing. Now it properly disabled automatic update checks.

(Released November 1st, 2010)

Prerelease 4.022

• Put in some more sanity checks that would hopefully prevent missing image or sound files from impacting game stability on OSX (if that is what was happening).

• The error file writing has now been centralized, so that if error files can't be written it no longer crashes the game.
  • Additionally, if any error file is larger than 2MB before the new error occurs, it now deletes the entire old error file and starts again (if it can). This keeps the game from generating gargantuan error files in the case of a serial error that might occur.
  • Additionally, if the error file is unable to be written, it now logs itself to the console log instead.
  • And finally, when errors are encountered in-game they are now rendered as local text messages to the player (not their contents, just their error name). Thus players actually know when errors happen, rather than them being a bit too silent.
  • They also now ALL include the game version number as part of their error, which a few previously did not do.

• All of the Unity GUI texture-drawing methods are now wrappered in a much more robust error-avoiding central call. If this was the cause of any instability on the OSX side, it should now be resolved.

• Added a new "Left Mouse <=> Right Mouse" AnyTime KeyBind (defualts to None on windows, defaults to LeftApple on a mac), for people who were having problems getting the normal ctrl+left = right logic on a mac one-button mouse.

(Released October 29th, 2010)