AI War:Current Post-3.120 Beta

Prerelease 3.187

• The AI will no longer send homogenous waves of Zenith Paralyzers.

(note: the above changes reflect our work-in-progress build that has not yet been released)

Prerelease 3.186

• Previously when placing a construction template with cloaked enemy ships obstructing one of the placements, that placement would be randomly bounced away to some place that did fit. It will now simply not build that placement.

• Tugs are now much less likely to stop hauling a ship just inside MRS repair range (which can be quite a ways off), and instead get closer to the MRS before releasing the towed ship in order to make the repairees easier to defend.

• "Mines" have now become "minefields." The following changes now apply to all mines, including regular, EMP, and Area mines.
  • The max health of mines is now 8x higher, as is their regen rate.
  • The metal and crystal costs of mines are now 6x higher.
  • The ship caps on mines are now 4x lower.
  • Minefields are now 16x larger than the older mines used to be (256x256 instead of 64x64).
  • The damage dealt by an individual minefield is now 3x what it was before, and is now shown in the tooltip.
  • Minefields now take 3x longer to build.
• These changes will affect existing savegames, but human players may still have a large number of mines in play that will suddenly look all overlapped and be way above the ship cap for the player. Once these mines are exploded, they won't rebuild if the player would be over ship cap. It's a bit of an advantage to mine-loving players who upgrade older savegames; the mines can simply be scrapped to counteract this.

• Individual ships are now only able to hit any minefield once per second. So, for example, if Ship A hits minefield 1, and if it survives that hit, it then has 1 second of immunity to pass by minefields 1, 2, 3, etc. If it moves so slowly that it is still touching minefield 1 after a second has passed (and minefield 1 and Ship A are both still alive), then Ship A will hit minefield 1 again. This would also happen if a ship was tractored or paralyzed on top of a minefield -- it would keep getting hit once per second until either the minefield or the ship was exhausted.
  • This is PER SHIP only. So if Ship A hits minefield 1 and gains immunity, that doesn't matter for Ships B or C, which could also hit minefield 1 on that exact same instant.
  • This also does not apply to area effects. So if Ship A hits minefield 1, and minefield one does area damage or paralysis to Ships B, C, and D, then B, C, and D still can hit minefield 1 or other minefields. In fact, Ship B could collide with minefield one, damaging itself and doing area damage to Ships A, C, and D.

• Mines are no longer all-or-nothing damage, now that they are minefields. If their damage would overkill the ship that hits them, they now only deal the actual damage that would kill the triggering ship. This in turn reduces the amount of damage taken by the minefield itself, and if there is an area damage effect, it also reduces how much area damage is taken by the other nearby enemy ships.

• Fixed an occasional crash bug in 3.185 relating to waves being generated.

• On difficulty 5 and up, the AI will now build nests of sniper turrets every so often (like the spider turret nests, except larger).
  • The random occasional sniper turrets are still seeded as normal, because these have some desirable effects such as "pinging" larger ships every so often in order to prevent their healing, as well as knocking off tachyon-revealed scouts, and similar.
  • These will be seeded into existing savegames.

• On difficulty 7 and up, the AI will now build occasional gravitational turrets of varying marks. These will be seeded into existing savegames.

• Only the Mark V AI guard posts are now immune to snipers, EMPs, nuclear explosions, and being insta-killed. Previously, it was Mark IV and up.

• Wormhole guard posts now have 20 million health instead of 2 billion, which means that they can be killed after being stunned via an EMP, but they take a lot of firepower to do so.

• Special Forces Guard Posts now have 4 million health instead of 400k. Their attack range has been reduced from 1500 to 1000.

(Released 2010-08-20)

Prerelease 3.185

• Fixed bug where some minor faction units (like the mining golem) were getting orders from the AI thread that conflicted with their proper behavior. The AI thread now no longer issues orders for those units.

• Some players were running into cases where tractor beams were not acting for a number of seconds after enemies exited a wormhole due to throttling, so moved tractor-beam target-checking throttle into central throttle logic, made more intelligent about how much load the operations actually involve.

• Now when a constructor is unable to complete the item at the front of its build queue due to insufficient energy, any engineers assisting it will be properly flagged as failing to assist. Assuming they were not directly ordered to assist that constructor, they will shortly start looking for other building projects they can assist (like, hopefully, a new energy reactor).

• Fixed crash bug from 3.184 that would happen when a unit holding more than one unit in a tractor beam then died.

• Fixed bug in 3.184 that was setting all the "counter shooter radius" of all tractor beams, forcefields, gravitational turrets, and cloaking boosters to 0. In some cases these abilities were still working (albeit more slowly) but in others like the grav turrets they were not working at all. This was also preventing these units from drawing their proper area during placement, etc.

(Released 2010-08-20)

Prerelease 3.184

• Astro trains in general (including turret trains), and also astro train stations, are now a lower priority for player ships to auto-attack. This will help somewhat with ships getting distracted by turret trains, but if ships are already latched on and firing on it, it may still be 5-10 seconds before they decide to shoot at something else, so this may not have as large an effect as some might prefer.

• Electric shuttle shot-stagger-time increased from 12 cycles to 22, but now tracked separately for mark I, II, III, and IV. There is now a significant advantage from stacking different mark levels of electric shuttles together, rather than the previous penalty due to lack of control over which marks fired when the stagger was over.

• Lightning turrets now use shot-stagger-time too, 12 cycles and tracked separately by mark I, II, and III (and entirely separately from electric shuttles).

• Logistics Command Stations now no longer generate a force field, but instead halve the speed of all enemy ships on the planet (in addition to their existing bonus of speeding up allied ships; can really help when trying to catch Neinzul Younglings). The highest mark version (III) now also prevents enemy units from teleporting while they are on the planet.

• Military command stations now have tachyon beams:
  • Mark I has 10000 range.
  • Mark II has 20000 range.
  • Mark III covers the entire planet in tachyon beams, so all enemy units that can possibly be decloaked will be.

• Military command stations now provide a planet-wide munitions boost effect for all allied ships, mark I/II/III stations now provide 20%, 50% and 100% attack power boosts, respectively. Note that these still obey the normal munitions boosting rules for the maximum boost each ship type can receive (turrets and starships can only get about 20%, etc).

• Fixed crash bug that could occur when killing the command station on a planet with an AI Warp Counterattack Guard Post.

• The AI is now much less likely to send (normal) starships at the player in the first 40 minutes.

• Added proper description to AI Core Leech Guard Post.
• Added proper lightning-ball shot type to AI Core Electric Guard Post.
• Corrected typo in AI Core Zenith Fortress Guard Post definition, base range from 50000 to 5000 (meaning actual range from 53000 to 8000).

• Metal and Crystal Harvester Marks I/II/III now produce 12/14/16 instead of 12/13/14.

• Fixed bug in the remove-ship-cap cheat that would stop a fleet ship queue when it hit the cap that wasn't supposed to be there.

• Previously there was a bug that would overwrite the first buy-tab of a multi-tab constructor (like a starship constructor) with a pause button if it was still self-building, even though it already has a pause/play button on the top button row. Fixed to not have a pause button on the tab row.

• Fixed a bug in the galaxy view planet-mouse-over metal/crystal income display that would count the last non-paused metal/crystal rates of a paused manufactory in the total, leading to inaccuracies if there were manufactories on the planet that had been paused since the game was last loaded.

• Context menu auto-scout and auto-gather-knowledge options now auto-close the menu and play a sound, rather than giving no direct feedback.

• Neinzul Bomber (and Preservation Bomber) attack power cut by 50%.

• Neinzul Preservation Warden rate-of-building-younglings cut by 50%.

• Fixed bug where an exo-galaxy wormhole was not providing "golem supply" if it happened to be on a nuked planet. It will now provide supply regardless of how much everything else is glowing.

• Fixed bug where planetary summary sidebar item mouseover was displaying a controlling player name and color despite the fact that it's generally impossible for this to be a truthful representation since units from multiple players can be combined into one planetary summary sidebar item.

• Added protective mechanism to prevent a crash when closing the game after disconnecting the original sound output device.

• Fixed bug where a ship with a target-to-kill would not clear that target if all remaining enemy ships on the planet are killed at the same time as that target and no other targets are available. This would lead to an FRD ship converging on the target's last location and staying there until other enemies come along.

• Fixed bug that was allowing a hive golem to keep producing wasps in low-power mode. It can still produce wasps outside supply, this is intentional.

• Building a mark III science lab on an AI planet now attracts more hostile attention from the AI.

• Fixed bug in auto-assist logic where repairers were not properly prioritizing lower-health-percent ships.

• Fixed bug where AI engineers repaired broken golems (they couldn't activate them afterwards, and the golem would revert to original broken health if captured by the humans, so no big deal before).

• Fixed bug where paralyzed ships could be put into cold storage, which would stop their de-paralyze countdown.

• Nanoswarms can no longer target ships that are immune to reclamation.
• Nanoswarm max-targets-affected-by-explosion from 4/7/10/13/16 to 2/4/6/8/10.
• Nanoswarm metal/crystal cost from 15/25/50/75/100 to 10/20/30/40/50.

• Fixed a bug where the far-zoom icon for Neinzul Youngling Cockroaches were not showing up correctly.

• Fixed a bug where the spent metal/crystal in the Economy Stats tab was often being over-reported. This won't fix existing savegames, but should prevent the problem in new ones.

• The knowledge cost of Neinzul Regeneration Chambers has been dropped from 3000 to 1000. Previously it was higher because the Chambers were expected to work a bit differently, but as they have turned out they needed their cost to be reduced.

• The AI will no longer use the following ships as homogenous waves:
  • Forcefield Bearers
  • Munitions Boosters
  • Zenith Autobombs
  • Shield Boosters
  • Youngling Nanoswarms

• The accuracy of drawing angled lines has been improved fairly substantially.

• The way that links between planets are drawn in the galaxy map has been altered substantially:
  • Previously, supply was shown via a darker thicker line underneath the main link lines. That has been removed, and now the main lines normally draw a bit thinner, and then become thicker to denote supply.
  • The relationship between the two linked planets are now shown via the color of the line.
    • Gray lines now denote unknown relationship, or a link between two neutral planets.
    • Yellow lines now denote links between friendly and neutral planets.
    • Green lines now denote links between friendly planets.
    • Orange lines now denote links between friendly and enemy planets.
    • Red lines now denote links between enemy planets or enemy and neutral planets.

• Fixed some longstanding ants-in-the-pants issues with AI melee and autobomb units (frequent switching between destinations).

• Fixed bug where tractoring an AI Ship and then killing it while there was an AI regenerator (like a regen train) on the planet would cause it to properly respawn on an adjacent planet but then be snapped back to the original planet due to tractor (and often way out of range at that point). Now will properly break the tractor first.

• Updated Transport description.

• Transports are now always subject to the gradual-unload rule when on a hostile planet (they can still bulk-unload on a friendly planet or a neutral planet that is in-supply).
• Transports can no longer be scrapped on a hostile planet (they can still be scrapped on a friendly or neutral planet).
• MkII Transports gradual unload rate increased from 10/second to 20/second (mkI is still 10/second).

• Fixed bug where Alarm Posts would not trigger when being killed, instead of having a 50% chance to trigger as they should.

• Updated Golemite AI Type description to reflect lack of AI penalty from repaired golems.

• Cloaker starships now prefer to cloak ships with transport capacity or buy menus over other ships. However, this preference will not let it "kick out" an ship already chosen by the starship for cloaking in order to "make room" for a transport (or whatever) that has just come into range.

• Human-controlled attrition emitters now do not damage AI-held units that cause AI progress on death (like distribution nodes and zenith reserves).

• Hybrid base "class" distribution changed from 47.5% Attacker / 47.5% Defender / 5% Builder to 40% Attacker / 30% Defender / 30% Builder. This should moderately reduce their early-game threat and increase their later-game threat.

• Teleport Raider and Teleport Battlestation damage to Hybrid Facilities reduced to 20% and 40% of previous, respectively, to make it a bit harder to teleport through enemy territory and clean out all the Hybrid infrastructure.

• Reduced overall attack power of Hybrid machine gun and laser cannon modules by roughly 20%, and significantly reduced bonuses against various ship types (particularly fighters).

• Fixed bug that would make the estimated build time be wrong for a self-building unit that was being assisted by higher-than-mark-I engineers, due to the multipliers on those higher mark assistants.

• Fixed a crash bug related to neinzul regeneration chambers unloading a repaired neinzul ship.

(Released 2010-08-19)

Prerelease 3.183

• Since the ship-type quick buttons at the bottom now have a category-based first-tier, the "low power" button now lists manufactories, energy reactors, and constructors again.

• The ship-type quick buttons at the bottom now sort ship types by category and then mark level, rather than the other way around.

• Hybrid spawn time increased from 20 minutes to 25 minutes, to give the player a little bit more time before they start facing walls of hybrids blocking their advance.

• Mark III, IV, and V Ion Cannons are no longer seeded on planets next to human homeworlds (they won't be removed from existing savegames, though).

• Recent prereleases had a crash bug in the stats window code if playing a game where you had killed any of the old guard posts. Fixed.

• The borders of the far zoom icons have been made consistent between all the various screens, including the lobby and the intel summaries, and in general look a little less ragged.

• The lobby has been completely reworked in a way that will be easier to port to unity coming up, and in a way that avoids potential rendering problems that a minority of players were suddenly seeing based on the old way the lobby was redirecting window output from one window handle to another.

• Added some basic alert messages when a human planet is under attack by Hybrids, Preservation Wardens, (hostile) Roaming Enclaves, or hostile warheads.

• Neinzul Preservation Warden youngling build rate reduced to 1/3rd of what it was.

• Neinzul Preservation Bomber attack power increased quite a bit (was like a mark I bomber, was intended to be more like a mark III bomber). Also applies to Neinzul Bombers spawned by bomber clusters seeded by the Neinzul Cluster Bomber AI Type.

• The infiltrator bonuses have been nerfed about 10x, especially against heavy defense units, as mid-sized groups of infiltrators could kill them in mere seconds.

(Released 2010-08-17)

Prerelease 3.182

• When a large new AI Barracks is created, that can cause a momentary lag in the time, which we forgot to mention last game. Now there is also a message shown of "AI Barracks Created With Units: 1200" or similar, to let players know what is going on. These lag spikes are really temporary, not all that common (except when loading old savegames with tons of units over the ship cap), and lead to better performance on an ongoing basis in that savegame.

• Previously, AI Barracks were not allowed to be created except when the attack + threat level was already over 1500. Before that point, it would cause border aggression only, which could be rather catastrophic with older savegames, especially longer ones. Now the AI Barracks are allowed to kick in at any time regardless of the attack + threat levels. This also will make the barracks more likely to be used during the course of normal games started in 3.181 or later.

• Previously, Border Aggression could be really vicious, sending vast quantities of ships cumulatively into threat when there are a lot of planets all with fewer than 200 excess ships on them (the minimum to make a barracks). And it could also be really vicious in sending a lot of core or mark IV ships at the players when they were used to seeing mark I or II ships in a game.
  • Now the Border Aggression will never kick in at all if the attack + threat level is already 500 or more.
  • Additionally, when ships would be released via border aggression, and those ships have a tech level that is more than 2 marks higher than the current tech level of that AI player (so, mark IV/V ship with a mark I AI tech level, or mark V ship with a mark II AI tech level, basically), then these excess ships are simply exploded rather than being released. This keeps the ship caps pruned as needed without causing a ridiculous spike in difficulty and without having players ever get swarmed with core ships early in the game.

• Refactored the ship category buttons at the bottom of the main screen to a two-tier model letting the player drill down to either the full list, the low-power list, the non-low-power list, or a list of a specific ship-type.

• Command Stations and Guard Posts now get their own line of icons in the intel summary in the galaxy map. This prevents them from completely overwhelming all of the other special ship icons by their presence.

• The ships that show up with an icon on the intel summary view have their own text line directly below in purple, but they were also still showing up in the larger lists of my/allied/enemy ships further down. Now they have been removed from those lower lists (but not the counts of enemy ships by mark level), so as to make those lists more focused and easier to read.

• The non-core guard posts now have white borders like other ships. The core guard posts will soon.

(Released 2010-08-17)

Prerelease 3.181

• Starships and warheads now build 3x faster than before, or basically an equivalent rate to space dock units.

• AI planets now get fewer slots added to their ship cap per command station and guard post (it was 250, but now it is 150). Their overall max ship cap is also now lower (1000 per AI player, rather than 2500 per AI player), and on home and core AI planets it is a little higher but still lower overall (1300 now instead of 2500). These changes are logical given the huge new guard post strengths on the home and core planets (and the new ones coming for regular plants), making it now more about those large structures and less about the huge groups of smaller fleets grouping it out; though of course when the AI attacks the human players, you still get that same dynamic as always. Without changing the game TOO much, this really lets us save on sim/graphics performance as well as making the offensive actions less of a grindy.

• AI planets now get only about 2/3 of the reinforcements per reinforcement wave that they used to. This avoids having all the planets hitting ship cap (and thus running border aggression constantly, etc). Between this and the above change, this should cut down on the occasional grindyness somewhat, and make sure that the sim speed doesn't have as much risk of dropping in battles.

• The max starships that a starfleet commander can have are now 1/3 per planet what it was previously, hopefully making this AI type more reasonable.

• The thresholds for the number of AI units that can be in cold storage before becoming part of border aggression and attacking the human players has been reduced by 2000 overall. This puts it into equivalency with the new, lower ship caps, but it also is going to lead to... well, pain, in the case of some existing savegames with massive numbers of ships already in place out in the galaxy.

• The health of armored golems has been doubled.

• The reinforcement penalties on all of the golems have been massively reduced, making them significantly more powerful.

• Added Neinzul Preservation Warden minor faction. When this is enabled:
  • The game will periodically check if it should spawn one of these enclave starships. They are always allied with the AI.
  • The original spawn points are generally on AI core worlds.
  • The enclave starship will then wander towards human territory and be antagonized by any extractors on nearby planets and release its younglings to attack the humans.
  • Once it reaches human territory it typically thinks that the place is a dump and starts on a journey back to an AI core world.
  • The chance of enclave spawn and the rate of youngling production is directly related to the number of extractors currently running in the galaxy.

• Added Neinzul Roaming Enclave minor faction. When this is enabled:
  • The game will periodically check if it should spawn one of these enclave starships.
  • When spawning, it randomly picks between AI-ally, Human-ally, and Enemy-to-all versions of the roaming enclave starship.
    • The AI-ally ones will spawn somewhere in AI territory and move towards human territory to raid it (typically having had time to build up a few youngling squadrons). When damaged to 50% or less it typically retreats to AI territory to regen.
    • The Human-ally ones will spawn on a human planet, produce (internally) at least one squadron of younglings, and then try to raid AI planets. When damaged to 50% or less it typically retreats to human territory to regen and rebuild its squadrons.
    • The Enemy-to-all ones will spawn on an AI planet that borders a non-AI planet, and typically run away as it gets shot at by lots of stuff. These don't really have anywhere to run and tend not to last long, but they can still spice things up a bit.

• Added the Neinzul Youngling Nanoswarm (I-V) bonus ship type.
  • Actually composed of billions of microscopic organisms, this "ship" has no conventional weapons and attacks by ramming targets and exploding. This explosion damages the target and some nearby ships. More importantly, the now-liberated microscopic organisms will work together to take over the damaged vessels. They are unable to do further damage to the ship after the explosion, but can reclaim it once it is sufficiently weakened.

• Grenade Launcher shots can now only damage a finite number of ships within their explosion radius (like the Flak Turret), specifically 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 for the mark I, II, III, IV, and V versions respectively. The actual attack power of these shots has been increased by 50%, in hopes of maintaining the danger of the unit while removing the previous problem of them being capable of exterminating nearly infinite quantities of enemy ships (particularly when AI worlds could accumulate over 1000 core grenade launchers).

• Added Neinzul Youngster (moderate) AI Type. Its waves' fleet ships are always Neinzul younglings (a mix of all 5, so basically always schizo), and it launches 2 times as many waves as normal. Its planets are defended pretty lightly.

• Added Support Corps (easy) AI Type. It launches no waves of its own but mixes support ships (MRS's, decoy drones, etc) into the waves of its ally. Support ships are also mixed into normal reinforcements for all AI planets.

• Added Warp Jumper (hard) AI Type. It can launch waves against any human planet without a warp jammer on it. If a wave is "remotely" warped in, it will spawn on the edge of the planet (50000-70000 range out from the center), rather than on a wormhole. As a consolation, this AI's planets will not have warp gates, and thus will cost 15 AIP instead of 20 to take.

• Fixed bug where Heavy Beam Cannons were still firing at ships immune to area-of-effect damage (like Missile Frigates, which recently were made immune-to-aoe).

• Increased the "on paper" health of all self-decaying Neinzul ships by 10x, but also increased the volatility "multiply all incoming damage" attribute by 10x. The only real difference is that the negative-regen rates will now work more properly. It's not really possible to have a negative regen of lower magnitude than -20/sec, so really really low health ships like vultures were dying much faster than intended, but now they should last closer to the intended interval.

• Neinzul Silos now have a 1/15 chance of producing an emp warhead, instead of 1/5 like before. However the mk I and II versions now also have a 1/15 chance of producing a lightning warhead 1 mark higher than normal.

• Added 24 achievements. 1 for the base game (win a game with the Avenger plot enabled), and 23 for CoN.

• Signficantly rebalanced the Neinzul Viral Swarmer to make it not-totally-bat-crazy-to-call-this-an-easy-ai-type, and also to stop eating the CPUs of player machines.
  • ReplicationCostScalingFactor from 0 to 10, this results in a very heavy penalty to replication rate when the number of swarmers on a given planet (controlled by that player) exceeds its normal ship cap.
  • Set the normal ship cap to 1.5 the normal cap (i.e. a bit less than 300).
  • Decreased build-points-to-replicate from 5xAttackPower to 2x, to maintain some degree of threat in balance with the other changes.
  • Decreased time-to-live from 4 minutes to 1 minute, to reduce the scope of the danger to your overall empire. Unless you don't do a good job of denying them fuel, of course.

• The internal calculations for border aggression have been revamped extensively in the wake of the recent AI ship cap reductions. It's hard to express exactly what effect these calculation revamps will have, since it varies by AI Progress, difficulty level, and other factors, but in general it should make border aggression not happen until later, while at the same time making it more pronounced for high AI Progresses on higher difficulties.

• Fixed bug from recent versions where a ship being loaded into a transport would cause the simulation to skip the next ship, causing all manner of tomfoolery (or lack thereof). Notably, this fixes the behavior where ships loading into a transport would load by halves, and then halves of halves, etc.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions that could cause move orders to occur with more latency.

• Border aggression now only kicks in when there is Threat + Attack of less than 4,000, to avoid latency based on extreme amounts of border aggression on top of waves, etc.

• New "AI Barracks" have been added.
  • Built by the AI to contain offline overflow units from its planets when it has too many units to keep online. Each barracks contains 200-1200 ships that will come active when the barracks is attacked or destroyed, or when the planet of the barracks no longer belongs to the AI.

• Viral Clusters no longer cause AIP on death.

• Scouts with cloaking boosters no longer will ever boost ships with a mark level lower than their ship level. Thus the in multi-level scout groups, the lower-level scouts will support the higher-level scouts, thus maximizing the chance of overall survival within the group.

• Scout starships are no longer counted in the "EnemyStarships" group, which prevents them from very easily making AI planets go on-alert.

• Ships with bonuses against starships (notably Dreadnoughts) now get a bonus against the hull of Hybrid Hives.

• Hybrid Hive forcefield module shield-rating (not hp) was previously much higher than intended (4,000 at mark I up to 20,000 for mark V), cut down to what was intended (1,200 at mark I, 6,000 at mark V). This makes polarizers less useful against them, though hopefully still effective in numbers.

• Hybrid Hive hull and forcefield module energy consumption increased quite a bit. This has no impact on the AI as it has no economy in the normal sense, but it does increase the damage done to them by Impulse Reaction Emitters.

• PermaMines have been removed from the game, as the game has evolved to a point where they just didn't make sense any longer (free transports is a big part of that, plus the permamines just involved too much micro in general). PermaMines have been changed into regular mines.

• The AI's ship caps on mines per planet have been drastically reduced in order to keep planets from filling up with mines and thus not having many actual ships given the new lower AI ship caps per planet.

• The AI now has strict ship caps on turrets per planets in order to keep planets from filling up with turrets and thus not having many actual ships given the new lower AI ship caps per planet. This also prevents ultra-rare situations like turret-only AI homeworlds based on border aggression, etc.

• The AI now slowly scales back its counts of mines and turrets, in the same fashion that it has long pruned starships. It does this mainly for the benefit of older savegames.

• Fixed bug where minor faction ships wouldn't run any "what next?" logic if no enemies were in the system.

• Fixed a bug where AI ships in cold storage on a planet with a planetary cloaker would not be treated as cloaked.

• Fixed a bug where minor faction ships (like dyson gatlings) would sit around on a planet because some cloaked enemy units were present, despite the fact that said minor faction units could do absolutely nothing about said cloaked enemy units.

• The icons that are shown at the top of the intel summary are now sorted by short name (displayed in the line below), rather than just being ordered effectively randomly as they were before.

• Fixed bug where mines were not regenerating health if all enemies left the planet before they had a chance to regen.

• External invincibility for command stations (provided by certain destructible guard posts) is now visually shown on the command stations, and shown in the hover info for the command station with a count of how many external guard posts are contributing to that invincibility.

• Five marks each (I-V) of nine new guard posts have been added to the game. These are specifically NOT for the AI homeworlds, but are now used in place of all of the previously-existing guard posts and stealth guard posts that used to be in the game (special forces guard posts have not been altered.
  • These new, specialized guard posts vary in rarity and effect just as do their counterparts on the AI homeworlds, but these have very little overlap in terms of specific function with the homeworld-specific guard posts. Also, with the exception of the "AI Command Station Shield Guard Post," none of these new guard posts protect the command stations from being destroyed.
  • The primary function of these specialized guard posts is to make the assaults on AI non-homeworld planets more interesting and varied. These first 45 new guard posts should be considered the first steps into this new design paradigm for guard posts, rather than the end-all designs. In other words, there is lots of room for growth in terms of variety and function with these, same as with the guard posts for the homeworlds.
  • The secondary function of these new guard posts is to raise the difficulty on the non-homeworld planets. Or, more specifically, to counteract the lowered difficulty that is also contained in this release in the form of the lowered AI per-planet ship caps. These guard posts now form the centerpieces of more varied sub-battlefields within the larger battlefields of each planetary area.

(Released 2010-08-16)

Prerelease 3.180

• Fixed bug where holding control could let you see the location of exo-galaxy wormholes on planets you had not scouted yet.

• Fixed longstanding bug that was causing inordinately high threat counts to stay forever and ever, because the AI considered the Dyson Sphere a constant high-level threat and thus thousands of special forces ships would collect and gawk at it in lieu of actually shooting (since the Dyson is invincible).

• Fixed inaccuracy in science station description.

• Attrition emitters, human cryogenic pods, planetary cloakers, counter spies, omega drives, rebelling human colonies, captive human settlements, home human settlements, AI troop accelerators, advanced research stations, and datacenters are all now immune to Dark Matter weapons. This protects them from astro trains, munitions boosters, and a few other similar things.

• Core Warhead Interceptors can now be captured by taking over the planet the interceptor is on (now that warheads could be incoming from the AI, this makes sense, but previously it did not).

• Transports, frigates, scout starships, raid starships, and riot starships are now immune to area damage. This significantly increases their usefulness in situations against things such as grenade launchers, lightning turrets and lightning warheads, and a few other upcoming nasties.

• Riot Starships are now immune to blades, which is thematically fitting for them and also makes them not so incredibly prey to vampires.

• This one is a HUGE and exciting change to the base game: the endgame has been completely overhauled for AI War. Previously, the home planets for the AI were always very similar to one another, and often they were something of a grind.
  • The chief problem was that things were too centralized on a single unit on those planets: the AI home command stations. You had to destroy those, and that was really the only goal; therefore, that was super hard if you didn't have enough firepower, or really easy if you did.
  • Now the emphasis is on a distributed network of specialized, much stronger guard posts, as well as a much weaker central home command station. However, the central home command station can't be touched until all the new AI Core Guard Posts have been destroyed, which means that there are many goals on the planet before you actually get to the final goal of killing the command station itself.
  • There are 9 new types of these specialized guard posts, with various abilities. Rather than enumerate those here, we'll let you discover those in-game. Some are more rare than others, and your seeding is different every time, which makes each AI home planet quite unique now. There is also room for expansion over time with more specialized guard posts in addition to the first 9.
  • The overall net effect is that you can take on the home planet a chunk-at-a-time now, and you can successfully destroy a chunk and then come back much later without having lost any progress. This is a big improvement over the old system, where you had to build up overwhelming force and win all in one big push; again, that tended to be either too hard or too easy (usually too hard).
  • Going along with the above, there is now quite a bit of strategy and puzzle-style challenge to figuring out the best attack pattern and order for actually clearing the guard posts on the AI home planets. Some of the guard posts are likely to support one another, and so your success depends on your ability to make and execute plans here. The goal is to make the endgame as strategic as the early and middle game, rather than it always devolving into a grind or a cakewalk right at the end.
  • Lastly, the AI home planets previously had really inflated ship caps, in that even if you destroyed guard posts it was impossible to neuter the AI home planets at all. This is no longer the case, and the AI home planets can now have their effective ship caps whittled down over time. This way the battles remain epic, but not laggy or grindy, hopefully. More tweaks may be needed to this over time, too.
  • All of the above DOES affect all existing savegames loaded in the new version. Enjoy!

(Released 2010-08-13)

Prerelease 3.179

• EMP Warheads and Tachyon Warheads all now do a small, localized amount of area damage when they explode, in the manner of a lightning warhead but with a much smaller area of effect and level of damage. This gives an added bonus to the use of these warheads, just to sweeten the deal a bit.

• Tachyon Warheads now have a ship cap of 2 per player rather than 4 per player.

• New Mark II and Mark III Tachyon Warheads have been added in addition to the existing Mark I Tachyons. The new higher marks cost more AI Progress (and more metal and crystal), but have far more health (better for deep strikes), do more localized damage, and cause enemy ships to be decloaked for much longer.

• New Mark I and Mark II Armored Warheads have been added in addition to the existing one, which was renamed to Mark III. The new lower marks have the same level or armoredness, but cost a lot less to build, cost only 10 or 15 AI Progress to use respectively instead of 20, but do less damage to a smaller area. When you can't get lightning warheads to a target that you're unable to kill any other way, these guys are the way to go, but they're definitely very costly and not to be used casually. The new lower marks at least provide some more flexibility when going after smaller groups of ships, or lower-health ships.

• The recently-added mark III, IV, and V ion cannons can now be captured by players on planet ownership change. However, they increase the size of incoming enemy waves to that planet by x4, x6, and x10, respectively. These are definitely not something to capture on border planets without first killing all the adjacent warp gates!
  • The recently-added mark III, IV, and V ion cannons can also now be purchased from the Zenith Trader, but they are ridiculously expensive in metal and crystal.

• Previously, no ships had any attack bonuses against ion cannons. Now bombers and similar (anything with bonuses against "heavy defense" structures) has 1/3 their normal "heavy defense" bonus against ion cannons. This makes especially the higher-level ion cannons not quite so fearsome in the hands of the AI, as well as not so permanent-bottlenecking in the hands of the players.

• Added Neinzul Silo (I-V) structures. When a Silo's planet is on alert, it periodically generates minor-faction-controlled warheads that will target human planets and cost no AIP when used (since the human is not using them).

• Added Neinzul Rocketry Corps minor faction that initially seeds Neinzul Silos on roughly 8% of the AI planets on the map (fairly distant from any human homeworld, with the mark level of the planet on which they are placed. On higher difficulties the silos can be of higher level (indeed, IV and V only ever show up on diff 8+).

• Neinzul Viral Cluster attack power reduced by about 84%.
• Neinzul Viral Swarmer:
  • Attack power reduced by 80%.
  • Replication now requires 5 times attack power in damage, rather than 3x.
  • Health reduced by 50% (self-decay takes same amount of time).

• Converted some remaining string.concat list-building blocks to StringBuilder.Append, to prevent some (non-impossible) cases that would cause out-of-memory crashes.

• Previously teleporting units (like engineers) were completely immune to speed boosting, even if their teleportation was shut down by a grav drill or a game option. They are now no longer "officially" immune to speed boosting, but act as such unless their teleportation is somehow shut down.

• Previously there was a bug that would cause units in cold storage not to be affected by nuclear explosions. Fixed.

• The metal and crystal cost of nuclear warheads has been increased from 50k each to 75k each.

• Nuclear warhead mark II has been added (costs 750k metal and crystal):
  • Causes a multi-planet nuclear explosion when destroyed by enemy forces or by scrapping. Destroys all resources and most ships on the planet on which it is set off and all adjacent planets. Does not affect core ships or starships. Also causes supply to be permanently lost for all teams at that planet, meaning you then cannot use science labs, docks, etc.
  • Be VERY careful not to detonate it on OR adjacent to a planet belonging to your team! AI Progress jumps upward by 500 every time a nuclear warhead is detonated, so this is something to be done with extreme care.

• Nuclear warhead mark III (doomsday device) has been added (costs 7.5 million metal and crystal):
  • When this warhead is destroyed by enemy forces or by scrapping... the effect is nothing short of a galaxy-wide catastrophe that destroys all resources and most ships on EVERY planet. It still does not affect core ships or starships, but it causes supply to be lost for all teams on all planets.
  • You can still win the war after using a weapon of this magnitude, but be wary of the terrible cost! There is not much of a galaxy left to inhabit after an event such as this, and the AI Progress will jump upward by 5000. This chilling piece of hardware truly belongs amongst the weapons we wish we could disinvent.

• Previously, transport ships mistakenly had an infinite ship cap when they were supposed to be limited to a ship cap of 60 per player. Fixed.

• Transport Ships Mark II have been added:
  • These cost far more energy to operate, but they slowly heal all ships contained within themselves; Neinzul Younglings are healed faster.

• Fixed a bug from 3.178 that was preventing Hybrid Hives from spawning... at all.

• Mark II and III metal and crystal harvesters have been added as four new unlockable technologies.
  • The mark II technologies cost 2000 knowledge each, and the mark III technologies cost 2500 each. Combined, therefore, they equal the cost of unlocking mark II and mark III economic command stations, respectively. However, these can be unlocked piecemeal, or in addition to the economic command stations, which adds a lot of flexibility.
  • The gather rate of the mark I harvesters is 12 (same as before), and the new mark II gather rate is 13, and new mark III gather rate is 14. That might not sound like a big improvement, but when you have a lot of harvesters throughout the galaxy that can add up to a serious degree. When you don't have many harvesters, however, that's not all that worthwhile.
  • There is, however, a second benefit to these new harvesters: they cost the same to build as the regular harvesters, but they build significantly faster (2x as fast at mark II, 4x as fast at mark III). On highly-contested planets where harvesters are frequently getting killed, this makes these an attractive alternative to harvester exo-force-fields.
  • Command stations will automatically build the highest tier of harvester available, which is always desirable since the higher tiers of harvester don't cost any more than the lower-tier ones (aside from the knowledge cost to unlock them in the first place).
    • However, please note that the existing harvesters will NOT automatically be upgraded, as the destruction and reconstruction of them could tank your economy at a bad time. To upgrade all your harvesters, simply go to each planet, click the select all the harvesters from the planetary summary, and delete the old ones. New, higher-mark ones will appear in their place.
  • Please keep on the lookout for any odd behavior related to the new harvesters, as these were rather intensive to add to the game in a code sense. The chance of subtle bugs with these is pretty high, because a lot of various ships interact with them in a lot of various ways.

(Released 2010-08-12)

Prerelease 3.178

• Added Neinzul Cluster (I-V versions) AI defensive structure; also added Neinzul Cluster-Bomber AI type (moderate) that starts with a cluster on every one of its planets that isn't right next to a human homeworld.

• Fixed bug in auto-knowledge-gather that could cause a crash.

• Fixed a crash that could happen with Neinzul ships looking for a regeneration chamber.

• Previous versions had changed the long-standing behavior that fortresses were not selected with other mobile military; the military selection logic has now been changed to exclude anything that cannot travel through wormholes.

• Added Neinzul Viral (only one mark) Swarmer and Neinzul Viral Cluster I-V (which is a cluster that only has the swarmers), and Neinzul Viral Enthusiast (which has viral clusters on every wormhole).

• Added Neinzul Bomber (only one mark) and Neinzul Bomber Cluster I-V (which is a cluster that only has the bombers), and extended the Neinzul Cluster-Bomber to pick Bomber Clusters half the time and normal Clusters half the time during initial map generation.

• Added the Neinzul Privacy Cluster, a rare form of Cluster that emits tachyon beams and is antagonized by scouts as well as normal military (no other cluster is antagonized by a mere scout). This type of cluster is seeded on roughly 1 out of every 20 planets of a Neinzul Cluster Bomber AI.

• Neinzul Regeneration Chambers are now seeded on AI planets as part of map generation (including loading old saves) in any game with the CoN expansion turned on. The seeding ensures that no AI planet (with the possible exception of those directly bordering a human homeworld) is more than 1 hop away from an AI-controlled regen chamber.

• Hybrid Hives will now no longer take Neinzul Youngling ships as drones, since they are so short-lived.

• Neinzul Youngling ships that are below 30% health have had logic to automatically look for a regen chamber on their planet, but now will also check directly adjacent planets.

• Fixed a bug from the last couple of prereleases that could cause odd AI behavior such as its ships shooting off into the ether. It was a funny and unintended occasional side-effect of one of the recent performance improvements.

• Previously, there were only mark I and II ion cannons. Now, mark III, IV, and V ion cannons have also been added. These new ion cannons cannot be purchased by humans from the trader, and cannot be captured from the AI on planet ownership change. Like their lower-level cousins, they insta-kill all non-insta-kill-immune ships with a mark level equal to or lower than their own mark level. In the case of the mark V ion cannons, this basically means that the best way to take them out is starships.
  • These will be seeded into existing savegames, but the seed rules in general are as follows:
    • Mark III ion cannons are only ever seeded for AI players of difficulty 6 or higher, and at most with 1 per planet.
    • Mark IV ion cannons are only ever seeded for AI players of difficulty 7 or higher, and at most with 1 per planet.
    • Mark V ion cannons are only ever seeded for AI players of difficulty 8 or higher, and at most with 1 per planet.
    • Even though there can only be one ion cannon of each mark level per planet, you could indeed see situations where you have a mark III and a mark IV ion cannon both on the same planet. The likelihood of each mark level of ion cannon appearing is diminishing as the mark level increases. However, the likelihood of each is increased as the difficulty of the AI player is increased.

• The ships that the Zenith Trader will build for the AI has been updated to give better weighting to the ships based on their level of power, and to include the new, more-powerful ion cannons at a fairly low likelihood.

• The AI, on difficulty 5 and up, now will occasionally build a "nest" of spider turrets on some planets. These are pretty rare, and basically consist of a big clump of spider turrets all clustered together and ready to paralyze the engines of incoming player ships. Normally the AI doesn't use spider turrets at all, since if they were too prevalent they would be really annoying. These pretty-rare nests provide interesting unusual challenges, though. On higher difficulties, the nests have more spider turrets in them, and there is more of a chance of them appearing.
  • These will be seeded into existing savegames.

• The AI, on difficulty 7 and up, will now use Mobile Repair Stations and space tugs on some of its planets. These are pretty rare, but add to the challenge of those particular planets like the addition of a mark I or mark II fortress does. The chance for these goes up with higher difficulties.
  • These will be seeded into existing savegames.

• The speed of the energy bombs fired by dreadnoughts, resistance fighter/bombers, neinzul bombers, and zenith bombards have all been doubled.

• The health of the mark i, ii, and iii dreadnoughts have been increased as follows: from 200k to 300k, from 300k to 600k, and from 400k to 900k. This makes the dreadnoughts vastly more fearsome and gives them much more survivability.

• The health of light starships, flagships, zenith starships, and spire starships have all now been doubled.

• Added Neinzul Nest (I-V) structures, which are like clusters except that they are also angered by the humans controlling their planet or an adjacent planet, or killing AI units on their planet or an adjacent planet. They also have a greater capacity than normal clusters. They also differ from clusters in that they have no attack of their own but can take vastly more damage and cost 10 AIP if destroyed instead of 2.

• Added Neinzul Nester (harder) AI type, which starts the game with Neinzul Nests on most of its planets (half of them on Diff 10, scaling down for lower difficulties).

• Previously, there was only a mark I scout starship. Now new unlockable mark II, III, and IV scout starships have been added. Each has progressively better tachyon beams, health, and movement speed, as well as higher costs and progressively lower ship caps. The mark IV scout starships also are perma-cloaked like the regular mark IV scouts. The difference is that these scout starships can be unlocked at any time, unlike the regular scouts. But on the other hand, to unlock all the way through tech IV with regular scouts only requires 3,000 knowledge (and you get a single mark IV scout). In the case of the scout starships it requires 9,000 (and you get two mark IV scout starships).
  • These are in no way intended to replace the main scout line, but they do provide a new similar-but-different-in-the-specifics alternative for some circumstances (for one example among many: if there are no advanced factories remaining on the map, and you REALLY need a perma-cloaked scout). Unlike regular scouts, these are also useful for combat support because of their counter-sniper flares, tachyon beams, etc.

(Released 2010-08-11)

Prerelease 3.177

• In the previous version the player handicap was defaulting to -10%, fixed to default to 0% again.

• There is now 3,000 knowledge that can be gathered per planet instead of 2,500.

• The dreadnought starship line, as well as flagships, zenith starships, and spire starships, have all been made more 1000 knowledge more expensive.

• Mark II fleet ships now only cost 2,500 knowledge to unlock instead of 3,000 knowledge.

• Mark III/IV fleet ships now cost 5,000 knowledge to unlock instead of 4,000 knowledge.

• Previously it was possible in rare cases for the CPA-like Waves option to result in the AI wave ships being spawned way, way, waaaaay out in the middle of nowhere. Added some preventative measures to wave positioning to ensure a certain minimal sanity of the initial position.

• Previously it was possible to add an item to a production queue that was not allowed by the technology of the constructor's owner (by multi-selecting that constructor with constructors owned by a player that did have the technology), fixed to check tech prereqs for each builder in the multi-select case.

• Further fixes to missing texture problem for Hybrids and Hybrid Facilities. Hopefully it will actually be fixed this time.

• Added Control Node: Engineers Do Not Auto-Assist Low Power Ships; it doesn't interfere with directly targeted repairs and can be useful in preventing your engineers from spending your entire economy on repairing a golem that's been damaged in battle.

• Previously it was possible to attempt to save a game with an invalid filename ("CON" is not a valid windows filename, it is a reserved device name), fixed to disallow this and to give the user a clear error message as to why.

• The ship cap on mark I force field generators has been increased from 5 to 9.

• Added a new "Home Human Settlement" unit that is only found on the starting human home planets.
  • One of the last free civilian cities, filled with living humans. They aid your cause by producing a moderate amount of metal and crystal, but the AI Progress will go up by 5 if the city is destroyed.

• Added a new "Human Cryogenic Pod" unit that is only found on the starting human home planets.
  • Due to overcrowding in the last human cities, a good portion of the remaining human population has to remain in cryogenic sleep. After the war is over they can be brought back to life, but for the meantime they contribute to the war effort through the excess solar energy produced as a byproduct of their freeze chambers.
  • The AI Progress goes up by 1 if these are destroyed.

• The home planet for human players now includes thre major outposts, in order to keep the basic home outpost from getting too overwhelming and to make the home planet more interesting to defend.
  • The first is the one that has been the classic setup for some time now: home command station, energy reactor mark II, mark I forcefield, two mark II engineers, one mark II scout, one science lab, and one space dock.
  • The second is new, and consists of: a mark I force field, mark I energy reactor, ten each of metal and crystal manufactories, a starship constructor, a warhead silo, a mobile builder, and a mercenary space dock.
  • The third is also new, and consists of: a mark I force field, mark III energy reactor, three home human settlements, and thirty human cryogenic pods.

• Previously, any ships of radius 256 or higher would not be translocatable. That only applied to things like golems and superfortresses, really. Now any ships of radius 120 or higher are not translocatable, so that applies to many starships, all the regular fortresses, etc.

(Released 2010-08-10)

Prerelease 3.176

• X-shaped and Concentric-Circle maps now have a roughly 1/3rd chance of putting the eligible starting planets in the center, instead of always on the outer parts.

• Some rebalancing of Hybrid Hives:
  • Reduced Hybrid Hive move speed from 50 to 30.
  • Reduced Hybrid Hive hull strength from 2 million to 1.5 million.
  • Changed Hybrid Hive main gun, machine gun module, and laser cannon module damage against forcefields and heavy-defense from 100% to 20%, and against command stations from 20% to 10%.

• Added support for more selectivity (including Hybrid-class-based selectivity) on which ships are generated as drones. Notably, melee ships and autobombs will no longer be chosen, and stuff like Sentinel Frigates will be chosen much less often.

• Added 2 galaxy map display overlays: detected hybrids and detected hybrid facilities. Only displays info on planets that you current have visibility.

• Added the "builder" Hybrid classes, some of which build defensive structures on AI planets, some of which build Hybrid-supporting facilities. Roughly 5% of neophytes will become builders instead of attackers or defenders.

• Concentric Circles maps with fewer than the maximum number of rings (7-8) will have the rings spaced out a bit more to make use of the extra space.

• Added "Advanced Hybrids" AI Plot; if the base Hybrids plot is enabled and the Advanced one is not, then the highest tier of Hybrid classes will be disabled (including stuff like the re-coloinzer, which is not quite implemented yet). Also slightly influences the tech level of equipment available to the lower classes, for instance the first Attacker type will only be able to get a mkI forcefield (instead of mkII) if Advanced Hybrids is off. If you select Advanced Hybrids and not the base Hybrids plot for an AI player, once you start the game it will act as if you had checked both.

• Hybrid Hive spawn time changed from 15 to 20 minutes.

• Hybrid Hive maturity times increased slightly (Neophyte -> level 2 takes 35 instead of 30 minutes, etc).

• Fixed missing texture for Hybrids in far-zoom (apparently last time only the close-zoom texture was added).

• Fixed a bug that was causing move orders of thousands of ships to take more processing time than necessary.

• The lobby will now display the actual number of planets in the generated map, which can be less than the player-designated number on spokes, tree, and grid maps (and perhaps others). Those types sometimes run out of places to put planets according to their logic, so this indicator is provided to notify the player of the difference and let them decide whether they want to play the map or generate another one.

• Fixed ambiguity in unexplored planets option description.

• Gifting multiple units at once now combines into one game command, preventing hangs when gifting rather large amounts of units at once.

• Fixed bug where the Zenith Trader's buy menu would display "X of Y in service" numbers for one of the AI players instead of the local player.

• Regenerator golems now no longer regenerate ships if they are in low-power mode or are out of supply.

• Gravitation turrets no longer have any effect if out of supply.

• All tractor-beam generating units are now immune to paralysis.

• Previously, ship modules would still show up via the still-show-stationary-ships-if-scouted logic if the player did not have ships on that planet. Fixed.

• Shield hit effects were showing up as visually offset in recent prereleases. Fixed.

• A bug in the last prereleases were causing regeneration chambers to actually kill the ships put inside them, instead of healing them. Fixed.

• Previously, any ships taking attrition (even self-attrition) would stop at 1 hp, rather than dying outright. That logic made sense for the cursed golem, but for most other ships (especially the new Neinzul ships, but also Dyson Gatlings), it's mainly annoying. Now ships actually fully die from attrition, except for Cursed Golems (and even they can be killed via an attrition emitter -- this only applies to their self-attrition).

• Units out of supply (that require supply) will no longer try to attack, chase, etc.

• Fixed bug where loading a game with inbound schizo waves would display the wave alerts like a non-schizo wave.

• A substantial new performance improvement has been made to units on "cold storage" planets with no enemies present: basically, the entire processing of the planet is skipped except every other turn (even for things like special forces or free units on those planets, if other ships on that same planet are in cold storage), which reduces background simulation processing (in other words, not human player ships or battles) to a pretty enormous degree.
  • To clarify, a turn is 200ms long.
  • The "statistics" for things like the number of attacking ships, threatening ships, etc, are also now only recalculated every other turn, which also helps with load to a much more minor degree.
  • Any ships that are moving on planets of this sort now move twice as fast, since they are artificially only moving half as often. This keeps it from actually altering gameplay in meaningful ways (though players will likely still find something!).

• Warhead silos now only cost 10,000 energy to maintain rather than 80,000.

• Fixed bug where Zenith Autobomb could aoe-damage secondary targets that normally are not auto-targeted (because they cause AIP on death, or whatever). Will still damage the target if directly targeted at it. Also did a sweep to ensure this behavior for other forms of aoe.

• Fixed bug where auto-explore (and auto-gather-knowledge) would sometimes stop working when playing a second game within a given run of the application.

• Added missing -100% value to handicap dropdown.

• Fixed obsolete Munitions Booster tooltip.

• Previously there was a bug in auto-knowledge-gather that would lead to the science stations bouncing endlessly against the command station in a rather amusing fashion. Fixed to be less amusing.

• Previously superfortresses were inconsistent with normal fortresses in that they would box-select with other military ships while the fortresses would not. This was due to the fortresses having the IsScout flag, which has now been added to super-forts as well.

• Removed some extra padding at the bottom of the mouseover text for buy and tech buttons.

• The graphics for the Mercenary Space dock have been overhauled so that it now looks like an evil version of the regular space dock.

• The Mercenary Space Dock now costs 0 energy to use (this is a mercenary outpost, after all), but the players are now limited to having two of them.

• There are new Mercenary Parasites and Mercenary EtherJets which allow for new strategic options in any game, but with the usual overly-high costs of mercenary ships.

• In Zenith-Remnant-Enabled games, there are now Mercenary Beam Frigates.

• In Children-Of-Neinzul-Enabled games, there are now Mercenary Neinzul Enclave Starships (mark I). That lets you always build Mark I ships anywhere if you're willing to pay 300k metal/crystal for one of these. Of course, a much cheaper alternative is to spend the knowledge to get some actual regular Enclave Starships from the main Starship Constructor.

• Players now get a Starship Constructor, Warhead Silo, and Mercenary Space Dock at the start of every game, to encourage experimentation and use of these other buildings.

• Fixed bug where ship caps would display in the lobby as if there were always 8 human homeworlds. Changed to display the cap according to the actual selected number of homeworlds (or 1, if none selected) and to multiply the result by the number of homeworlds currently selected by the local player (or 1, if none selected). This may still result in some misleading cases, but may be the best that can be done for now.

• The strong/weak vs data shown in-game has been recalculated to show for the new ships through this point.

• The ship cap of lightning warheads has been reduced from 8 to 6.

• The ship cap of EMP warheads has been reduced from 4 to 2.

• The old lightning warheads are now lightning warheads mark II. New lightning warheads mark I and III have been added. The lightning warhead mark I does much less damage but in a larger area, and for one less AI Progress point. The lightning warhead mark III does much more damage but in a much smaller area, and for only one more AI Progress point.

• EMP warheads mark II and III have been added. For extra AI Progress points, they will paralyze enemy ships for longer intervals. The higher-mark EMPs are more AI-Progress-cost-effective than using multiple of the existing mark I EMPs.

• Warhead silos and starship constructors were seeded onto enemy planets as a capturable for human players to take over in the past, mainly so that players would be sure to eventually discover these constructors if the players were not diligent in exploring the build menus. However, now that these constructors are seeded at the start, this is no longer needed, and it was sometimes confusing to players anyway (some thought that the silos or starship constructors would be used against them, which was not the case). These will no longer be seeded into new games on AI planets.

• Previously, there were only 4 types of command stations that could be built by players. Now there are 10, providing vastly more functionality and branches for varying strategies.
  • The previously-existing warp jammer command stations have not been touched.
  • The prior Mark I-III command stations have been renamed to Economic command stations, but their functionality is unchanged.
  • There are now Mark I-III Military command stations.
    • Military Command Stations provide very little in the way of economic gain, but have much more health and the ability to shoot at enemy ships.
  • There are now Mark I-III Logistical command stations.
    • Logistical Command Stations provide very little in the way of economic gain, and can't shoot at enemy ships, but they vastly increase the speed of all allied ships in the current system. They also have middling armor and a smallish force field.
  • Mark I of the Military, Economic, and Logistical command stations are all available at any time, and have no ship cap. Marks II and III have to be individually unlocked per branch, and each branch has a ship cap of 6 per mark II/III command station.

(Released 2010-08-09)

Prerelease 3.175

• Previously, both eyebots and commandos were being selected like scouts because they have the scout ability. Now they are instead selected like regular mobile military ships.

• A new Neinzul Youngling Vulture I-V has been added for the expansion:
  • This low-powered ship does damage equal to (full damage * ( (101 - target health percentage) * 10 ) ). This makes it very effective at finishing off high-health targets when mixed into a regular fleet, but it's barely able to hurt enemy ships that aren't wounded.

• Because they are so short-lived and so inexpensive to build, all Neinzul Younglings are now worth 10x less in terms of build and kill score.

• All Neinzul Younglings now have health has been tweaked downward a bit, to make them easier to one-shot kill. They also now take more damage from all incoming shots.
  • These changes put more emphasis on using them in a disposable, repeated-construction fashion (given their low cost and the new mobile space docks, this makes sense).

• A new Neinzul Youngling Weasel I-V has been added for the expansion:
  • This inexpensive, low-powered ship attracts all incoming missiles to itself from the nearby area.

• Neinzul Regeneration Chambers now work 10x more quickly than before.

• When Neinzul Youngling ships are included in waves, 10x more of them are now included than normal.

• Ships that have a negative regen rate now show up as having a Self Attrition ability to make it clear what is happening. Before, nothing was being shown at all.

(Released 2010-08-06)

Prerelease 3.174

• Fixed a bug where Zenith SpaceTime Manipulators previously did not have a proper metal/crystal/energy cost set.

• Fixed a bug with 3.173, that was causing the new expansion to be installed into the wrong folder.

• Fixed a bug with 3.173 where the Hybrid Hive ship graphics were missing.

• Previously loading a game where the total AI Progress was over a tech threshold but combined with the negative modifier would be under the tech threshold would result in it acting like it was above the threshold. Fixed to properly factor the negative modifier.

• Previously, the addition of new expansions that a player did not have enabled in the lobby at a given time would still affect the seeding of the ship types placed on the possible starting planets in the lobby. This has been changed so that new expansions won't affect the random seeding in this fashion when they are turned off.
  • This may change the seeded values for some prior maps that were incorrect if players had only the base game and not the first expansion, for example.

• Previously, not all cloaked ships were guaranteed to be turned off when cloaking was disabled, though most were. The code for this has been changed around a lot now to make it more automatic that all cloaking ship classes are definitely turned off when the lobby option for that is selected. Same goes for things such as tractor beams, etc.

• Neinzul Youngling ships are no longer used on AI planets as reinforcements. They are only used offensively in waves, and during attacks, etc, because of their short lifespan.

• A new Neinzul Regeneration Chamber has been added for the expansion.
  • Stationary structure with the capacity to contain 500 Neinzul Youngling ships inside itself. The player cannot manually load the regeneration chamber, but Neinzul Younglings will automatically seek shelter inside the Regeneration Chamber when their health drops below 30% if they have no other orders. While inside, Neinzul ships are regenerated at the inverse of their normal self-attrition rate, and then are automatically ejected when their health is fully restored.

(Released 2010-08-06)

Prerelease 3.173

• All of the fabricators now use only 5000 energy instead of 10000.

• Fixed bug where units approaching an enemy strong forcefield from the left would pass through and wind up on the right side (and sometimes stop in the middle). The forcefield still stopped their shots, but it was disconcerting.

• The game now randomly selects from all the possible title music tracks (from the base game and any installed expansions) when deciding which title music track to use.

• The first beta of the Children of Neinzul micro-expansion is included in this version.
  • The following expansion-only features are included:
    • Starship Class: Neinzul Enclave Starships Mark I-IV.
    • Bonus Ship Type: Neinzul Youngling Commandos Mark I-V.
    • Bonus Ship Type: Neinzul Youngling Tigers Mark I-V.
    • Map Type: X
    • Map Type: Concentric Circles
    • AI Plot: Hybrid Hives
  • If you just want the beta update and do not wish to have the expansion features turned on, simply go into the Expansions tab of the Settings screen and disable the expansion. The game will run in demo mode until you've either disabled the new expansion or until you've purchased it, so you can easily demo these new features at no charge if you'd like to do so.

• Fixed a bug where a CPA could quietly not happen at a specific AI tech level and difficulty level.

(Released 2010-08-05)

Prerelease 3.172

• Fixed bug where ai tech level was not always properly recalculated when setting the negative AIP offset (like when loading the game).

• Fixed typo in the Zenith Starship description.

• Fixed bug where flak turrets mk II and III were rebuilding into mk I.

• Fixed bug where fully repaired but not activated Golems (not activated because you don't have enough energy) would revert to 25% health after save and load.

(Released 2010-06-22)

Prerelease 3.171

• Fixed arithmetic overflow exception crash that could occur if the AI tried to launch a wave against a planet with an inordinately high total wave multiplier (multiple golems and zenith-power-generators, etc).

• In previous prereleases the new no-more-than-6000-ai-ships-per-planet cap was preventing the Avenger and its modules from spawning. Fixed. Be afraid.

• Previously it was possible for the automatic AI engineer retreat logic to place an undue load on the CPU, fixed to pace these calculations.

• Since some folks were seeing inordinate delays in ships gaining protection from counter-shooters that they've just moved under, made TryProtections throttle more intelligent about how much a given check really cost.

• Ion Cannons, Orbital Mass Drivers, Counter-Spies, and Core Warhead Interceptors all now have only 120,000 attack range. This covers pretty much all of a planet anyway, but is no longer so large as to be considered a sniper shot. Thus, ships with immunity to sniper shots are no longer immune to these weapons.

(Released 2010-06-16)

Prerelease 3.170

• TryFindAssistTarget throttle made more sensitive to the cost of the actual target searches, so that engineers on planets with smaller allied unit counts will be able to get through faster.

• Fixed bug in previous versions where ship modules were being positioned incorrectly.

• Scouts are now immune to sniper shots.

• For a long time, shots have sped up to 10 more than the speed of the target they are chasing if the target they were chasing is faster than them. However, now shots speed up to 40 more than the speed of the target if 40 more than the speed of the target is greater than the speed of the shot. This makes it a bit more possible for slower shots to hit faster targets, hopefully without making it too overpowering of a change.

(Released 2010-06-09)

Prerelease 3.169

• The repair speed of golems has been slowed down 8x to account for the new, faster engineers.

• The attack rate and amount of engine damage done by spider turrets has been adjusted so that they once again fire more lower-power shots. It's still a bit slower and more powerful than it one was, but nothing like it has been recently.

• Immobile AI ships that were at a planet the last time the planet was scouted are now visible through the fog of war (as in many other RTS games).

• Shots and explosions are no longer visible through the fog of war.

• Fixed a rare overflow exception with wormhole guard posts being repaired.

• Snipers and sniper/spider turrets now use a new Railgun ammo type that strikes its target instantly, leaving a faint white line flashing in its wake as it does so. This fixes the issues with overkill and wasting incoming sniper shots, as well as simultaneously making it easier to see where sniper shots are originating from.

• There is a new internal format for storing player data inside savegames, which makes it easier to find issues and desyncs relating to player data.

• Fixed a desync relating to loading multiplayer savegames with AI ships caught in player tractor beams.

• Fixed a longstanding bug that was causing all player planets to be treated as out of supply right upon loading the game. This was causing force fields to blink off for a second right after load, as well as tractor beams to lose the ships they were holding for an instant, etc.

(Released 2010-06-07)

Prerelease 3.168

• There is now a sizable cluster penalty on fortresses, making them not very useful when clumped together too much on one planet.
  • Of course, with multiple players or multiple levels of fort this can be gotten around, same mechanic as with sentinel frigates.

• Golems no longer require supply.
  • This change was unpopular with players, and given the prevalence of Orbital Mass Drivers probably not needed, anyway.
  • Golems do still require the proximity of AI warp gates, however, as that is important for avoiding the most exploitable aspects of golems.
    • Any ship (including the AI exo-galaxy wormhole) with the "Warp Gate (Wave) or Warp Gate (Full)" abilities will work just fine for this proximity requirement, as a note.

• Sniper attack values have been increased 10x, and their reload speed has also been increased 10x. This makes them more of a "volley" type of unit, good at dealing a lot of damage right when ships enter their field of view, but then taking quite some time before they can do it again (about 60 seconds of reload in most cases).
  • The above applies to both snipers-the-unit and sniper turrets.
  • In the case of Spider Turrets, their values were only increased 5x since that made more sense for their engine-damage-focused abilities.

• Sniper turrets no longer have the reclamation ability, as that was definitely overpowered.

• Fixed a longstanding bug with the Zombie reclamation ability (botnet golem) that was causing ships it reclaimed as zombies to come in at half health at most.

(Released 2010-06-06)

Prerelease 3.167

• Normally AI engineers should not try to repair broken golems (as of the last release), and the last release had a safety check that prevented broken golems from activating even if the AI did repair them. However, in some cases the AI was already in the process of repairing them, or would otherwise do so; in that event, the players could get a massive cost savings on metal/crystal by capturing the already-fully-repaired broken golem and simply activating it.
  • Now when a player captures any unit from a planet ownership change, if that unit had a lower-than-full-health starting health value, that unit is reverted to the starting health value assuming that it's current health is higher than that (if current health is already lower, it keeps the lower value).
  • This fix prevents the exploit even among edge cases where the AI does something unexpected.

(Released 2010-06-06)

Prerelease 3.166

• Fixed a bug in the prior release that was causing the AI to repair and use broken golems on its own.

(Released 2010-06-05)

Prerelease 3.165

• Fixed a bug that was causing the wrong tooltip to be displayed when in ship-placement mode.

• The Avenger no longer repairs nearby ships.

• Previously there was just a single "engineering rate" for ships that could assist construction or do repairs. Now there are separate repair rates and construction rates for engineers.
  • This lets them do construction at the same rate as always, while doing repairs much faster than in the past, which in turn makes them more viable once again as an alternative to Mobile Repair Stations.
  • This also makes a clearer delineation on not allowing Mobile Repair Stations to assist the construction of units.

• Acid Sprayers have been completely rebalanced.
  • They have 10x more base damage, and 10x less bonus against Zenith ships.
  • They now have 50% of Zenith bonuses against starships and resources, 40% of Zenith bonuses against engineers, and 25% of Zenith bonuses against turrets.
  • They now have 10x lower shields.

• The ship cap of sniper turrets has been doubled, and their cost has been halved.
  • The cost of spider turrets has also been halved, but the cap of spider turrets is the same.
  • These changes don't affect the AI, but make the sniper turrets more useful for human players.

• Sniper turrets now have the reclamation ability, which lets them work like very weak, slow parasites. They're unlikely to capture a ton of units with this, but the reclamation ability does provide some minor more incentive to use them. This ability also applies to the AI, unlike the cost shifts.

• Golems have been majorly rebalanced, to create a new strategic landscape for them -- they have long been the most underused units in the game.
  • There is no longer and AI Progress cost associated with golems in any way, from repairing them or otherwise.
  • Golems now have significantly higher repair costs after being initially repaired to be operational.
  • Golems now require supply, which means that they are useless for long-range raiding.
    • This encourages a (sort of) new school of strategic thought relating to adjacency to keep the golems relevant on offense. Certainly no other units emphasize this to the same degree, anyway.
  • Golems now require proximity to AI warp gates in order to function -- they have to be within one hop of an AI warp gate in order to attack, etc.
    • This prevents players from using golems to play "goalie" on their home plants, which could have created impossible-to-lose scenarios for players.
    • Thematically speaking, this is related to the golems being reliant on exo-galaxy signals echoing from the ancient Zenith civilization. These signals are normally not able to be picked up at all, but AI warp gates cause them to be amplified to the point where they are faintly available.
  • The cumulative effect of these changes is that golems are no longer such a strategic risk, and they provide some new excitement on the front lines, but are not useful at deep defense or on long-range raiding.

• The attrition rate of transports is now shown via an ability in their tooltip list of abilities.

• There are now AI-specific versions of the following golems that are used by the Golemite: Armored, Artillery, Black Widow, Regenerator, Botnet.
  • Those versions don't have some of the restrictions that the human-controlled versions do, but neither do they buff reinforcements or waves, and they have 1/2 the normal health for golems of those sorts.

(Released 2010-06-05)

Prerelease 3.164

• Flak turret shots now can only damage a finite number of ships (currently 5, 6, and 7 per shot for mk I, II, and III respectively), to prevent it from destroying arbitrarily large numbers of ships (basically it's a fragmentation bomb, not an energized-field-of-kill-all). Specifically, the actual targeted ship is always struck, and then the game randomly picks the secondary targets from eligible targets within the explosion radius, this is intentionally not using any kind of autotargeting logic to prioritize the secondary targets because, again, it's a frag bomb.
  • To compensate, Flak turret attack power increased from 300, 600, and 900 to 3000, 6000, and 9000; also changed the attack penalty against heavy-ish fleet ships to make it much more possible to actually kill space tanks and the like with heavy sustained flak fire (though the tanks will still have the advantage, pound for pound, as they should). Other attack bonuses adjusted to make it so flaks in numbers should be fairly effective against all fleet ships, as that no longer means that they will be able to kill almost infinite numbers of them at once.
  • Flak turret shot explosion radiuses for mk II and mk III increased (300 -> 350 and 300 -> 400).
  • Flak shot travel speed from 1000 to 200 (doesn't affect their combat properties, really, just helps actually see something move).

• Changed normal wormhole exit behavior to automatically set destination to a point on a (filled) circle around the wormhole. Previously ships would sit directly on the wormhole and wait for a collision check; many versions ago this just meant the game slowed to a crawl while the collision checks ran, and in more recent versions the collision-checks-allowed-per-cycle throttle meant that ships just sat on the wormhole forever and got eaten by AOE. Now they should immediately fan out a bit and check for collisions when they stop.

• Fixed a number of bugs relating to the strong/weak simulation not being able to be run in the last few versions, and updated the simulation to include all the data for the recent new ship additions.

• The "Number of Simultaneous Shots" is no longer treated as a special ability for display purposes. Instead, when a ship has multiple simultaneous shots, there is now simply an "x2" (or whatever number) notation next to the main attack power.
  • This makes it quicker to gauge the real attack power of a ship without having to dive into the abilities, and also takes up less visual space. The actual functionality it describes is unchanged.

• In the tooltips for ships, AI Progress increase/decrease conditions are now shown in highlighted yellow on the same line with resource production, to emphasize this more since AI Progress is essentially a very important resource.

• In the tooltips for ships, the immunities are now split out from the other normal abilities to make it so that they don't crowd out the rest of the abilities for things such as golems, etc. Now the immunities are shown in a slightly more concise notation, on a separate line, in a different color.

• The tooltips for multiple control nodes or space tugs are now shown much more concisely in the plantary summary hover lists, as was already the case with things such as fabricators.

• The text for the control nodes now wraps better.

• The health of booster trains and regenerator trains have both now been reduced 10x, to 20 million instead of 200 million. The regular astro trains still have 200 million health, while turret trains still have only around 10 million health.
  • Turret Trains are now autotargeted by player ships like any other ships would be.
  • The three types of Turret Trains have now had their attack increased by a linear 1000 points.

• Warheads, Fortresses, Golems, Starships, and Mark V ships now all no longer absorb EMPs, but now only are immune to them instead.

• Only a very few ships (a couple of Golems) had differing metal and crystal repair costs. These have been adjusted so that metal and crystal costs are always the same, and the tooltip is now more concise with simply specifying the repair rate as something that is always applying equally to metal and crystal.

• Hovering over the net energy display at the top of the screen now shows the positive and negative energy amounts that factor into that, for the local player and any teammates.

• Previously, "experimental" ships could not get into transports. Fixed.

• The ship costs (complete with icons and coloring, etc) are now always shown in the ship tooltips, rather than only in the buy menus. This makes it so that players don't have to go to the buy menus in order to make construction decisions.
  • Additionally, this gets rid of the need to have energy use on the line with the ship caps, etc.
  • And lastly, it now lets the repair cost move out of the abilities section and into the costs line.

• The lobby tooltips now show the costs for each of the starting ship classes (mark I only, but still).

• In the last prerelease, there was a bug with the starting ship icons in the lobby being displayed offcenter. Fixed.

• When ships take damaged from internal attrition (a negative regen rate, as with the cursed golem) that was previously tripping their "last damaged time" so that engineers could never repair them. Fixed so that now the "last damaged time" is not affected by this, which allows engineers to repair these sorts of ships.
  • This now also applies to ships in attrition-emitter territory, which makes engineers a necessity in those zones, rather than pointless.

• The repair cost of the cursed golem was previously set abnormally low. Now that has been fixed to be the same as the broken cursed golem.

• Previously, when ships that were taking internal or external attrition hit zero from attrition, they would die. Now, instead the attrition will not take them below 1.
  • Thus if an attrition-ed ship gets all the way down to 1, it's at death's door and can easily be killed by an enemy, but at the same time if no enemies are around, engineers can repair it back up to higher health. This removes some of the fiddly time-based aspects of things like the cursed golem if it's not on the front lines.

• Previously it was possible for a multiplayer savegame that was upgraded from an older version to a new version to cause a desync. Fixed.
  • Even in the past, it should be noted that if the host saved immediately after the desync, and then reloaded that save, this issue would be bypassed. This fix simply removes the need to do that on savegames that are upgraded.

(Released 2010-06-05)

Prerelease 3.163

• More internal optimizations that make loading savegames faster than ever, reduces RAM use a bit more, and somewhat lowers the overhead of having a lot of ships moving around in the galaxy. Also makes rendering lots of ships on the screen slightly more efficient, and corrects a few display-related bugs.

• With these latest changes, the positions of harvesters loaded from past savegames will unavoidably be off by a small amount (this has little effect other than visual), but new harvesters that are placed will be in the proper locations. Other ships may also be off by a tiny amount, but same thing with them.

(Released 2010-06-04)

Prerelease 3.162

• Fixed bug in recent versions where the try-protection throttle was letting the wrong ships through and never having room left for some units (so they didn't get protections from forcefields, etc).

• Fixed bug where heavy beam cannons could shoot at astro trains but would never actually hit them.

• Fixed a bug in the last version where lightning turret (and similar) explosions were being drawn offset from where they should have been.

• Ships belonging to allied minor factions no longer are picked up by tugs.

• Fixed a bug that was causing engineers to bunch up on ships in an ineffectual manner.

(Released 2010-06-04)

Prerelease 3.161

• Fixed a bug in how the AI was calculating threat assessments in the last release.

• Some more efficiency improvements to the AI thread.

• A new, Unity-friendly way of handling version numbers has been implemented.

• A major refactoring in the internal codebase has taken place, fixing a number of bugs and also leading to some performance gains (mainly RAM more than CPU, but also some CPU).

• In recent prereleases, sometimes the resource nodes were moving from some savegames. Fixed.

(Released 2010-06-04)

Prerelease 3.160

• Fixed potential crash bug in previous versions if you loaded a game with a cloaker starship in a transport.

• Some small performance improvements in overall main loop code and AI determination of "how much strength is protecting ship X".

• Fixed problem in new movement optimizations that would make some really-low-speed units (like trains and superforts) move extremely slowly.

• Added a separate throttle category for ships that have only overkill targets, so that those ships are more likely to update their target lists in a timely fashion when non-overkill targets show up.

• A minor performance improvement to CheckForTargetListUpdate.

• The code has now been set up so that internal development on the Children of Neinzul expansion can start at any time.

(Released 2010-06-03)

Prerelease 3.159

• In the previous version loading a save with a unit that has modules could lead to it constantly hitting collision checks with its modules. Fixed to correctly never collide with modules.

• Minor change to RunCollisionDetection to prevent unnecessary calls to the random generator.

• Changed movement angle-of-rotation calculation to a simpler slope-to-angle conversion lookup-table-based approach rather than the fairly cpu-intensive ATan2 method.

• Fixed a major and subtle desync based on floating-point precision. A bit of floating point math recently slipped into part of the simulation based on some of the changes to our FInt struct, and this may have been the cause of the elusive desyncs that a tiny minority of players have been recently seeing. This fix may also have some minor performance improvement implications.

(Released 2010-06-02)

Prerelease 3.158

• Fixed a bug with loading some savegames, related to TryProtections when the CurrentRollup is null.

(Released 2010-06-02)

Prerelease 3.157

• TryFindAssistTarget (engineers looking for something to repair or assist) is now separate from the TryFindOtherTargets throttle, and has been cranked down since those searches can take so long.

• TryFindTachyonTargets (tachyon emitters checking for cloaked ships in rage) is now separate from the TryFindOtherTargets throttle, and is fairly generous since even a partial second's delay can make a difference between your turrets eating the raptors for lunch and the raptors eating your command station for theirs.

• Some performance improvements to collision checking, target list filtering and sorting, and the generic basic range checking function.

• Some performance improvements to the "move ship" logic that handles a lot of every-cycle logic for non-cold-storage ships.

• Dyson Gatlings are now immune to black hole machines. Removed the logic added in previous version that removes black hole machines from planets with a dyson sphere (as this could be disconcerting to the joker who builds one via Zenith Trader and sees it disappear when loading the game).

• Units now check for protections (e.g. forcefields) and supply after loading and before the first simulation cycle, to prevent some of the significant combat differences when reloading in the middle of a fight.

• Cloaking starships now check for ships to cloak after loading and before the first sim cycle, to prevent embarassing moments when you park in the wrong lot.

• Flak turrets were not properly being considered a turret for the purposes of standard ability flags and attack bonuses. Fixed.

• Flak turret attack power moderately decreased against ships outside its specialty.

• AI turret proclivities adjusted; notably it should build fewer flak turrets now, but will now build them as part of higher level turret sets.

• A number of small performance improvements all throughout the application, moving away from the System.Drawing structs to custom ArcenPoint, ArcenRectangle, and ArcenSize structs. These structs are more efficient in terms of RAM and CPU, and are Unity-compatible, which the others were not.

• The seek CPU efficiency of teleporting engineers has been increased significantly.

• Fixed a bug where using Manage Players to open a new Active slot with blank name or name of "???" and then having someone join in that slot would lead to an immediate desync.

• The DEF build category was really a misnomer at this point, and has been renamed to SUP instead (Support instead of Defense, which more accurately describes those ships).

• The Avenger graphics have been updated to be at least a little more unique.

• The existing Fortress is now renamed to Fortress Mark III, and has had its stats (and costs) increased somewhat.

• Two new units have been added: Fortress, and Fortress Mark II, which are scaled down (and cheaper) versions of the Fortress Mark III.

• The SuperFortress has been buffed again, and the Fortress line has been tweaked in general. Fortresses now have very long range, longer than any non-sniper turrets or units, but a bit weaker attack on average than before.

• There are now three separate levels of basic AI command stations, same as the basic human command stations have three levels.
  • The AI command station variants have 5X more health than their human counterparts, and no longer have the human-specific abilities such as resource/energy production, warp detection, build menus, etc.
  • The AI command stations are now the only ones that cause AI Progress to increase. That was previously already the case (the AI Progress went up only when a command station controlled by the AI was destroyed), but now that these are two separate units the tooltips are substantially briefer and clearer.
  • Existing savegames and new games now use only AI command station variants for the AIs, as follows:
    • On the AI home planets, they use AI Core Command Stations (same as always).
    • On Mark I and II planets, they use AI Command Stations Mark I.
    • On Mark III planets, they use AI Command Stations Mark II.
    • On Mark IV planets, they use AI Command Stations Mark III.

• Command Stations are now shown on the Planetary Summary icon lists on the galaxy map.

• The human-controlled Command Station Home Cores, and the AI-controlled Core Command Station, did not have their internal mark levels correctly set. Fixed.

(Released 2010-06-01)

Prerelease 3.156

• Fixed a potential desync.

• Minorly improved the performance of a few central parts of the code.

• Fixed a rare arithmetic overflow exception.

• Black hole machines will no longer appear on planets with dyson spheres, as this was causing a huge build-up of non-decaying dyson gatlings that didn't want to destroy the black hole machine (since that would cause AI progress, etc) and were thus more dangerous than intended when "freed".

• Some performance increases, notably for cases where there are a ton of human ships on a planet with no AI ships. These changes may result in it taking a little longer for a ship's protections (being under a forcefield, counter-shooter, etc) to update, and for engineers to find something to auto-assist when idle.

(Released 2010-05-30)

Prerelease 3.155

• Fixed a very longstanding subtle bug (from the 2.0 days) with net energy fluctuating when ships are passing through wormholes. This was extremely tough to track down, and in the end we completely rewrote the net energy handling to fix it.

• Ships in transports now still cost the normal energy they would cost outside the transport.
  • Previously, transports could be used to too great of effect in terms of minimizing energy needs simply by loading ships into them.

• When the energy count is being shown for ships (either by pressing Alt+A, or via the net energy being low for you), transports now show their own energy plus that of all the ships inside themselves.

(Released 2010-05-28)

Prerelease 3.154

• Fixed an overflow error in the adjusted score calculations which sometimes was resulting in players with invalid reported scores.
  • Note: in the process, this also makes some subtle changes to how adjusted scores are calculated, but the effects should be minor overall.

• Fixed an obscure crash bug relating to ship movement.

• In the last version, Mark II engineers were still using 3000 energy instead of 500. Fixed.

• In the last version, any time a shot hit its destination it was causing an explosion sound effect. Fixed.

• A significant new early-out performance improvement has been made for range checks. Especially when there are a lot of ships that are out of range of a battle on a planet (such as those at other guard posts), this now has a notable boost to performance.

• In the last version, munitions boosters and shield boosters were a couple of orders of magnitude too strong. Fixed.

• Scouts and Cloaker Starships now have a much-increased cloaking booster range. This does not affect how many other ships these units can boost, however, as there was already a finite cap on that.

• Cloaker Starships also now provide both counter-sniper and counter-dark-matter protection, in addition to their cloaking duties.

• The energy use of Zenith Electric Bombers has been reduced from 10k to 1k (except for the Core variant, which is now 2k).

• Remains Rebuilders and Cleanup Drones now use 25 energy each instead of 0. Mobile Builders now use 100 instead of 0.

• Attrition Emitters can no longer be paused, and now only use 10k energy instead of 18k.

(Released 2010-05-28)

Prerelease 3.153

• added parameterized version of knowledge cheat: "Give Me K,x" (where x is an integer >= -50000 and <= 50000) changes using player's knowledge by x.
• added parameterized version of ai progress cheat: "Get Angry,x" (where x is an integer >= -2000 and <= 2000) changes AIP by x.

• Previously engine-damage-focused units would not sustain fire properly on engine-dead targets if there were only engine-dead targets left. Fixed so that they should keep firing in that case.

• Previously holding shift to place multiple copies of the same construction template did not work well with the snap-to-wormhole feature. Fixed.

• Fixed a bug where the predicted path of ships on the galaxy map (shown when hovering the mouse over another planet) was different from the path actually executed by issuing a move order via right-clicking the target planet.

• Fixed some potential desyncs for cases where a player played a game, quit it without quitting the application, and joined a multiplayer game.

• The amount of available knowledge per planet has been increased from 2,000 to 2,500 to account for the influx of all the cool new technologies that people are able to play with. This also rebalances the game a bit in light of recent difficulty increases, and further marginalizes the need for knowledge raiding on any sort of regular basis.

• Science Lab MkIII AI reinforcement bonuses no longer stack.

• Fixed a bug in game-loading code that was confusing the values of CloakingPartialCount and CloakingRechargeCount.

• Made a rather notable performance improvement to ship explosions (which are just visual, not part of the simulation itself):
  • Explosions on other planets or otherwise out of your view no longer actually happen, thus saving a goodly amount of sim CPU load when taken in aggregate.
  • When in far zoom, the little debris is too small to see with explosions anyway, so it now doesn't render that, either. That only happens on larger ships anyway, but this saves the GPU and CPU load of both generating and then rendering this. A much more minor update than the first, but still notable.

• Transports are now such a core part of the game that they are something to always unlock. Thus that was simply a penalty of 1000 knowledge that always had to be incurred. Transports no longer have to be unlocked.

• Mobile Repair Stations are far more powerful than they once were; their knowledge cost has been increased from 2,000 to 4,000. Their metal and crystal costs have also been tripled, to 18,000 and 9,000, respectively. Their health has also been reduced from 390k to 300k. This encourages players to not lose them, and keep them near but not right on top of the front lines, which thus makes them not so overpowered.

• The knowledge costs of engineer drones mark II and III have now been reduced by 1,000 each.

• Mobile builders now use 0 energy instead of 1500. Cleanup Drones now use 0 energy instead of 150, and Remains Rebuilders now use 0 energy instead of 1500. Engineer drones now use 1000, 500, and 250 energy for marks I-III instead of 4000, 2000, and 1000. The experimental engineer now uses 4000 energy instead of 12000.
  • These changes all make it more effective to keep a larger fleet of the various sorts of engineers around, whereas before there was too much incentive to need to micro them when energy was low.

• The energy cost of the missile silo has been increased from 40k to 80k.

• The energy cost of all the starship lines has been doubled, except for the raid and leech starship lines.

• The attack power of the fortress has been halved, but the number of shots it gets has been quadrupled.

• The number of shots that the superfortress gets has been doubled.

• The knowledge cost of unlocking the flagship has been reduced from 2000 to 1000.

• The knowledge cost of unlocking the spire starship has been increased from 4000 to 6000.

• The knowledge cost of unlocking the Mark I dreadnought has been increased from 1000 to 1500.

• The knowledge cost of unlocking the Riot Control Starships have been increased from 1500, 2250, and 3250 for Marks I-III to 2500, 3500, a 4500.

• The knowledge costs of Tractor Beam II and III turrets have been increased from 1000 and 2000 respectively to 2000 and 4000.

• The knowledge costs of Gravitational Turrets III and III have been reduced from 4000 and 6000 to 3000 and 4000.

• The knowledge costs of Laser Turret II and III have been increased from 2000 and 3000 to 2500 and 3500.

• The knowledge costs of MLRS Turrets II and III have been reduced from 2500 and 3500 to 2000 and 3000.

• The knowledge cost of the Counter-Missile Turret has been increased from 2250 to 4000. The effective range of counter-missile turrets has been increased from 1400 to 6000.

• The effective range of Counter-Dark-Matter Turrets has been increased from 1400 to 8000, and the effective range of Counter-Sniper Turrets has been increased from 1400 to 4000.

• The metal/crystal costs of all the Counter turrets has been quadrupled, and the energy use of them has all been doubled.

• The health of Mark II Leech Starships has been increased from 160k to 320k, and the health of Mark III Leech Starships has been increased from 160k to 480k.

• The following munitions boosting range changes have been made:
  • Light Starship from 900 to 3000.
  • Flagship from 1100 to 4000.
  • Zenith Starship from 1200 to 5000.
  • Spire Starship from 1400 to 6000.
  • Core Starship from 1600 to 8000.
  • Mark I Munitions Boosters from 1200 to 5000.
  • Mark II Munitions Boosters from 1400 to 6000.
  • Mark III Munitions Boosters from 1600 to 7000.
  • Mark IV Munitions Boosters from 1800 to 8000.

• The munitions boosters are only able to boost a certain number of ships based on the "circular area" of those ships compared to the range of the munitions booster. By increasing the ranges so much, that would therefore have made munitions boosters vastly more powerful.
  • Instead, the circular area that is actually allowed has now been divided by 6.
  • This actually weakens the lower-end munitions boosters by a bit (in terms of how many ships they can boost), but at the same time their vastly increased range makes it so that (such) precision placement of them is no longer needed for the optimal effect on a fleet, and the highest-tier munitions boosters are actually stronger than they were before.
  • The overall effect is thus to make these far easier to use effectively, and to create more of a power gradation between the lower-tier ones and the higher-tier ones.

• The following shield boosting range changes have been made:
  • Mark I Shield Boosters from 600 to 3000.
  • Mark II Shield Boosters from 800 to 4000.
  • Mark III Shield Boosters from 1000 to 5000.
  • Mark IV Shield Boosters from 1200 to 6000.

• Previously, shield boosters did not have any limits on how many shields they could boost; they were simply limited by their incredibly small boosting ranges. Now they follow a "circular area" limitation that is exactly like that of the munitions boosters.

(Released 2010-05-27)

Prerelease 3.152

• Fixed a crash bug in the last version.

(Released 2010-05-25)

Prerelease 3.151

• Science Lab AIP-on-death from last version removed.

• Science Lab, Science Lab Mk II,and Advanced Research Station can no longer gather knowledge from AI-held planets.

• Added Stationary Science Lab (Mk III) that can gather knowledge from AI-held planets, but costs nearly 4x as much as a MkII lab and normal construction takes half an hour.
  • Also, it doubles the reinforcements of the AI at that planet, and enrages all of their ships so that they'll attack the lab. You really need a solid beachhead and a lot of incentive (or to have neutered the planet already) to do a knowledge raid now.

• Science Lab Mk II move speed from 16 to 20, knowledge gather rate from 2 to 3.

(Released 2010-05-25)

Prerelease 3.150

• Fixed bug where crystal harvesters were not properly auto-rebuilding if there were no _metal_ harvest points eligible for auto-rebuilding.

• Added "Auto Gather Knowledge (Science Only)" to the context menu. When executed, selected science ships will be automatically issued the following orders:
  • if not on friendly planet, no orders
  • else if on friendly planet but there's knowledge left to get, and not under a strong forcefield:
    • if command station is under strong forcefield, set destination to that forcefield
    • else if there are allied forcefields on the planet, set destination for the one nearest to the command station
    • else set destination for the command station
  • else if there's a planet I can reach through a friendly-planet-only path that has knowledge left to get, set destination to the nearest one (if there are more than one equidistant it picks the first one in the list every time, no random, so groups on one planet will all go to the same other planet).
  • else no orders (but periodically check again)
  • (note: friendly planet is defined as a planet with an orbital command station owned by a player on the same team as the science ship's owner)

• Added "Snap To Wormhole" toggle to the "Build From Construction Template" context menu.
  • If this on while you are placing a construction template it will snap the cursor to the closest wormhole within 2000 range units (if any).

• Science Lab MkI, MkII and Advanced Research Stations now all cause 1 AIP on death.

(Released 2010-05-24)

Prerelease 3.149

• Some of the internal calculations for how ships wait at wormholes have been reworked, in hopes of making them never get accidentally stuck in cold storage or stuck just waiting permanently at a wormhole.
  • For super-high AI Progress games there was a check in particular that was causing issues here.
  • Freed AI ships are now vastly more effective at traveling between their own planets in fluid groups now.

• AI players are no longer allowed to reinforce their planets if there are more than 175,000 ships currently in the game.

• A semi-major new "Scrap Wave" mechanic has been added for the AIs. Any time there are more than 150,000 ships currently in the game, and comparably little is going on in terms of threat/attack/wave counters, the AI will scrap a large number of its ships and then send a wave that is half the size of the number of ships scrapped.
  • The AI is prejudiced toward scrapping and sending the lowest-tech mobile military it has, but that will really vary based on what it has available. If all the AI has is Mark V stuff, this will be a much worse event than if the AI still has a lot of lower-tech stuff.
  • In general, the size of these waves is 1,000 ships multiplied times the difficulty of the first AI player. The number of scrapped ships will be about twice that.
  • Generally if there are more than about 1,000 threat/attack/wave ships already out in the galaxy, then the AI won't do a scrap wave. Otherwise it will do continuously scrap waves, one after the next, until it is back down to fewer than 150,000 ships.
  • In the end, if you're like most AI War players you'll never-ever see this mechanic at all. But if you've got a beast of a machine and love playing 30+ hour-long games on the largest maps, then this will help keep things from bogging down completely.

(Released 2010-05-20)

Prerelease 3.148

• MkIV scout now no longer evades after exiting a wormhole.

• Fixed arithmetic overflow relating to the devourer golem's auto-target logic.

(Released 2010-05-19)

Prerelease 3.147

• Auto-explore is now non-random and much more even in deciding between equidistant planets of the same level of "I need to scout this". So if you have 5 unexplored (or unscouted, in an everything-starts-explored game) planets connected to your home world and build 10 scouts there and put them on auto-explore, 2 each will go to each of those 5 planets. At least, that's the idea.

• Fixed bug in paint-attack implementations that was preventing the attack-target-set sound from playing in previous prereleases.

• Added "Give Resources" item to X+right-click context menu:
  • Check the players you want to give to (you can give to more than one player at once, but it gives the designated amount to each, not the total split amongst them).
  • Left-click and Right-click the metal/crystal amounts to increase/decrease them (left = increase, right = decrease). Normal clicks are units of 1,000, ctrl-clicks are units of 10,000, alt-clicks are units of 100,000.
  • Left-click "Execute" to send the resources. It will add a note in the chat log of the amounts actually given (you can't give more than you have, etc).

• Fixed divide-by-zero bug (which manifested as an arithmetic overflow) in CustomScrollbarVertical and CustomScrollbarHorizontal.

• Added "Use non-Cleartype Fonts" checkbox to the graphics tab of the settings menu.

(Released 2010-05-19)

Prerelease 3.146

• Fixed an overflow exception when ships with more than 2 billion combined health were selected together.

• Tugs are now blind, to prevent uberscouting.

• Fixed a couple of potential overflow exceptions related to focus firing (these may have contributed to desyncs in prior versions).

(Released 2010-05-18)

Prerelease 3.145

• Some internal networking changes have been made as the start of phasing in a new, more memory-efficient network/savegame format over time. These first changes add a very slight bit of memory/CPU efficiency on the game host, including in single-player games, but mostly they are laying the groundwork for more extensive future changes.

• Added "Create Construction Template" context menu item for when you have a selection including a unit eligible for construction templates (basically anything that can be direct-built by a command station; note that this includes engineers so be careful when box-selecting turret balls that have engineers assisting or repairing):
  • Click "Set Title" to bring up the text entry box, enter a title, and click "OK".
  • Click "Execute" to actually create the template and add it to your list (note that these are stored per-player, on the local machine, not in the save file).

• Added "Build From Construction Template" context menu item for when you have a command station or mobile builder selected:
  • Assuming you have defined construction templates, it will list each one (it will note which ones you lack tech for, or which ones require a different sort of builder though that should not happen in the current setup), and you can click one to "load" it into normal ship-placement-mode, then move your mouse around and place it like you would place an individual direct-build unit.
  • If you want to delete a template, click "Go To Template-Deletion Menu", then click the desired template (note that you will not be prompted for confirmation here; the confirmation is the fact that you went to the menu, so be careful).

• Existing "counter-shot radius" drawing logic (which also draws tractor range, tachyon range, etc) will now draw engineering range if the ship has one and does not have a counter-shot or other auxiliary range.

• Multi-place mode (arc-place or template-place) will now use the non-filled dotted-line circle for counter-shot/tractor/etc ranges (only on sets greater than 1, same as with attack range drawing in these cases).

• Fixed two internal overflow exceptions that previously could potentially have caused desyncs.
  • Both of these also lead to some small speed boost, especially for games that are already running very fast.

• At least for now, arithmetic overflow checking is now enabled.
  • This may cause a tiny performance hit, but in our testing it has been all but unnoticeable.
  • More importantly, this will cause the game to crash whenever an arithmetic overflow is encountered.
    • This is annoying if it happens, but far less annoying than having the game do something really wrong (like eat all your metal) and/or desync if such an overflow is encountered.
    • These sorts of overflows should be super rare, if you run into them at all, and the reason for our having enabled this is so that we can clean out any that might be hiding in the code causing issues.
    • If you run into this sort of crash, simply posting your UnhandledExceptions.txt file will let us fix the issue with comparable ease compared to if the overflow went silently as part of the simulation, as in the past.

(Released 2010-05-17)

Prerelease 3.144

• Added "Arc Place" item to context menu when you do the x+right-click while in ship-placement-mode (example: hit B to bring up the build menu, click the turret tab, click the mark I basic turret, you are now in ship-placement-mode, hit x+right-click).
  • "Draw Radius Length" lets you draw the radius line in a similar manner to arc-move; note that in this case you are not determining the position of the center of the arc, just the length of the radius of the arc (a bit unwieldy, but allows the finest level of control and works well with the range-display of ship-placement-mode).
  • "Degrees Of Arc", left-click or right-click to increase or decrease (respectively) the size of the arc; minimum is 30, maximum is 360 (so 180 for a half circle, etc).
  • "Ships To Place", left-click or right-click to increase or decrease (respectively) the number of units to place at once, minimum is 1, maximum is 9999 (so effectively ship cap); ctrl+click uses increment of 5, alt+click uses increment of 10, normal click increment of 1.
  • "Filled Arc", if checked, places points that won't fit on the primary arc in succesively smaller inner arcs.
  • "Set Points", sets the current ship-placement-mode target points according to the parameters you have specified. To then execute the build, click on the play area normally (it will use the clicked point as the center, not the origin defined by Draw Radius Length, so you can place multiple such arcs with successive shift-clicks).
  • "Back", moves back to the main context menu, without doing anything else (or undoing anything done) on the arc place menu.

• MRS Tugs speed from 72 to 140.
• MRS Tugs health from 8000 to 200000.
• MRS Tugs now have the same ai-low-priority flag as transports to prevent the AI from chasing them all over the place in a tactically-unsound fashion.

• Doubled Flak Turret attack against the units it's not particularly good against.

• Fixed bug in the fix for the bug preventing players from shift-right-click-queuing move orders on the galaxy map.

• Fixed bug where the local player could not place a construction using an ally's builder if the local player had exhasuted the ship cap of that unit (even if the ally still had ship cap left).

• Overhauled context menu code, visible changes:
  • Paint Attack's first item is now "Set Areas", to use:
    • Left-click "Set Areas".
    • Left-click-drag-and-release a rectangle over the first group of targets you want to destroy.
    • Repeat the left-click-drag-and-release over each group you want to destroy, in the order desired.
    • When all have been defined (and the other options like Group Move are the way you want), left-click "Execute". To check if it did what you want, hold shift to show currently queued orders.
  • Arc Move now no longer assumes that the clicked point of the X+right-click used to open the menu is the origin of the desired arc; you now:
    • Left-click "Draw Radius Line".
    • Left-click the desired origin point.
    • Left-click the desired point-on-the-circle (which sets the radius, and the central point of arc for arcs of fewer than 360 degrees).
    • When the radius line and other toggles are correct, left-click "Execute".
  • Special Move now no longer assumes that the clicked point of the X+right-click used to open the menu is the desired destination point; you now:
    • Left-click "Set Destination".
    • Left-click the desired destination.
    • When the destination and other toggles are correct, left-click "Execute".

• Fixed bug where right-click while holding Z+X was not issuing orders (since X was pressed and it thought it was opening a context menu).

(Released 2010-05-15)

Prerelease 3.143

• Added "Split Selection Across Control Groups" item to "Selection" context menu.
  • Check the Control Groups you want to split the selection across.
  • Check "Should Remove Units From Current Control Groups" if you want "Execute" to clear existing control group associations before adding the new associations.
  • Check "Should Pre-Clear Target Control Groups" if you want "Execute" to clear out the "target" control groups before adding the ships from your selection to them.
  • Click "Execute" when you're ready to perform the split; the split is done evenly by ship type, the same as L/Shift+L/"Select Percentage By Type".
  • In some cases this can be more useful than L/Shift+L/"Select Percentage By Type" because you don't have to manually reselect the other parts of the now-split-up group, but can use control group numbers instead.

• In the previous version, Paint Attack was not restricting targets to enemy ships, fixed.

• Paint Attack no longer changes preferred target type.

(Released 2010-05-13)

Prerelease 3.142

• Fixed bug where shift-right-click in alternate galaxy layout view was moving the planet (which is supposed to just be shift-left-click).

• Removed duplicate menu item from galaxy layout context menu.

• Fixed conflict when holding z+x and right-clicking to issue other orders (previously this would open the context menu); now if z is being held, x+right-click does not open the context menu.

• Fixed hang bug that happened when generating a 120-planet spokes (or potentially tree) map with some seeds. In those cases it will now fail to place all 120 planets, but not by much, and the game won't hang.

• Added "Paint Attack" item to ships-selected context menu, it brings up a secondary menu:
  • "Set Area", click this, then click and drag on the play area to draw a rectangle around the targets you want to attack.
  • "Group Move", if you want your ships to use group move (in case you don't know, this means "move at speed of slowest unit in group").
  • "Fire While Moving/Stop To Engage(Attack Move)/Chase Enemies (Free Roaming Defender)", if you wish, click this to toggle between "normal" move, attack move, and frd.
  • "Queued Move", if you want the paint attack order to be queued up after existing commands already queued.
  • "Execute" executes the order (only does something if the area was set, of course); note that this does not close the context menu, so you can use it with the Queued Move toggle to, for example, issue successive paint-attack orders for the area around each guard post on an AI planet, and just let the ships go about their business if they're not likely to encounter effective resistance.
  • "Back" goes back to the parent context menu without issuing any additional orders (any ones already issued via "Execute" have already been issued and will not be canceled by this).
  • FYI, this command will never result in an attack order against a target that requires a direct right-click attack (command station, warp gate, that sort of thing)
  • FYI, when you're using this you're basically saying "kill these targets, I don't care what order", but each ship sorts the target list separately according to normal autotargeting rules and thus is fairly efficient about shooting things it's good against first (the focus fire control nodes also apply here).

• Moved Auto Explore command from A+E+X key combination to the x+right-click context menu (only when you have selected ships and at least one is a scout).

• Auto Explore now functions in the absence of unexplored planets (either you've explored them all or you started with all explored), and applies similar auto-pathing logic to unscouted or not-scouted-recently planets (preferring the unscouted, then the not-scouted-for-5-hours, then the not-scouted-for-1-hour, etc).

• Auto Exploring scouts no longer try to evade after exiting a wormhole, instead they should shortly pick a new exploration/scouting destination and get moving that way.

• Difficulties 8, 9, and 10 were supposed to be getting 1 extra wave per difficulty level, but were only getting 1 extra wave overall. This was a longstanding bug, and was a big contributor to why waves seemed undersized in difficulties 9 and 10 compared to other parts of the game. Fixed.

• Moved "Select Modules" context menu item into new "Selection" Submenu.

• Added "Select Percentage By Type" item to "Selection" context menu:
  • Use left and right click to increase and decrease (respectively) the "Percent To Retain" (note that the max is 90% and the min is 10%)
  • Click "Execute" to actually apply the narrowing, and your selection will = (Percent To Retain) * (current number of each ship type).
  • This basically substitutes for the "L" and "Shift+L" key combinations, but those have not (yet) been removed from usage.

• The AIs will now actually build the new Flak Turrets.

• Fixed a couple of potential desyncs.

(Released 2010-05-13)

Prerelease 3.141

• Balancing changes to Flak Turret: doubled explosion radius, reduced range by 1500 across the board, reduced metal/crystal cost to about 1/3rd of what it was, much more effective against fighters, has roughly 2x as much health and about 3x higher dps in general.

• First implementation of x+right-click context menu.

• Moved arc-move from shift-Q-right-click to an "Arc Move" item in the X+right-click context menu when you have selected ships. This new implementation of the arc move interface allows setting:
  • The radius (which is just the length of the center-to-point-on-circle line).
  • The number of degrees of arc (so 360 for a circle, 180 for a half circle, 90 for a quarter-circle, etc); for this one left click the line to increase the angle by 30 degrees, right click the line to decrease by 30 degrees.
  • The central point of the arc on the circle (which is just the endpoint of the center-to-point-on-circle line).
  • Whether the arc is filled in.
  • Whether the move is group/attack/frd and/or queued.

• Moved Switch-galaxy-layout-being-viewed controls from Alt+A+# to X+right-click context menu on galaxy map.

• Fixed bug where floating displays from a previous game were showing after loading/starting another game.

• Added "Select Ship Modules" item to X+right-click context menu when your selection contains modules or ships with modules. Note that the game does not indicate module selection if you are in far-zoom, this will be revisited later now that there is a reliable way of selecting them in far-zoom.

• Added "Special Move" item to X+right-click context menu (when you have ships selected, on planet view) that acts as a "normal" (non-arc) move order, allowing setting of group/formation/attack/frd/queued flags via mouse rather than the various (and sometimes obscure) key combinations. Please note that the old key combinations for these DO still work (unlike other functions which are no longer on the keyboard at all).

• Added "Stop" item to X+right-click context menu (when you have ships selected, on planet view) that emulates the "end" key command that cancels all standing commands, formation (if you're on sticky formations, those don't clear with normal moves), etc. Again, the keyboard key still works for this one.

• Alternate Galaxy Layout alt-click logic now uses a base radius of 40 instead of 20, to reduce planet info overlap.

• Alternate Galaxy Layout which-layout-you-are-viewing info line moved from bottom left to top right.

• Added support for use of "any" as the second parameter of the spawn-immediate-wave cheat, so "warp in the clowns,any,1" will send in a wave of any, but will use the 1 size modifier instead of whatever the AI Progress would dictate at the time. Note that the impact of the size parameter is very different in the "any" case than if you specify an actual ship type; generally it results in much larger numbers (so you probably want to start with using "1" as the size parameter, and work up from there).

(Released 2010-05-11)

Prerelease 3.140

• Updated the in-game credits to reflect recent player contributions.

• Orbital Command Station upgrades now provide more metal/crystal income, in order to make those upgrades more worthwhile. If you consider that an individual harvester produces 12 of metal or crystal, and if you consider how many harvesters can be built on most planets versus how much knowledge is required to get the command station upgrades, the upgrades were previously of lesser value than they should have been.
  • Mark II now provides 40 of each instead of 28 of each.
  • Mark III now provides 64 of each instead of 40 of each.
  • For the sake of comparison, the Mark I still produces 16 of each, and the Home command station still produces 80 of each.

• Guard Posts now show on the top row of the planet intel summary.

• New Hotkeys for galaxy map (likely to be changed to something else):
  • Alt+A+9 : switch to your alternate galaxy layout
  • Alt+A+(1-8) : switch to alternate galaxy layout of player 1-8 (respectively)
  • Alt+A+0 : switch to official galaxy layout
  • Please note that all alternate layouts start exactly the same as the official layout, but there's a flashing note in the bottom left of the screen if you're viewing an alternate layout.

• While viewing your alternate galaxy layout you may:
  • Shift-left-click-drag planets around
  • Alt-left-click a planet to perform a basic automatic "pull in chains" operation that relocates subsidiary chains (defined as link cardinality <= 2) into a cluster near the clicked planet. On higher-connections-per-planet map types this may not help you at all; on snakes and spokes and such it can be a huge time-saver.

• Added Flak Turrets: mkI, mkII, and mkIII. Graphics donated by HitmanN (with preliminary work and idea by superking, many thanks to both). The Flak Turrets have only received preliminary balancing, intended to be good against zenith viral shredders, cutlasses, and vampires, and mediocre against other very light ships, and only minorly effective against anything much bigger)

• Extended "warp in the clowns" cheat to take 2 additional parameters (separated by commas), the first is a case-insensitive ForegroundObjectType name, the second is the base wave size (which is multiplied up down and sideways, but allows relative control)

• Updated icon for Heavy Beam Cannons to a new graphic donated by HitmanN.

(Released 2010-05-10)

Special Thanks

• Thanks to HitmanN for providing graphics for the new Flak Turret line, for providing a far-zoom-icon for the Heavy Beam Cannon line (he had already provided the main graphics for that line during the last dev cycle), for balance feedback on the flak turrets.

• Thanks to superking for the idea behind the new Flak Turret line, for longsuffering during the balance process for those, for reporting an arithmetic overflow crash in the custom scrollbars, for suggesting that zenith electric bomber use go down, for suggesting that the energy on the niche engineer units not be so low as 0, for reporting that flak turrets were lacking many of the flags normal for turrets, for suggesting the reduction in energy use of fabricators, for reporting that tractor turrets were still working when paralyzed, for suggesting the changes to allowing attrition to kill ships completely rather than leaving them at 1 hitpoint.

• Thanks to RCIX for the idea behind the alternate galaxy layouts, for his patience as that languished on the "we really don't think this is feasible" pile, for suggesting that the "which layout am I looking at" info line be moved to another corner, for suggesting the Paint Attack feature, for reporting a bug where paralyzed ships would get stuck on the de-paralyze countdown, for pointing out that Nanoswarms were somewhat OP, for suggesting that Neinzul Regeneration Chambers have their knowledge cost reduced, for providing a save with a reproducible case of the ever-elsuive AI-ship-has-ants-in-the-pants syndrome.

• Thanks to wyvern83 for suggesting that guard posts show on the top line of the planetary intel summary on the galaxy map, for reporting a conflict between the alternate galaxy layout controls and the planet-priority setting keys, for reporting the overflow exception with adjusted scores, for providing a save to demonstrate the out-of-supply-AI-turrets-firing-once-after-load issue, for reporting a crash bug in 3.183.

• Thanks to orzelek for suggesting that the alt-click function on alternate galaxy layout use a larger base separation between planets, for reporting that Paint Attack could cause Friendly Fire incidents.

• Thanks to Fleet for reporting a conflict between x+right-click and a common usage of z+x, for reporting some desync problems, for reporting that the epilogue display was not clearing on a new game, for suggesting that MkIV scouts not evade after exiting a wormhole, for reporting the problem with the move code optimization where slow ships were becoming much slower, for reporting the moving resource nodes, for reporting the issue with scouts being immune to counter-spies, for reporting a bug where loading a game with inbound schizo waves would display the wave alerts like a non-schizo wave, for pointing out that autobombs could sometimes aoe-damage things that would not normally be auto-targeted, for reporting a bug where multi-selecting constructors owned by different players could lead to queues containing items that the owner lacked the tech to build, for reporting a bug where holding control could let you see the location of exo-galaxy wormholes on planets you had not scouted yet, for reporting a bug where ships were loading into transports by halves instead of all at once, for reporting that scout starships were causing AI planets to go on alert much more easily than should be the case, for reporting a bug with dyson gatlings sitting around, for reporting a bug where AI ships in cold storage on a planet with a planetary cloaker would not be treated as cloaked, for reporting a bug where the planetary summary was lying about who controlled what.

• Thanks to platinawolf for reporting that generating a 120-planet spokes map was hanging on some seeds, for reporting that the Neinzul Youngling Cockroach far zoom graphics were not showing properly.

• Thanks to Winter Born for reporting that alternate galaxy layout mode was processing both right click and left click for planet-moving commands, not just left-click, for reporting that the attack-target-set sound was no longer playing, for reporting the crash bug related to movement in 3.153, for suggesting that tugs haul ships closer to the MRS to make them easier to defend.

• Thanks to rubikscube for pointing out that the now nearly-invincible super-fast tugs were a bit too good at scouting.

• Thanks to Black for the original proposal of the construction template feature.

• Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting that arc-placing tractors in large numbers was resulting in unhelpful opaque walls of color, for pointing out that Science Lab Mark III AI reinforcement bonuses should probably not stack.

• Thanks to Rustayne for proposing a means to directly give metal and/or crystal, in addition to the existing mechanism of gifting resource harvesters, for reporting a bug where the AI Tech Level was being incorrectly computed after loading a game, for suggesting that x-shaped and concentric-circle maps allow central starts, for reporting that some map seed/type combinations were yielding significantly fewer planets than they claimed to, for reporting the issue with regeneration chambers actually killing ships instead of regenerating them, for reporting an inconsistency in box-select behavior between forts and superforts, for reporting that forts were being selected with other mobile military again (contrary to historic practice), for reporting a but in 3.178 preventing hybrids from spawning at all, for suggesting the nerf to infiltrators.

• Thanks to RobbySpry for suggesting an option to disable cleartype.

• Thanks to Adetia for reporting an arithmetic overflow relating to the devourer golem's auto-target logic.

• Thanks to Buttons840 for reporting that crystal harvesters were not properly auto-rebuilding, for reporting the issue in 3.153 with all shot hits making explosion sound effects, for suggesting the changes to attrition emitters, for suggesting making Dyson Gatlings immune to black hole machines instead of having dyson spheres automatically remove black hole machines on their planet, for reporting that Riot Control Starships had AntsInThePants set to true, for providing a save to help fix the problem with the move code optimization where slow ships were becoming much slower, for reporting a bug where heavy beam cannons could shoot at astro trains but would never actually hit them, for reporting an arithmetic overflow exception crash that could occur if the AI tried to launch a wave against a planet with an inordinately high total wave multiplier, for reporting a bug where where ship modules were being positioned incorrectly, for reporting a crash when closing the game after disconnecting the original sound output device, for pointing out that building a science lab mkIII on an AI planet would not always provoke any kind of attack, for reporting the issue with the metal/crystal expenses being far too high in the Economic Stats screen, for pointing out that human-captured attrition emitters were damaging targets that cause AI progress on death, for reporting that the self-builder build timer was sometimes inaccurate.

• Thanks to triggerman602 for detonating a tachyon warhead to make sure the problem in Buttons840's report wasn't a cloaked ship, for reporting that engine-damage-focused units would not sustain fire properly on engine-dead targets if there were only engine-dead targets left, for reporting a bug where the predicted path of ships on the galaxy map (shown when hovering the mouse over another planet) was different from the path actually executed by issuing a move order via right-clicking the target planet, for reporting that the fix to make engine-damage-focused units sustain fire on engine-dead targets was interfering with their switching to non-engine-dead units that appeared later, for reporting a bug where fully repaired but not activated Golems (not activated because you don't have enough energy) would revert to 25% health after save and load, for reporting the bug with the shield hit effects being visually offset, for reporting that the player handicap was defaulting to -10% in 3.176, for providing a save to help find the longstanding permanently-high-threat bug, for reporting a bug where FRD ships would converge on its last target's last location and stay there.

• Thanks to vonkolberg for reporting a crash in 3.151, for reporting a bug where auto-explore (and auto-gather-knowledge) would sometimes stop working when playing a second game within a given run of the application, for pointing out that nanoswarms were autotargeting things immune-to-reclamation.

• Thanks to TDATL for reporting the engineer mark II energy use being incorrect in 3.153.

• Thanks to Junuxx for suggesting the range increase for cloaker starships.

• Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting the bug with erratic energy consumption with ships going through wormholes, for suggesting that construction templates not bounce placement around in a cloaked enemy minefield.

• Thanks to mastapsi for reporting some odd (and unintended) consequences from a dyson sphere and a black hole machine being on the same planet.

• Thanks to Spymine for reporting that out-of-supply AI turrets would fire once right after loading, for reporting that there was a small break in cloaking starship coverage right after load and that this sometimes led to some tension with the neighbors, for reporting a crash bug in the cloaking-boost-checking code, for reporting a bug where flak turrets mk II and III were rebuilding into mk I, for reporting a bug where the Avenger was not spawning when it should, for reporting an arithmetic overflow crash, for reporting that special forces alarm posts were not working properly.

• Thanks to Signata for reporting the issue with loading certain savegames in 3.157.

• Thanks to SNAFU for reporting an issue where ships were not getting protection from forcefields.

• Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting the offsetting issue with the lightning attacks in 3.161, for reporting that the Zenith Trader buy menu was displaying the wrong X of Y in service numbers.

• Thanks to Weapon Master for reporting the issue with engineers clumping in a way they should not, for reporting a typo in the Zenith Starship description, for reporting that Hive Golems could produce wasps while in low-power mode, for reporting a bug where the AI was repairing broken golems.

• Thanks to sebcw1204 for suggesting the spider turrets be faster again, for suggesting that cloaking starships prefer transports and mobile builders.

• Thanks to AlexV for reporting the overflow exception with wormhole guard posts being repaired.

• Thanks to RogueThunder for reporting the desync with player ships caught in tractor beams, for suggesting that scouts be immune to sniper shots.

• Thanks to Dazio for reporting a bug where ai tech level was not always properly recalculated when setting the negative AIP offset (like when loading the game), for reporting some inordinate delays in ships gaining protection from counter-shooters that they've just moved under.

• Thanks to Vinraith for reporting and providing a save-with-reproducible-case of a disappearing CPA, for reporting a crash bug in 3.184.

• Thanks to RedrumJackle for reporting the issue with disabled expansion affecting starting ship position seeding.

• Thanks to Ixiohm reporting the missing texture in 3.173.

• Thanks to Epsilon Plus for suggesting that smaller concentric maps have more space between the rings, for reporting an out-of-memory crash.

• Thanks to Awod for reporting that there were still missing texture problems with Hybrids in 3.175, for reporting a crash bug in 3.182.

• Thanks to Dragon for reporting a hang related to gifting large numbers of units at once, for reporting that grav turrets were still working out of supply, for pointing out that teleporting units would not get speed boosts even when their teleportation was disabled by a grav drill.

• Thanks to Draco18s for pointing out that regenerator golems were still working out of supply and in low-power mode, for pointing out that AI fortresses out of supply would ineffectually charge after targets, for pointing out that the munitions booster tooltip was out of date, for reporting the lack of bomber bonuses against ion cannons, for suggesting that players be able to capture the higher-mark ion cannons.

• Thanks to Tssbackus for reporting that the lobby handicap dropdowns were missing -100% as an option between -90 and -110.

• Thanks to Sizzle for reporting that auto-knowledge-gather was making science stations bounce around a lot.

• Thanks to quickstix for pointing out some extra padding at the bottom of the mouseover text for buy and tech buttons, for suggesting that the core warhead interceptors be capturable now that humans can get hit by warheads.

• Thanks to Doddler for reporting some inconsistencies between the ship caps reported in the lobby and in the game, for suggesting the color-coded lines in the galaxy map.

• Thanks to Burnstreet for reporting the issue with ship modules and the still-show-stationary-ships-if-scouted logic.

• Thanks to voiddarkness for reporting AI ships being spawned way out in the middle of nowhere.

• Thanks to zebramatt for suggesting that there be a way to prevent engineers from auto-assisting units that are in low-power mode (notably golems), for suggesting that turret trains be a lower priority to auto-attack, for reporting that tractor ranges were not showing in 3.184.

• Thanks to snrub_guy for reporting that it was not possible to save a game with the filename "CON", for reporting that grav turrets were not working in 3.184.

• Thanks to Ancestral for reporting a regeneration-chamber related crash in 3.177.

• Thanks to PeterD for reporting an auto-knowledge-gather related crash in 3.177.

• Thanks to Moonshine Fox for pointing out an inaccuracy in science station description.

• Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting the issue with translocators working on fortresses, for reporting a problem with a pause button occluding another button while a starship constructor was being built.

• Thanks to Sunshine! for suggesting the cryo pods and human settlements be immune to dark matter, for reporting cases where the AI was sending starships really early in the game, for reporting a bug with tractoring and killing something that had a regenerator, for reporting the staggering mining golem, for reporting the sluggish tractor beams.

• Thanks to corfe83 for suggesting the improvements to the targeting of cloaking boosters.

• Thanks to Shelly for reporting that some aoe weapons were still firing (ineffectually) on aoe-immune targets, for reporting that mines were not regenerating health.

• Thanks to carlosjuero for reporting the issues with overly difficult border aggression in 3.181.

• Thanks to kjara for reporting some errors in the unit definitions for some of the new AI Core Guard Posts.

• Thanks to qlf2007 for reporting the problems with the remove-ship-cap cheat.

• Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting a bug in the galaxy view planet-mouse-over metal/crystal income display, for pointing out the out-datedness of the transport description, for pointing out the out-datedness of the Golemite description.

• Thanks to matyasbot for reporting a bug with exo-galaxy wormholes not providing "golem supply" if nuked.

• Thanks to Affine for reporting a bug in auto-assist logic where repairers were not properly prioritizing lower-health-percent ships.

• Thanks to J a s o n for reporting a crash bug related to neinzul regeneration chambers unloading a repaired neinzul ship.

• Thanks to Ktoff for pointing out that engineers were continuing to try to assist constructors that could not complete their build queue item due to insufficient energy.

• Thanks to zebramatt and Spikey00 for reporting an ambiguity in the unexplored planets option description.

• Thanks to Buttons840 and Dazio for reporting the issue with the ship icons being offset in the lobby in 3.163.

• Thanks to RCIX and superking for suggesting the Acid Sprayer rebalance.

• Thanks to Signata and Trezamere for suggesting the railgun shots for snipers.

• Thanks to BlackCobran for reporting the crash bug in 3.185 related to waves being spawned.

AI_War:Fleet_Command