AI War:Current Post-6.000 Beta

Release 6.005

(not yet released; we're still working on it!)

• Since it was the sole winner (that beat the "none of the above" option) of the "Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: Player-side (II)" poll, Tackle Drone Launcher:
  • Drone's self-attrition now happens on a per-frame basis rather than per-second, so that the distance it can travel after engaging tractors is much more consistent (for a given amount of health-left-when-starting-tractors).
  • This deals with the tendency since the attritions-faster-when-tractoring change was made for drones to pick up their loads just after the second ticked over and thus get nearly a full second of additional flight time and go way further than intended. Overall it's a fairly big nerf, though it also makes the results look cooler in general.
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• Improved the rendering of the planetary summary sidebar to use the same approach for drawing the ship icons and borders as the game normally does for far-zoom ships. Previously that sidebar was blurring the icons a fair bit due to using a different method.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for bringing this to our attention and helping us figure out what was happening.

• Since threat now behaves more intelligently when "stonewalled", removed the /10 modifier that turret firepower was given when evaluating whether a threatball should attack. Before it was better that they just get it over with, but now it's better that they regroup with other threat and look for an opening.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 and many other players for suggesting.

• In honor of being one of the winners of the "Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: AI-side (II)" poll, the autobomb-like colony ship in the nebula scenarios has received moderate nerfs to speed, health, and damage. Combined, those three moderate nerfs are fairly severe. Surely if we overdid it someone will let us know (yea right, not with that scenario).
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• Fixed a bug in the past couple versions where the Spire's Frigate-level champion was using the wrong icon in the planetary summary.
  • Thanks to Jeffersn for the report.

• Redid the far-zoom icons for the 9 LotS bonus ships:
  • Spire Armor Rotter
  • Spire Blade Spawner (and Spire Blade)
  • Spire Gravity Drain
  • Spire Gravity Ripper
  • Spire Maw
  • Spire MiniRam
  • Spire Stealth Battleship
  • Spire Teleporting Leech
  • Spire Tractor Platform
  • Thanks to HitmanN for more excellent pixelart.

• Also in honor of being one of the winners of the "Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: AI-side (II)" poll, the Zenith Bombard:
  • Now "costs" the AI 50% as much to spawn in all contexts (or nearly all of them, at least; hybrids wouldn't pay attention to this when picking up their escorts, they just pick zombards less often).
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• In honor of being one of the winners of the "Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VIII)" poll, the Teleport Raider:
  • Ship Cap from 488 => 320. (those are high-cap-scale numbers)
    • Health, Attack, M+C cost, and E cost automatically adjusted accordingly, before the further changes below.
    • This just cuts down a bit on the inevitable disadvantages of being so high-cap in terms of damage loss to armor, etc.
  • Cap Health from 5.145M*mk => 10M*mk.
  • Cap Base DPS from 49k*mk => 70k*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 300*mk => 750*mk.
  • Effective Range from 7k => 8k.
  • Cap Energy cost from 25k => 20k.
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

Release 6.004

(Released October 29th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug in the last version that had changed the colors of your ships in the planetary summary.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the report.

Release 6.003 Fortress-size It

(Released October 29th, 2012)

• Fixed a longstanding (forever, basically) bug where non-wave AIs (Turtle, Support Corps, etc) would not launch waves even in a Defender-campaign game.
  • Thanks to Gith, Cinth, and others for reporting this.

• AI Home Command Stations have been taught a new self-preservation technique for dealing with a very specific threat.
  • Thanks to Kahuna for inspiring its new sense of humor.

• Removed the range-check when deciding whether a champion should gain experience from a kill on a planet. Now if it's on the same planet as the thing dying, it gets XP.
  • Note that the majority of champion XP normally comes from winning nebula scenarios, which already give XP to all champions in the game.
  • Thanks to contingencyplan, Moonshine Fox, Wingflier, and Cinth for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug where AI spire corvettes were always spawning with MkI modules when they should have been using (corvette mark)+1 (max 5, of course).
  • This will not impact AI spire corvettes that already exist in savegames prior to this version; just newly-spawned ones.
  • Thanks to ussdefiant for the report and save.

• Adjusted Fallen Spire shard speeds again, since the increased intensities necessary to match the increased speed were a bit much early on. Now the first shard is back at the original (1/4 of recent) speed, the first city shard is 1/2 of recent, the second city shard is 3/4 of recent, the last shard is actually 5/4 of recent, and the others are unchanged. The intervals between chase spawns have been adjusted accordingly.
  • Thanks to the participants of this poll and for their feedback on this issue.

• Added modular-fort versions of the following champion modules:
  • Acid Jet.
  • Paralyzer.
  • Polarizer.
  • Impulse-Reaction.
  • Heat Beam.
  • Nanosubverter.
  • Insanity Inducer.
  • Translocator.
  • Doom Accelerator.
  • Photon Lance.
  • Rail Cluster.
  • Rail Cannon.
  • Plasma Siege Cannon.
  • Flak.
  • Bomber Bay.
  • Interceptor Bay.
  • Slicer Bay.
  • So that's all of them. They follow the same racial affinities as the champion modules (spire doesn't get drones but gets the absurdly big energy weapons, etc).
  • Each is available to any human player's modular fortresses if any human champion has them. Fortress modules only go up to MkIII, though (champion modules go all the way to MkV).
  • Thanks to Cinth for reminding us to make this happen.

• Redid the far-zoom-icons for all the Ancient Shadows bonus ship types:
  • Neinzul Scapegoat.
  • Youngling Firefly.
  • Saboteur.
  • Spire Corvette.
  • Spire Railcluster.
  • Tackle Drone Launcher.
  • Zenith Medic Frigate.
  • Zenith Reprocessor.
  • Zenith Siege Turret.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for the excellent pixelart.

• Redid the far-zoom icon for the Spire champions (the others had a fair bit of internal contrast, but this one looked pretty washed out.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for this one too.

• Added two new cheat codes (entered during the game via the chatline, if cheats are enabled) :
  • running with scissors
    • Removes all AI Eyes (sentry/ion/parasite/nuclear/etc) from the game.
  • revenge is best not served
    • Removes all Counterattack Guard Posts from the game.
      • Note, this will result in the ships guarding those posts being freed as threat. Not generally a big deal if done early in the game after you have some defenses, however.
  • Thanks to triggerman602, LaughingThesaurus, and Lancefighter for inspiring these.

• AI special forces growth rate is now about 0.5x what it used to be, but max strength is now about 1.5x what it used to be. An overall nerf, in general; we'll see where we need to go from here.
  • Thanks to Kahuna for the suggestion.

• Corrected an obsolete description for the counterattack guard post saying the resulting waves were low-warning.
  • Thanks to Lord of Nothing for the report.

Release 6.002 Better Than A Stick In The Eye

(Released October 25th, 2012)

• Fixed a really longstanding bug where human rebel colony rebellions couldn't happen if the player had not conquered any mkII AI planets.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic and others for reporting.

• Amended the tooltip that the lobby shows when you mouse over the button that disables cloaking ships to note that it does in fact disable scouts and this makes for a fairly different game.

• Tackle Drones now self-attrition much faster once their tractors have engaged, which drastically reduces how far out of the fight they can throw enemy ships while not reducing their effective "get to the enemy at all" range.
  • In fact, their overall base time-to-live has been increased from 7 to 9, to make sure they can reach the enemy in most cases.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic, Kahuna, Hearteater, and others for inspiring this change.

• The AI now has some more tricks to use when responding to knowledge hacking, only used fairly rarely except when dealing with certain recently exploited player cheeses.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic for sealing the fate of many.

• Deepstrike threat:
  • Now triggers 1/20th as often, but each spawn is 20 times as big.
  • Now respects relative unit strength (so 1 blade spawner != 1 fighter, cost-wise).
  • Now spawns on a random AI planet instead of always on an AI homeworld.
  • Now spawns with the ThreatFleet behavior instead of just normal threat.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed bug where champion-only players could try to build units from the zenith trader. Not really succeed, lacking resources, but try.
  • Thanks to bonreu and Coppermantis for reporting.

• Respawning champions owned by a Normal+Champion player now respawn at that player's home command station (if alive) rather than using the "respawning command core" logic (which Champion-Only player champions still do).
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Finally got around to finishing the AI Eye changes from the poll it won some months ago.
  • Added the following new eye types:
    • Raid Eye (like a raid engine if it's triggered too long)
    • Nuclear Eye (nukes the planet, and itself, if it's triggered too long, really hurts on AIP)
    • Threatening Eye (spawns threatfleet ships elsewhere in the galaxy every 5 seconds or so of being triggered)
    • Translocating Eye (powered-up version of the mkIII military command station's new weapon, only fires when eye is triggered)
    • Plasma Eye (massively-higher-Rate-of-Fire version of the mkIII plasma siege starship's weapon, only fires when eye is triggered).
  • Added "Core" variants of the Sentry, Raid, Threatening, Translocating, and Plasma eyes.
    • These are only seeded on AI homeworlds, and are now the only eyes eligible for seeding on AI homeworlds (so Ion and Parasite eyes are now only seeded on non-homeworld planets).
    • They are immune to nukes and a few other things normal eyes aren't.
    • They emit planet-wide tachyon coverage (even when powered down, for those types that can power down).
  • Thanks to the many players who voted for the Eye in that poll, and to Hearteater, Faulty Logic, madcow, and others for suggesting some of the specific changes made here.

Release 6.001 There's Always At Least One

(Released October 22nd, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where if player 1 had the "Engineers do not assist allies" toggle checked, the allied large starbases in nebulae would not repair champions controlled by players 2-8.
  • Thanks to Kronic and menzel72 for the reports and save.

• Fixed a bug where unlocking the MkI champion missile module would count as MkV for the purpose of the Specialist achievement.
  • Thanks to Jeffersn for the suggestion.

• Fixed a localization-missing error that could happen on the high scores window.
  • Thanks to Cinth for the report.

• The "Reduce Visual Stimulation" now suppresses the "whiteout" effect of warhead detonations, etc.
  • Thanks to Jeffersn for the suggestion.

• Fixed several potential unhandled-errors and desync situations that could happen with the scrap-wave mechanic.
  • Thankfully scrapwaves basically never happen due to other AI-population-compression mechanics, so this wasn't actually a big deal. Good to have fixed anyway.
  • Thanks to Cinth for the report.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where the Stats window -> Military tab -> "# Built" column values ended in a % sign.
  • Thanks to Volatar for the report.

• Fixed a bug in the CTRLS window -> Ship Design tab where changing a design and then switching templates or unit types before saving (and confirming when it asks if you're sure you want to discard the changes) would leave the display in a very confused state.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic and chemical_art for the report.

• Fixed a bug where a scapegoat could regen _any number_ of allied ships that died in exactly the same frame, rather than just one.
  • Generally this wouldn't be a big deal due to the number of ships dying during a particular frame being fairly low, but when a Spirecraft Martyr goes up... let's just say that the Abominable Intelligence found a counter to the martyr. But it's been fixed now.
  • Thanks to Switch for the report and save.

• Changed Ravenous Shadow speed to not vary with combat style (it's now always what it used to be on Normal combat style), since the champion's speed doesn't vary there.
  • Thanks to Cinth and Coppermants for the suggestion.

• The game no longer seeds wormhole guard posts on wormholes that lead to nebulae, since this was confusing in games without champions (the wormholes are still seeded in that case, because champions can be added midway).
  • Note: this won't affect saves from previous versions, because the posts are already seeded there.
  • Thanks to Volatar and other for reporting the confusion.

• Brightened the "Shields" display that shows on the resource bar when using a champion.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for the suggestion.