AI War:Current Post-4.000 Beta

Prerelease 4.043

• Raid Starships:
  • Multiplier against command-grade hull type (primarily command stations) from 4 => 1. This should help make them less insta-homeworld-death against the human, but still quick-homeworld-death.
  • Multiplier against ultra-heavy hull type from 2 => 4.
  • No longer immune to snipers.

• Snipers, Sniper Turrets, and Sniper Guardians all now have 100,000 armor piercing.

• Sniper base damage was way out of line (MkII did 900 damage every 9 seconds with a 0.2 ship cap multiplier, Sniper Turret did 3600 damage every 6 seconds with a 1.2 ship cap multiplier, a ratio of 1:36), so base damage from 450*mk => 8100*mk. making the mkIV Sniper have a roughly equivalent dps-for-cap as the sniper turret, and the mkI sniper have roughly 1/4 of that, etc.

• Sniper Turrets now get a 5x vs Close-Combat hulls (Snipers already had this).

• Fixed bug preventing ships from leaving cold storage if they were on a planet with > 4000 attack+threat ships (this led to capturables not being captured, zero-health ships not going away, ai ships sitting there and not firing and not fireable-upon, etc).
  • Thanks to BlackCobra for reporting and providing a save.

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

Prerelease 4.042

• Added new control to the Planet-Specific tab of the Controls window: "Redirection Tries To Maintain Garrison Of".
  • When this is greater than zero, and the number of allied mobile military ships on the planet is less than the specified number, redirection rally posts won't actually redirect ships entering the planet.
  • Functionally this allows you to tell the planet to hold onto a "garrison" of X ships, filling up from the redirection-post patrols you've set up.
  • Note that you have relatively little control over the composition of the garrison, since faster ships will tend to fill empty slots unless you've got your patrol groups on group-move. Nonetheless, this can be useful for making sure a planet has some kind of defensive force without having to nanny it.
  • Thanks to Fleet for the suggestion.

• Added new control to the Planet-Specific tab of the Controls window: "Stop Building Military If Have Garrison Of".
  • When this is greater than zero, and the number of allied mobile military ships on the planet is greater than or equal to the specified number, build queues on the planet will be suspended (not actually paused, per se, but similar to that).
  • This also allows establishing a garrison, and gives you more control over composition but requires that you build a space dock (or whatever) on the planet and set up the queue, etc. Anyway, you can set up a looping queue of, say, 5 fighters, 1 bomber, and 1 missile frigate and a garrison threshold of 50 and it will produce ships until it hits 50 ships and then stop until some of the ships die or leave; it will then replace those (though not necessarily with the same type, of course).
  • Does not impact self-building units like turrets, or the construction of modules on modular ships.
  • Thanks to Fleet for the suggestion.

• Enclave Starship collision priority from 9000 => 875, putting it below rally posts (and standard ff-gens and command station cores) but above just about everything else that's mobile.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Shield Bearers and Spirecraft Shield Bearers now have collision priority of 566, making them less likely to be bounced out to the edges of a group and more likely to cover more units.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for the suggestion.

• All other Spirecraft, and the "starship-esque" Spire bonus ship classes (Blade Spawner, Maw, Stealth Battleship, Tractor Platform) now have collision priority, the default for all starships.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for the suggestion.

• The Spire Blade Spawner, Maw, Stealth Battleship, and Tractor Platform:
  • No longer use the ship cap scaling since there are so few of them even on high. This means that their stats (attack power, health, etc) will no longer be higher on low and normal caps than on high caps, but the ship cap will not decrease either.
  • Now have AIPerPlanetShipCap set to 4. This is supposed to cull existing populations and apply to almost all forms of reinforcement and spawning, and will help with situations like the AI having 100 blade spawners on a single planet slaying your CPU.
    • Note that this functions more like a cap of 5 and is per-mark-level, so it is possible to still get fearsome clusters of these, just nothing like 100.
    • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting the AI blade spawner CPU-slaying menace.

• Fixed some mixed-wave messages showing up as homogenous and thus misleading the player as to the content of the wave (now just says Enemy Ships in those cases).
  • Thanks to SNAFU for the report and save.

• Fixed unintended inflation of counter-attack-wave size. May still be some issues but this should fix the biggest of them.
  • Thanks to many, many... many players, for reporting.

• Previously Raid Engines and Core Raid Engine Posts could lead to runaway wave sizes (particularly the core one), this has been set to a more constant multiplier. Still might have some runaway-ness, we'll see.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting being attacked by almost seven. hundred. thousand. ships.

• Fixed bug that was preventing the spawning of certain objects in the fallen-spire progression if there were simply no more planets far enough away from human territory; now they'll spawn as far away as they can in those cases.
  • Thanks to mavorspam for the report and the save.

• Fixed some discrepancies in applying AI-Type-specific modifiers to wave sizes between mixed-wave and homogenous-wave branches.

• Fixed a bug where the WaveSize multiplicative factor was being applied twice (once on the AI thread, once on the main thread), leading to factors < 1 causing smaller-than-intended waves and factors > 1 causing larger-than-intended waves. In some cases the factors were >= 10, and you can imagine how bad that got.

• The Enable Advanced Logging setting now also causes two new logs to be written: MainThreadWaveComputationLog and AIThreadWaveComputationLog (which is only written on the host's machine in an mp game). These will have a lot of details in how a wave's size was computed, which is helpful in diagnosing exactly what's going on if we continue to have unexpectedly-sized (generally unexpectedly-large) waves.

• Fixed a bug in the enforcement of the IsEligibleForHomogenousWave flag that was leading to a wave that would be composed entirely of a non-eligible type simply being a nearly-empty wave (basically it would just have the starship(s)). Now the wave will only be empty if it somehow does not have any eligible types, but that should be impossible.

• Shield Bearers hull type from Heavy => Structural.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug where multiple science lab mkIIIs on one planet were reporting as if multi-stacking the reinforcement multipliers, even though they were not actually multiplying them.
  • Thanks to Suzera for reporting.

• The game now makes it clear when a wave or CPA that is incoming was triggered by a ship -- guard post, raid engine, scrap wave, or otherwise. This should substantially help reduce confusion about the deep raids into player territory.

(Released November 30th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.041

• All map seeds now give twice as many possible starting positions (16 instead of 8), to allow for players to have greater variety with less clicking through map seeds to find the ships they want (especially with all the new ship types lately).
  • If there are fewer than the allotted number of ship types available given the current expansions and ship complexity, then the number of valid starting positions will be reduced as appropriate.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient for inspiring this change.

• Zenith Electric Bomber hull type changed from Heavy to Neutron.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Zenith Autobombs and Neinzul Youngling Nanoswarms now do a better job of splitting up rather than focusing on a small set of targets.

• Missile Frigate Rebalance:
  • Reload Time from 20/15/10/8/7 => 11 - ShipLevel (10/9/8/7/6).
  • Base Range from 7000 for all marks => 6500 + 500*mk (7000/7500/8000/8500/9000).
  • Health from 4,800/16,000/22,000/28,000/33,000 => 9000*mk (9,000/18,000/27,000/36,000/45,000).
  • Armor from 150/150/300/600/300 => 150 for all marks.
  • Attack Power for MkV from 8000 => 5000.
  • Bonus against Neutron from 3x => 5x.
  • Added 5x bonuses against Composite and Refractive (previously, no triangle ship had a bonus against either of those).

• Youngling Nanoswarm Rebalance:
  • Removed all damage bonuses (trying to avoid their autotargeting prioritizing damage over other stuff).
  • Maximum targets affected from 1/3/5/7/9 => 3/5/7/9/11.
  • Now does 100*mk armor damage (i.e. "armor rotter" damage) to each affected target.
  • Now adds 1*mk seconds of paralysis to each affected target.
  • Now does 2*mk engine damage to each affected target.
  • Note that the nanoswarm cannot directly target stuff that is immune to reclamation, and may have similar difficulties with ships immune to its new debuffs, but that often other ships caught in the blast may be affected by those debuffs they are not immune to. Nanoswarms will pay house calls to individuals found filing mantis reports resulting from not reading this release note.

• Nanoswarm now considered to use non-shell ammo, so bulletproof stuff should no longer be immune to them.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• The way that unit data is synced to the AI thread is now better for purposes of cold storage and similar in particular.

• The AI now has some new logic for cleaning up certain old ships on its thread, to hopefully avoid issues with "ghost" warp gates and such that would lead to waves that shouldn't happen. That may or may not have been happening before, but we suspect it might have been and this adds on some safety checks to hopefully prevent it.

• Human ships no longer automatically open fire on low-power AI ships, though they do still put them in their targeting lists as normal (so that as soon as the AI ship comes out of low-power mode, they are able to fire on them just as quickly as before). This prevents long-range human ships from accidentally stirring up the guards of AI guard posts unless the player specifically orders them to. In general this will make the AI guards bumrush the player ships a lot less frequently than they were recently doing, while not losing the first-mover advantage of the human ships against the low-power AI ships.
  • Thanks to CogDissident for inspiring this change.

• Human ships no longer automatically open fire on guard posts of the AI if those guard posts have not already been "angered." This means that long-range human ships won't just snipe them without being told to do so, but as soon as the guard posts have entered the battle at all, they will fire at will. Like the other change about low-power ships, this also doesn't impact the putting of guard posts into the targeting lists, so it doesn't hurt the first-mover advantage of the player ships. Generally when players get at all in the vicinity of the guard posts the guard post gets angered, so this just prevents snipers and similar from alerting the entire planet without the player desiring for that to happen, for instance.

• Human ships no longer automatically open fire on guardians of the AI if those guardians have not already been "angered" AND they are on active guard duty. This works basically on the same principles as the above change to the guard posts, except for guardians that are already freely moving around it ignores them.

• Fallen Spire stuff:
  • Fixed another bug with the minor faction stuff costing the player energy.
    • Thanks to orzelek for reporting that the bug was still happening.
  • Improved the defense-assistance fleet logic, and improved the coverage from the initial spawns.
  • Fixed a bug where still-in-construction shipyards and city hubs counted towards their respective ship caps (for the capital ships and the galactic capitol, respectively).
    • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for the report.
  • Due to the golem buffs, the event-attack logic point-costs for golems have been increased by roughly 2.5x (from "Medium Battleship" to "Light Dreadnought", for those keeping score). Note that the balance may be off now, it's hard to say ahead of time, but the AI-variants used in these attacks are still relatively easy to destroy by concentrated beam & photon cannon fire, they're just more dangerous offensively.

• On difficulty 7 and up, AI ships now spread out 2x as much as before. AI ships that are waiting before going through a wormhole to a human planet now spread out 4x more diffusely to make them even harder for players to hit.

• The AI now uses the intel data it has about the relative strengths of planets (as human players do), when determining whether or not to send its ships through a wormhole they are waiting on. This is different from the prior method, which was partly randomized, partly based on an accumulated number of 200 ships, and partly based on having a lot of ships incoming.
  • This is a far-reaching change to the emergent behavior, which will have many effects on the gameplay, some of which are likely to be unanticipated at this time. The general expected result is that the AI will not attack players with "trickles" of ships very often anymore, and will instead choose to build up before breaching. The other expected result is the AI acting more sensibly when its command station has been prematuraly destroyed or when ships are freed from a guard post.
  • On lower difficulties (<5), the AI actually overestimates its strength 5x, leading it to make dumber decisions. On difficulties less than 6, it overestimates its strength by half, leading it to make occasional stupid decisions there. Both of these are examples of the intentionally-sometimes-off decisions that make the lower-level AIs easier while also making reasonable mistakes a human might.
  • On difficulty 9 and up, the AI actually underestimates its strength by half, leading to it to have a greater tendency to wait to strike with overwhelming force.
  • These changes should also make the AI more effective in defender mode.

• The number of shots of the raider guardians have been cut about 10x, and the attack power of their shots has bee increased about 20x. Their bonuses have also been changed to specialize against commandgrade, structural, and ultraheavy, with a penalty against turrets.

• The speed of raid starships has been increased about 50%, and their attack power has gone up 5x. They also have gained a hefty bonus against command grade ships, while losing their bonus against turrets and instead having a penalty. The armor rating of raid starships has also been increased 3x.

• Enclave starships mark II-IV still had guns in previous versions. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

• Armored Golem health has once again gone up 10x (to 500m). The base attack power of armored golems has gone up 100x. The number of shots of armored golems has gone down to 1/6th of its prior value. The armor piercing of armored golems has increased from 10k to 999k.

• Artillery Golem health has been increased 20x (to 100m). The base attack power of them has gone up to 50m per shot. The armor piercing of armored golems has increased from 100k to 999k.

• Black Widow Golems now have 70m health instead of 30m. The attack range of black widow golems has been increased 4k, and their tractor range has also gone up 4k. The armor piercing of 1k has been removed from black widow golems, and their attack power has increased from 3k to 60k.

• Regenerator Golem attack power has been increased 100x.

• Cursed Golem range has been increased 100x, and health up by 3x (to 60m). The number of shots has also increased from 3 to 20.

• The AI Wave and reinforcement bonuses of all golems have been removed. Golems also no longer require the proximity of AI Warp Gates.

• The repair costs of golems were ludicrously low in recent releases -- fixed.

• Added new "Auto Load" command.
  • Can be issued via Unit Commmand context menu (either click the button or via context-menu-specific keybind, which has no default binding) or the Auto Load keybind (which also has no default binding).
  • When issued:
    • Tells all can-be-transported units in the selection to try to load themselves into a transport on their planet. If insufficient transport space is available, those that can find room will try to load while the others may do nothing.
    • If any transports are currently in the selection, only those transports are eligible for the auto-load operation. If no transports are in the selection, all allied transports on the planet are eligible.
    • Each ship to be loaded will prefer nearby transports, but if multiple transports are within roughly 5000 range units of one another, ships will generally prefer to fill one transport before beginning to fill the next.

• Hive Golem health has been increased 3x (to 48m). Hive Golem attack has been increased 50x, but their attack range has been reduced by 3k. Hive Golems also now have a radar dampening range of 10000. The speed of creation of wasps has been increased 4x.

• The health of the botnet golem has been increased 10x. Armor Piercing on the Botnet Golem has gone up 10x. The number of secondary shots fired by the botnet golem has been doubled.

• The previous concept of AI Wave Bonuses (the crazy multipliers that could lead to waves of 700,000 ships, for example) have been removed entirely. This buffs a number of structures for human use, including captive human settlements, zenith power generators, gravity drill stations, zenith spacetime manipulators, and ion cannons.

• The cost of all ion cannons has gone up 3x. The cost of the higher-mark ion cannons now go up even more exponentially than before.

• The ability "AI Reinforces When This Enters AI Planet" has been removed from the game, as only golems used it and now they do not.

• The ability "Requires Proximity Of AI Warp Gate" has been removed from the game, as only golems used it and now they do not.

• Broken Golems are no longer seeded as a part of the base Zenith Remnant campaigns (it used to seed 3 in every TZR campaign) -- however, any preexisting seeded golems will remain in existing saves.

• Three new minor factions have been added to The Zenith Remnant (nearly a year after the expansion's release -- crazy, right?). The purpose of these is to provide a more satisfactory range of experiences with golems to match player tastes, rather than the old "there are always three there" method. The three minor factions are:
  • Broken Golems (Easy)
    • Massive broken golems can be found around the galaxy, ready for humanity to capture and repair them. Once repaired, they represent enormous power to use against the AI.
    • The EASY version of this minor faction simply gives you the golems with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. Consequently, your adjusted score is also halved.
  • Broken Golems (Moderate)
    • Massive broken golems can be found around the galaxy, ready for humanity to capture and repair them. Once repaired, they represent enormous power to use against the AI.
    • The MODERATE version of this minor faction gives you the golems at a moderate energy cost and with a small AI Progress increase upon repairing them from their broken states. Consequently, your adjusted score is also reduced by 1/3.
    • Using the moderate version will automatically disable the easy version if the easy version is also selected.
  • Broken Golems (Hard)
    • Massive broken golems can be found around the galaxy, ready for humanity to capture and repair them. Once repaired, they represent enormous power to use against the AI.
    • The HARD version of this minor faction simply gives you the golems with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. However, whether or not you choose to capture any golems, the AI will be launching periodic large waves with golems of their own -- so you're highly advised to get some golems in order to survive.
    • Using the hard version will automatically disable the easy and moderate versions if either of them is also selected.
    • Important: So far the hard version just works like Easy, it doesn't actually spawn the waves yet. That will come in a future version.

• All of the human-controlled golems now have a self-attrition that makes them require ongoing maintenance from player engineers. The attrition is slow, however, taking the golems from full health to the brink of death over a two hour span (except for the cursed golem, which takes a mere 40 minutes -- still up from the prior 20 minutes there).
  • This creates an optional non-energy-related ongoing cost for golems that players can choose to pay or not pay; if they don't wish to repair golems, they can simply be placed out of service somewhere safe. This also seems fitting with the status of golems as uber-powereful, extremely ancient weapons in poor repair. And boy are they powerful, they do need something to counteract them a bit even on the Hard golem minor faction.
  • AI-controlled golems don't have the self-attrition, but instead have 10x lower health and an inability to be repaired.

• Spirecraft Rams now do 10x more attack damage, and now have 999k piercing damage, have a ton more health, and are now much faster. This makes them brutally effective against force fields and other large structures that the martyr can't really touch. Now there's a reason to sometimes choose these over the martyr.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting.

• Spirecraft Shield Bearers now have a much larger radius, making them a lot more useful.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.

• A new "positive AI Progress on Metamorphosis" ability has been added for golems on the Broken Golems (Moderate) minor faction only. Also on that moderate minor faction, the cost of the golems in terms of energy is 10x higher.

• Previously, only three broken golems were seeded into almost all games. Now 3x the number of human home planets are seeded, not to be less than 9 or more than 14.
  • Existing savegames that already had their broken golems seeded won't get any extras, unfortunately.

• Asteroids are no longer seeded as a part of the base Light of the Spire campaigns (and Spire Mining Ships also thus don't appear) -- however, any preexisting seeded asteroids/mining ships will remain in existing saves, though the mining ships won't be constructible new and no spirecraft will be constructible with existing mining ships.

• Three new minor factions have been added to Light of the Spire. The purpose of these is to provide a more satisfactory range of experiences with spirecraft to match player tastes. The three minor factions are:
  • Spirecraft (Easy)
    • Six different kinds of asteroids are seeded around the various planets of the galaxy, waiting for you to use your Spire Mining Ships (CONST tab) to build mining enclosures on them. From these mining enclosures, you can produce the rare and deadly Spirecraft ships, which cannot be procured any other way. These massive ships can be an enormous asset against the AI.
    • The EASY version of this minor faction simply gives you the spirecraft with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. Consequently, your adjusted score is also halved.
  • Spirecraft (Moderate)
    • Six different kinds of asteroids are seeded around the various planets of the galaxy, waiting for you to use your Spire Mining Ships (CONST tab) to build mining enclosures on them. From these mining enclosures, you can produce the rare and deadly Spirecraft ships, which cannot be procured any other way. These massive ships can be an enormous asset against the AI.
    • The MODERATE version of this minor faction gives you the spirecraft with a vastly higher energy cost, and without the ability to repair them. Consequently, your adjusted score is also reduced by 1/3.
    • Using the moderate version will automatically disable the easy version if the easy version is also selected.
  • Spirecraft (Hard)
    • Six different kinds of asteroids are seeded around the various planets of the galaxy, waiting for you to use your Spire Mining Ships (CONST tab) to build mining enclosures on them. From these mining enclosures, you can produce the rare and deadly Spirecraft ships, which cannot be procured any other way. These massive ships can be an enormous asset against the AI.
    • The HARD version of this minor faction simply gives you the spirecraft with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. However, whether or not you choose to capture any spirecraft, the AI will be launching periodic large waves with spirecraft of their own -- so you're highly advised to get some spirecraft in order to survive.
    • Using the hard version will automatically disable the easy and moderate versions if either of them is also selected.
    • Important: So far the hard version just works like Easy, it doesn't actually spawn the waves yet. That will come in a future version.

• When asteroids are seeded into a campaign, they are now seeded onto all non-homeworld worlds. This makes them work in a much more friendly fashion with long-running existing savegames.

• Three new commands have been added to The Zenith Remnant for enabling the new minor factions in existing savegames (but ONLY if none of the three is already on -- you can't use this to switch back and forth between them):
  • cmd:activate broken golems easy
  • cmd:activate broken golems moderate
  • cmd:activate broken golems hard

• Three new commands have been added to Light of the Spire for enabling the new minor factions in existing savegames (but ONLY if none of the three is already on -- you can't use this to switch back and forth between them):
  • cmd:activate spirecraft easy
  • cmd:activate spirecraft moderate
  • cmd:activate spirecraft hard

• There was a missing localization error on the Spirecraft Martyr short name. Martyr is hard to type. ;)
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Spirecraft can now be repaired, except when playing with the Spirecraft Moderate minor faction. On that one minor faction, spirecraft aren't repairable and their energy costs are 5x as high as they otherwise would be.

• Previously, self-attrition was impairing engineers from being able to repair ships with self-attrition. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Salamander for reporting.

• The "View Ship Modules" context menu item now works on groups of more than one of the same designable type. If more than one distinct designable type is in the selection, the option is not available. Please note that it will only actually display the modules for one of the selected ships, but changes applied to the ships will be applied to them all (meaning that they will all wind up with the same design if you apply anything to the ships).
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Previously, the graphics for the Implosion Guardian was missing from in the game. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

(Released November 24th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.040

• Heavy Beam Cannons buffed:
  • MkI beam count 1 => 3
  • MkII beam count 3 => 6
  • MkIII beam count 7 => 12
  • All Marks armor piercing from 2000*mk => 8000 (flat, not multiplied by mark)

• Fallen Spire Stuff:
  • Spire Shard Reactors, Habitation Centers, Shipyards, and the Galactic Capitol now have a primary armament; the Capitol's is similar to a Spire Dreadnought, the others' are between a Spire Destroyer and a Spire Cruiser. For all of them, the base range is roughly double that of the capital ships.
  • Spire city laser-cannon and heavy-beam-cannon modules are now significantly more expensive and much more powerful.
  • Spire city shield generator mkII health doubled to put it more in line with the mkI and mkIII (the ship-based versions used by Spire capital ships and Hybrids are intended to have a big jump from mkII to mkIII).
  • Combined with the 4.039 changes, this probably actually makes things too easy on defense, but not trying to correct for that (possibly non-existent) problem yet.

• Added a new LotS AI Guardian: Gravity
  • Enormous gravity distortion effect slows enemy ships over a wide area. Middling firepower specially geared towards starships and other large targets.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.

• Added a new LotS AI Guardian: Starship Disassembler
  • Huge alien guardian that swallows enemy starships and gradually attritions them. If the guardian is destroyed, they are ejected with whatever health they have left. External guns also fire at targets at short range while it chews on the swallowed ships.

• Added a new LotS AI Guardian: Implosion
  • Mid-range, middling-health artillery weapon that does damage based on a percentage of the enemy ship's remaining health (not to be less than 1 damage). This is most effective when enemy ships have very high remaining health.
  • Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.

• The radius of all the human force fields (but not AI force fields) have been increased substantially.

• The radius of the spirecraft shield bearer force fields have been increased substantially.

• The ship cap of the shield bearer ship class has been cut in half, but their individual force field sizes have been doubled, their health has been tripled, and their attack power has been doubled. Their costs have also been doubled.

• Fixed bug where minor faction ships were consuming player energy.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Previously, rally posts were able to be damaged by mines. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Sigma7 for reporting.

• If a rally post is in FRD mode or attack-move mode, it will now set those modes on any ships that are directed to/through that rally post.

• The old rally posts are now called "Mobile Rally Posts," since their key feature is that they are mobile.

• New "Redirector Rally Posts" have been added to the base game. These are NOT mobile, but which can have gather points set like that of a space dock. You can use this to give cross-planet move orders, and even to set up cross-planet roving patrols of ships if you set up a looping pattern of redirectors.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• Cross-planet gather points (for docks and otherwise) now visually show movement lines on the planet itself, thus making it far more clear what's going on.

• Previously, holding Ctrl could allow players to build extra mining enclosures on a single asteroid. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• "Ally to all" minor faction ships were previously being affected by attrition. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• All ships that are unable to be repaired now automatically get infinite engine health (to prevent them from being permanently stranded).
  • Thanks to Lancefighter and TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Spire Blades (from a Spire Blade Spawner) and Wasps (from a Hive Golem) no longer get regenerated by Regenerator Golems/Trains.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• The fighter hull attack bonuses have been doubled to compensate for the recent cutting-in-half of their base attack.

• Previously, when an AI ship contained other ships (carriers, etc) that was not reflected in the threat/attack meters properly. Now it is.

• Previously, when AI waves got too large (more than about 2000 ships), the extra ships of the AI would simply not be included in the wave, leading to very inflexible wave caps. Now waves are free to get infinitely large, but any ships over the wave caps get added inside carriers instead of as roaming ships. There is a separate cap for starships in waves (always was), and now the excess starships also go into carriers rather than being cropped out. The net effect of this change is to make the danger from high AI Progress levels continue to rise linearly, rather than capping out at some certain value. However, the reason for the wave caps in the first place was to protect performance, and the use of carriers still accomplishes that while not reducing difficulty overmuch.

• The Armor Rotter, Blade Spawner, Tractor Platform, and Maw ships are now considered complex ship types. The rest are all considered Normal, as before.

• The Special Forces Rally Guardians are now direct-only targeted by the human players. The attack power of these guardians has been reduced to practically nothing, and they now have self-attrition that kicks in ONLY on human worlds, and which kills the guardian after 30 minutes of time. Thus the special forces rally post guardian winds up redirecting special forces ships for quite a long while, but isn't the same hassle as before to players.
  • Thanks to LintMan and TheDeadlyShoe for reporting the previous difficulties.

• Unique far-zoom icons have now been created for the following ships: AI Beachhead, SC Attritioner, SC Implosion, SC Ion, SC Jumpship, SC Martyr, SC Penetrator, SC Ram, SC Scout, SC Siege Tower, Spire Archive.

(Released November 23rd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.039

• Previously a ship design with empty slots would actually try to add "None" to the ship's queue. Hilarity ensued. Fixed to not do this.
  • Thanks to Ham for reporting.

• When Spirecraft Martyrs die, they now deal damage even to those ships that are immune to normal AOE damage.

• In the prior version, spire civilian leaders were helping out the humans even when under AI control. Oops. :) Fixed.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for reporting.

• A new capturable ship type has been added for LotS: Spire Archive.
  • These powerful science vessels can be found nearby or on the AI homeworlds. Capturing them will provide +1/s knowledge income on the archive's planet for all human players while the archive lives, up to a cap that is 3x that of the normal per-planet cap. If the archive is destroyed, however, there is a hefty AI Progress cost.

• Fallen Spire rebalancing:
  • City-Hub provoked event-attacks now cannot exceed 60,000 points per city hub (so 5 city hubs = max of 300,000). Having a capitol counts as one extra city hub for purposes of event-attack calculations.
    • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting some kind of cap.
  • Event-attack counter increment rate from 1300 per hub to 1000 per hub.
  • City Hubs are now perma-cloaked and thus exceedingly unlikely to ever be destroyed, but now requires supply to actually build anything. Other city facilities can be destroyed normally, as before. This change mostly removes the possibility of being kicked out of the "quest line" by losing a city during the build-five-cities phase, and makes it much easier to use cities as major defensive bulwarks on the way to your home command stations.
    • Thanks to Lancefighter for pointing out why people didn't want to use cities as heavy defense.
    • Event attacks used to send one battlegroup after each city hub, now it picks a random non-hub city facility from those existing in the galaxy.
  • Spire Habitation centers now produce 300/s of both metal and crystal. Generally the player wants as many shipyards as possible so there isn't a huge motivation to spam hab centers, but it does somewhat help compensate for the increased amount of fleet rebuilding required by the special attacks.
  • Leech starships no longer show up in event attacks.
  • Fixed bug where the signal to be scanned by a subspace receiver or refugee outpost was being spawned on the first homeworld their respective shards arrived on, rather than the homeworld they were constructed on. The game will also try to correct this retroactively in old saves by removing and respawning signals on incorrect planets.
    • Thanks to UberJumper for reporting.
  • Spire capital ship caps weren't scaling with multiple homeworlds since they used the entirely separate shipyard-count-based calculation, fixed to also scale with multiple homeworlds.
  • Previously event-attack battlegroups using the ship-coordination logic (same as the Hybrids use) were effectively immune to engine damage except for the "lead" ship (and the player is not told and should not need to know which ship is the lead ship). Fixed so that engine-damaged "underlings" can have an effective speed below coordinator.EffectiveMoveSpeed+5 (which is their normal speed while coordinated).
    • Thanks to orzelek for pointing out that engine damage was really ineffective against these.

• The force field size of the spirecraft shield bearers has been greatly increased.

• Previously, the metal and crystal costs to actually build spirecraft via the mining enclosures were swapped. Whoops, fixed.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Attritioner (Mark I-V)
  • This massive ship has weak direct guns, but does high attrition damage to all enemy ships once per second (on the order of multiple fixed-position attrition emitters). Enemy ships on the current planet will notice that they are damaged by attrition and will turn aggressive, however, so be careful of stirring up enemy planets with the attritioners.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Scout (Mark I-V)
  • These scouts are all perma-cloaked, but move pretty slowly and rapidly lose health if they are on an enemy planet of a higher mark level than the scout itself. Most of these except for the Mark IV or V spirecraft scouts make for better long-term sentries (thus freeing up your normal scouts to do mobile scouting) rather than as literal scouts that explore.
  • These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Xampite to Titanite, Mark I-IV ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.

• Minimum ship cap multiplier for wave size from 0.3 => 0.03. This should help with the killer waves of zenith electric bombers, spire stealth battleships, etc.

• AI Reinforce-guard-post logic now stops prioritizing the "majority" type at that guard post when a certain cap is reached, that cap is related to the human ship cap, this should help avoid massive piles of z-bombers and stealth battleships, though it won't completely prevent them.

• Added "priority" values to each of the hardpoints on the Spire capital ships, and newly completed modules fill the lowest-priority slot that is open. This helps prevent the case where, say, the shield generator and one of the heavy-beam-cannon modules are shot off of a cruiser, and it happens to rebuild the HBC first, and it gets put in the shield generator's slot.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• Spire Tractor Platform shots-per-salvo from 1+(20*mk) => 18+(3*mk).

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Ion Blaster (Mark I-V)
  • Advanced weapon insta-kills most ships with a mark level equal to or lower than its mark value. Cannot fire upon ships immune to insta-kill. Unlike the fixed-position ion cannons, these ion ships are both mobile and much shorter-ranged, but they are still extremely deadly.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz and love kawa for suggesting.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Penetrator (Mark I-V)
  • Perma-cloaked ship that cannot hit most smaller fleet ships and which must be manually targeted to fire. It does absolutely astronomical damage, and then is uncloaked and unable to fire for the next half hour. This ship is Blind, and thus requires the support of scouts or other similar ships to see its target, but otherwise it works best as a lone wolf sort of ship, delivering its payload and then returning to friendly space to rest and recuperate.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to LintMan for suggesting.

• Ion cannons, orbital mass drivers, and core warhead interceptors are no longer immune to minor electric shots.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Implosion Artillery (Mark I-V)
  • Large, high-range, middling-health artillery weapon that does damage based on a percentage of the enemy ship's remaining health (not to be less than 1 damage). This is most effective when enemy ships have very high remaining health.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Siege Tower (Mark I-V)
  • Huge, slow, low-range, high-piercing, highly-armored, radar-dampened battlestation with multiple shots excellent for taking out large swathes of enemy ships while repelling a beating in return.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Jumpship (Mark I-V)
  • Expensive, tiny-capacity transport with advanced teleportation and no self-attrition-per-wormhole. The advanced teleportation lets the jumpship pass through wormholes and across planets without the normal few-second delays that regular teleporting ships face. On planets with a higher mark than the jumpship, the jumpship expires in about twenty seconds, however.
  • These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Xampite to Titanite, Mark I-IV ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.

• Added a new LotS AI Plot: Beachheads
  • Each wave that the AI sends has a 10% chance of being half-size, but including a Beachhead structure that interferes with supply on the planet being attacked (thus knocking out everything from turrets to forcefields until the beachhead is destroyed), as well as preventing player ships from retreating. Counterattack waves, event waves, raid engine waves, and other specialized forms of waves won't ever include a beachhead.
  • Five marks of AI Beachhead have also been added:
    • Tough, armored, immobile long-range AI ship that gets sent along with some waves. Interferes with supply on the planet being attacked (thus knocking out everything from turrets to forcefields until the beachhead is destroyed), as well as preventing its enemies' ships from retreating.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

(Released November 22nd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.038

• Fallen Spire stuff:
  • Fixed bug where it was possible to order the new higher-tech modules for spire city defenses and capital ships through the ship design window, but not through the normal buy menu. Added to the buy menu now.
  • Added episodes 9 & 10, which are the end of the progression. They're actually also entirely optional, actually.
  • Fixed bug where the "must have all neighboring planets clear of AI" requirement of expanding a city was looking for units with WarpGateWave, instead of just checking for an AI command station.
    • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Laser Cannon Modules (for the Riot Control Starships, Hybrids, and Spire capital ships) now use new laser shot graphics generously donated by HitmanN, the Hybrid and Spire lasers use different colors for the different power levels (mkI = red, mkII = orange, mkIII = green, mkIV = blue) and the Riot laser mkI and mkII also use different colors.

• Fixed a bug that was causing Gravity Rippers to permanently strand enemy ships.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Added a new cheat for Light of the Spire: Impact Is Imminent (+1 Of Each Asteroid Type On The Current Planet)

• The far zoom icon for the asteroids has been greatly improved.

• Guardians and guard posts no longer try to load colormasks off the disk (which were all blank, anyway) to save a bit of RAM use and disk access time.

• Spire Mining Ships have been added to the game for the LotS expansion.
  • This ship allows the construction of mining enclosures on asteroids. Each tab in its build menu corresponds to a type of asteroid on which specific mining enclosures can be built.

• The attack range on the spire maw has been shrunk by 1000 to make extra sure that it's always in swallowing range of enemy ships.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz for suggesting.

• The cloaking and selection circles on the spire stealth battleship have been increased in far zoom so that they are actually visible.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

• The Spire Blade Spawners accidentally had tractor beams in the prior version. Fixed.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz for reporting.

• The Core Neinzul Melee Guard Posts and all the spire Mini Rams now have a shot type of Ram instead of Blades. The Ram is also a melee type, but ships aren't immune to it.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting the confusion with mini rams not being able to attack many of their intended targets.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Shield Bearer (Mark I-V)
  • Does relatively low damage, but has very high health and provides a sizable force field to protect allied ships. Its force field does not reduce the attack power of protected ships.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.

• A system for spirecraft mining enclosures is now in place, so that the spire mining ships build mining enclosures which consume asteroids and which then actually turn into one or more spirecraft when completed. Whew. Now we can get on with the business of actually creating the rest of the spirecraft themselves!

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Ram (Mark I-V)
  • This massive battering ram specializes in high-health targets, crashing into them for extreme damage and destroying itself in the process. Unable to hit smaller ships.
  • These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Adamantite, Mark I-IV ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to HitmanN and RCIX for suggesting.

• The far zoom icons for the spire bonus ships have had their contrast and sharpness improved.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Martyr (Mark I-V)
  • This massive ship has no guns, but is bristling with tractor beams. When it dies, it explodes for extreme damage to enemy ships within its tractor range.
  • These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Adamantite, Mark I-IV ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• All ships that have tractor beams on them are now immune to the tractor beams of other ships.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting the issue that led to this change.

• The health of armored and artillery golems has been increased 10x.

• In the prior version, the Civilian Leaders outposts were not working properly -- they could not be captured by taking their planet. Now they are properly captured, and they also give positive AI progress even when the AI command station has been destroyed but the humans have not yet colonized the planet.
  • Thanks to DonCarsto for reporting.

• The awesome modified version of the beam guardian that was created by HitmanN as a mod has now been integrated into the main game.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for creating!

• The way AI/minor-faction ships with module templates are created fixed to be much less fiddly (this was leading to avengers and AI-controlled Riots spawning with no modules).
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Spire ships now have a new blue explosion animation, like the Zenith ships have a green explosion.

• Fixed bug in recent versions preventing the ai eye and superterminal from functioning.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Bulletproof fighter changed from Heavy hull type to Medium hull type.

(Released November 20th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.037

• The awesome modified version of the short range guard post, missile guard post, and MLRS guard post that were created by HitmanN as a mod have now been integrated into the main game.
  • Thanks to HitmanN, of course!

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Maw (Mark I-V)
  • Huge alien vessel that swallows transportable enemy ships and gradually attritions them. If the maw is destroyed, they are ejected with whatever health they have left. External guns also fire at targets at short range while it chews on the swallowed ships.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Blade Spawner (Mark I-V)
  • Large central ship has weak guns, but continously spawns smaller independent blades that crash into enemy ships.
  • This also adds mark I-V of Spire Blades.
    • Extremely fast melee ship -- loses health over a 10-second period, then self-destructs. Created inside Spire Blade Spawners, these are uncontrollable but will viciously attack the enemy on the current planet. Players cannot give direct orders to the blades.
  • Thanks to soMe_RandoM for suggesting.

• Fallen Spire stuff:
  • Added Episode 8.
  • Fixed bug where secondary unlocks (like the higher laser cannon modules unlocked by researching laser turret II and laser turret III) were being used for the parent tech description.
  • Shard planets are now chosen more forgivingly; it still insists on X planets deep in AI territory (X=2 or 3 for early missions, 4 for city-shard-recovery missions) but it will choose between those meeting that criteria that are closest to the human homeworld(s), rather than potentially choosing something waaaaaay far away from the human homeworld if the human has expanded fairly far in a particular direction. If the human expands in all directions from their homeworld they may still face a rather long "shard run".
  • Recovery mission chase-spawn interval now scales with combat style; on Normal it's unchanged, on epic it's 2x as long, on blitz it's 1/2x as long. This is just to compensate for differences in actual shard speed.
  • Hab centers and Shard reactors can now mount a few higher tech modules if you have them unlocked. Note that we intend to add more variety of modules for both the city defenses and spire capital ships (particularly the really big ones).
  • Fixed a freeze bug in ship-coordination code
  • Building a Spire Colony Ship from a shard no longer requires the refugee outpost, just a home command station. This makes it possible to continue during the city-building phase if you lose your refugee outpost.

• Fixed bug where AI players were having no wave-eligible core ship types unlocked, and in some cases no core ship types unlocked at all. This caused various problems. Now all AI players will have the core fighter, core bomber, and core missile frigate unlocked. This will be applied retroactively to savegames as they are loaded.

• The last of the new LotS bonus ship classes has been added: Spire Armor Rotter (Mark I-V)
  • Shots do fairly little damage, but eat away at the armor of ships they hit with each shot. Ship armor gradually regenerates over time (it takes up to 10 minutes to fully regenerate, depending on how much armor the target has), but cannot be directly repaired. Thus the armor rotters can create a window of opportunity for other ships to strike high-armor ships.
  • Thanks to Salamander for suggesting.

• There was previously a cap on wave timers that was preventing counterattack waves from taking as long as they should have been taking. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for reporting.

• The "Grid" map type from The Zenith Remnant has been renamed to "Lattice" instead, as it really was not a true grid.

• Two new grid-like maps have been added for Light of the Spire:
  • Grid
    • Planets are organized into an orderly grid.
  • Crosshatch
    • Planets are organized into an orderly grid with the angles also filled in.

• The spire tractor platforms were previously ridiculously fearsome. Fixed.
  • Thanks to UberJumper for reporting.

• Six new maze-like maps have been added for Light of the Spire:
  • Maze A
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a grid to create the maze.
  • Maze A Easy
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a grid to create the maze, but with random extra links added in various spots.
  • Maze B
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze.
  • Maze B Easy
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze, but with random extra links added in various spots.
  • Maze C
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Prims algorithm on a grid to create the maze.
  • Maze D
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Prims algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze.

• The armor piercing and armor rating on the stealth battleship have both been removed. The radar dampening range on these has also been doubled (making it half as effective).
  • Thanks to Nypyren for suggesting.

• A new Minor Faction has been added for Light of the Spire: Spire Civilian Leaders
  • Up to 10 Spire Civilian Leader Outposts are scattered throughout the galaxy in the control of the AI. Against their will, every hour each outpost increases the AI Progress by 1. You have the choice of either destroying these outposts for colloduing with the AI, or freeing the outposts by capturing the planet from the AI. When freed, each of these outposts will gratefully decrease the AI Progress by one every hour.

• The attack power of all the fighters have been reduced by half from the prior release, but also now have twice as much armor piercing in general.

• Guns have been removed from the Neinzul Enclave Starships, at the request of players to have these work more like space docks (not selecting with military ships, etc).
  • Thanks to Foogsert for suggesting.

(Released November 18th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.036

• Fixed some bugs where logic was not properly checking for AssociatedExpansion = -1; notably this pretty much prevented all Fallen-Spire event-attacks.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• The game is no longer able to use multiple copies of the same starfield background to draw the starfield effect (that was able to make it look blurry when that happened).
  • Thanks to Toll and Kejal for reporting.

• Previously, Defender mode would result in different AI Progress for the host and the clients on game start. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Fleet for reporting.

(Released November 17th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.035

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

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

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

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

• Warbird Starship health 300,000 => 3,000,000.
• Beam Starship health 900,000 => 4,500,000.

• The way that AI fixed-position ships, most notably things like guard posts, respond to radar jamming and similar is now much improved.

• Space planes now have a new "Radar Dampening" ability that makes them impossible to hit beyond a certain distance. This even affects snipers, ion cannons, and the like -- they can't target the space planes until the planes get close enough to them.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for suggesting.

• Scout drones 1-3 now also have the radar dampening ability, to counteract the recent nerf to scouts based on making them unable to outrun shots through wormholes.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Stealth Battleship (Mark I-V)
  • Powerful battleship with onboard cloaking options as well as a portable radar dampener that makes enemy ships have to be in very close range to hit it at all (radar dampening does not affect the ability of enemy ships to hit other ships, just this one).
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• The Attack Power of the Zenith Starship has been increased 3x, as it was actually lower than the flagship (though with more shots) lately.

• The Spire Starship has had its range increased by 10k, it's attack power roughly tripled, and its number of shots cut by half.

• Continuous beam weapon endpoints now maintain position to the firing ship rather than maintaining an absolute position.
• Fixed bug where continuous beams were not properly "punching through" when the current target was destroyed and no other targets were behind it.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Teleporting Leech (Mark I-V)
  • Large teleporting ship fires lightning shots. Reclaims enemy ships it kills (reclaimed ships have health = half damage inflicted by reclamator).

• Yet... another... wildly different sound subsystem method in an attempt to get rid of the psched issue on osx. I'll be really surprised if this one doesn't work, and it also has the side benefit of having to do fewer calls to the disk. It possibly has a drawback of limiting how many sound effect files can be used by the game (to around 200), but AI War is presently under that number, anyway.

• Fixed bug where superterminal would stop generating ships once it tried to cross from MkIV to MkV ships. For now it will just stick with MkIV.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient, Lancefighter, and Dazio for reporting.

• Gravity turrets and other ships with gravitational effects now only affect enemy ships, rather than all ships. This makes them significantly more valuable and less annoying to use.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Gravity Drain (Mark I-V)
  • Large, slow ship slows the movement of enemy ships near to it. Also has powerful short-range lasers.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Gravity Ripper (Mark I-V)
  • Large, high-health, slow ship temporarily halts the movement of enemy ships with every hit of its weak, short-range, rapid-fire energy bursts. Best used in combination with other ships to keep fast targets from escaping.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Mini Ram (Mark I-V)
  • This miniature battering ram specializes in high-health targets, crashing into them for high damage and destroying itself in the process. Unable to hit smaller ships.
  • Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Tractor Platform (Mark I-V)
  • Large, slow alien vessel is bristling with small guns but most importantly many tractor beams. This has obvious defensive uses, but can also be used to hold enemy ships at bay while longer range allied ships take them out.

(Released November 17th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.034

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Raid Starships are no longer immune to missiles.

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 15th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.033

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 13th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.032

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Six different kinds of asteroids are now seeded throughout the galaxy in the following order of rarity (from least to most rare): Reptite, Pysite, Xampite, Ebonite, Adamantite, Titanite.
  • Build a mining enclosure (not available yet in the beta) around this asteroid to consume it and use its advanced materials to create advanced ships not accessible any other way.
  • Note these are utterly useless at the moment, but won't be for long. ;)

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

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

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

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

(Released November 12th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.031

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 9th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.030

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 8th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.029

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 5th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.028

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

(Released November 4th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.027

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

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

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

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

(Released November 4th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.025

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

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

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

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

(Released November 3rd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.024

• Colony ships no longer have any energy cost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 2nd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 1st, 2010)

Prerelease 4.022

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

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

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

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

(Released October 29th, 2010)