AI War:4.000 Release

Statistics For The Curious

• Between 3.120 and 4.000, we pushed out 81 distinct public beta releases over 170 days. That's an average of one release every 50 hours. This is with a major chunk of Tidalis's development happening in the middle (it was released July 16th), AND a signficant period with no public releases while we ported AI War from .NET/SlimDX to Unity3D.

• The combined release notes for those 81 betas total over 300 kilobytes of text.

Highlights

• Added a context menu which provides easy access to the various special move modes, the new micromanagement-saving Auto-Explore and Auto-Gather-Knowledge, and the new special unloading menu for transports.

• Knowledge raiding has been completely rebalanced to no longer be easy or necessary, returning it to the proper role of "last ditch effort to get out of a hole".

AI Updates

• 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.

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

• 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.

• The AI, on difficulty 7 and up, will now use Mobile Repair Stations 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

General Large Gameplay Additions

• 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 starting human outpost now contains:
  • Home Command Station
  • A special MkI forcefield that covers a much larger area (but has the same durability as a standard MkI),
  • A Space Dock.
  • A Starship Constructor.
  • One each of Energy Reactor MkI, MkII, and MkIII.
  • Ten each of metal and crystal manufactories.
  • On higher difficulties, a mobile builder and a mercenary space dock.
  • Depending on difficulty (the higher the more), a number of the new Home Human Settlements and Human Cryogenic Pods.

• 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!

• For CoN:
  • Added Hybrid Hives AI Plot.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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+).
  • 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.
• 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.

Performance Improvements

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• A minor performance improvement to CheckForTargetListUpdate.

• 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.

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

• 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).

• Some more efficiency improvements to the AI thread.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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!).

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

Interface Improvements

• Added context menu; the default context menu for your current context can be opened via Alt+Right-click. There is also a keyboard-only bind that you can set if you want to be able to open it at one keypress.

• Added "Special Move" item to context menu (when you have ships selected, on planet view) that allows setting of group/formation/attack/frd/queued flags via mouse rather than the various (and sometimes obscure) key combinations.

• Added "Stop" item to 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.

• Moved Auto Explore command from the A+E+X key combination to the 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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)

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 "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.

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

• Control Nodes have been removed and replaced with a Controls interface, accessed via the CTRLS button in the lower-left corner of the screen.

• Added new galaxy-wide control: 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• The lobby has been completely reworked, and 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.

• 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.

• Core Fabricators, Experimental Fabricators, and Experimental Starship Fabricators are now listed with space docks, starship constructors, etc on the "Space Dock" button at the bottom of the screen.

• The various messages that show near the top of the screen (Paused, Game Does Not Have Focus, You Win, etc) can now show more than one of these messages at once (like if you're paused after you've won and/or the game does not have focus).

Graphical Improvements

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

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

• The following modules now use a new shot-movement mechanic to fire their multiple-shot bursts in a brief sequence rather than all at once, to give more of the desired visual effect (gameplay impact should be minimal) :
  • Riot machine gun modules now fire 12 shots per salvo with a reload time of 4 seconds, instead of 3-shot salvos with a 1-second reload.
  • Riot laser modules now fire 8 shots per salvo per 8 seconds instead of 4 shots per salvo per 4 seconds.
  • Hybrid machine gun modules (I-IV) changed from firing 2/3/4/5 shots per 1-second reload to 10/15/20/25 shots per 5-second reload.
  • Hybrid laser cannon modules (I-IV) changed from firing 1/2/2/3 shots per 4-second reload to 2/3/4/5 shots per 8-second reload.

New Ships

• 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)

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 can be purchased by humans from the trader for an exorbitant fee, and can be captured from the AI but apply significant wave multipliers against that planet. 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 9 New types of Special AI-Homeworld Guard Posts that have to be destroyed before the home command station itself can be destroyed.

• 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.

• Dreadnought I/II/III renamed to Siege Starship I/II/III and given much more distinctive role:
  • Speed from 12 to 8.
  • Shields from 1500 to 200.
  • Base health from 300,000/600,000/900,000 to 1000,00/120,000/140,000.
  • Attack rate from 80/70/60 to 160 for all 3 marks (this means it used to fire once per 4/3.5/3 seconds, and now all fire once per 8 seconds).
  • No longer able to fire on fleet ships (this actually makes its autotargeting behavior much more efficient at its real job).
  • Base attack power from 3200/4800/6400 to 6400/11000/15000.
  • Engine damage per shot from 150/250/350 to 5000/7500/10000.
  • Multiplier against normal forcefields from 1 to 30.
  • Multiplier against starship-based forcefields from 1 to 15.
  • Multiplier against turrets from 1 to 30.
  • Multiplier against heavy defense from 21 to 30 (this includes fortresses, and 1/2 bonus against guard posts and 1/3 against ion cannons).
  • Multiplier against hybrid facilities from 1 to 10.
  • Multiplier against warheads from 0.2 to 1.
  • Removed multipliers against Fighter, Bulletproof-fighter, Microfighter, Zenith Autobombs, Zenith Bombardment, Raider, Teleport Raider, Teleport Battlestation, and Munitions Boosters.
  • Autotargeting now prefers starships (the 30x multiplier against them is still there).
  • Knowledge unlock cost from 2500/4000/6000 to 3000/5000/7000.

• For CoN:
  • 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.
  • Bonus Ship Type: Neinzul Youngling Weasel I-V.
  • Bonus Ship Type: Neinzul Youngling Vulture I-V.
  • Bonus Ship Type: Neinzul Youngling NanoswarmI-V.
  • Neinzul Regeneration Chamber.
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 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.
  • Neinzul Viral Swarmer (only one mark) 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).
  • 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.
  • 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).

Ship Logic Updates

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• "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.

• Previously, there was a constant rate of engine repair, which meant that ships with high engine health would take a REALLY long time to have their engines repaired. Now the rate of engine repair scales up so that ships with high engine health don't take extra time any longer. The base rate of engine repair has been halved, though.
  • Additionally, the repair speed bonuses of higher-level engineers now also apply to engine repair, whereas before they did not.

Balance Updates

• 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.

• 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.

• The amount of available knowledge per planet has been increased from 2,000 to 3,000 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.

• 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 100 energy instead of 1500. Cleanup Drones now use 25 energy instead of 150, and Remains Rebuilders now use 25 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 from 40k to 10k.

• 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, armor boosters (previously shield boosters) did not have any limits on how many units 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.

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• The Cursed Golem can no longer drop below 1 health from self-attrition.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• The Avenger no longer repairs nearby ships.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• All of the fabricators now use only 0 energy instead of 10000.

• 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 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.

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

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

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

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

• 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.

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

• 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).

• 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.

• Made engineers, cleanup drones, and rebuilders blind.

• Bonuses against heavy defense now give a bonus against Avengers too.

Misc Changes

• 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).

• 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).

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a couple of potential desyncs.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

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

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

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• Fixed an obscure crash bug relating to ship movement.

• 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 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.

• 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".

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

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

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

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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

• 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).

• 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.

• Fixed typo in the Zenith Starship description.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Added missing -100% value to handicap dropdown.

• Fixed obsolete Munitions Booster tooltip.

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

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

• 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.

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

• Fixed ambiguity in unexplored planets option description.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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).

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

• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 bug where it was possible to see a dyson sphere on the planetary summary sidebar of a planet where you had never had any visibility.

• Fixed bug where out-of-supply AI units would display a message intended only for player ships (talking about too far from "your" planets, etc); now has an AI-only message.

• Fixed a few bugs that would sometimes allow the placement of harvesters on resource points that were still covered by AI guard posts.

• (Really) fixed a bug where stuff caught by etherjets and then killed and regenerated by the AI on another planet was being snatched back to the original planet in a totally different position. Now will not be snatched back.

• Fixed bug where the galaxy-map planet intel overlay would not display the top two rows of icons (if any) for planets that were not owned by the players and did not have enemy ships.

• Fixed bug where mk III harvesters were not "redding out" like mkI and mkII when no spots were available.

• Fixed bug that hid the pause button when both normal military ships and a Riot or Enclave starship were selected (since those have buy queues).